Zooming from her office, MSU researcher Kelly Kapsar showed off stunning satellite images from across the United States.
In some, different colors revealed the precise heights of the forested ridges in the Sierra Nevada or the craggy peaks of the Rockies and the valleys between them. Others showed the pine flatwoods of southern Florida or the smooth rolling grasslands of the Kansas prairie.
The images were taken by the space shuttle Endeavor during a 2000 mission to make detailed radar maps of the planet’s surface.
Endeavour orbited Earth 16 times a day during the 11-day mission. In that time, it took more than a trillion elevation measurements, generating a whopping 12.3 terabytes of data.
Since then, other Earth-observing satellites have measured things like temperature, rainfall, sea levels, carbon dioxide, snow cover, wind speeds, even dust — and at scales ranging from the span of a continent to patches barely larger than a tennis court.
It’s a treasure trove of data. And by combining this information captured from space with measurements of plants and animals taken on the ground, researchers hope to better predict where species are most likely to thrive in the years to come, said professor Phoebe Zarnetske, who directs MSU’s Spatial and Community Ecology, or SpaCE, Lab.