Bozeman Daily Chronicle

September 14, 1998

NASA grant: New system will allow Yellowstone Ecosystem Studies to study park.

By Scott McMillion
Chronicle Staff Writer

A new $600,000 grant from NASA could help area researchers create detailed maps of things as diverse as lynx habitat, grizzly bear feeding areas and spotted knapweed infestations.

The money will go to Yellowstone Ecosystem Studies, a Bozeman-bases independent scientific research organization.

The grant, which will allow YES researchers access to new "remote sensing" technology that will present detailed images of the ground surface in Yellowstone National Park.

The images will be able to pinpoint and separate, from thousands of feet above the earth, items like individual whitebark pine trees - which provide a critical source of girzzly bear food - and outbreaks of knapweed.

YES founder and science director Bob Crabtree compared the technology to the invention of the micorscope

People put there eye to the viewer and found there was "a whole new world," Crabtree said. "This is the same kind of thing."

But it involves a lot more than magnifying lenses.

The technology, called "hyperspectral" imaging, doesn't take a photograph. Rather, it captures a vast spectrum of light waves emitted by plants, water and minerals.

Will Swearingen is project director at NASA-MSU TechLink, which helped YES obtain the grant. He compared the technology to looking at a landscape through dozens of pairs of eyeglasses.

Each set of glasses picks up just one of 128 or 224 "channels" or bands or light, depending on which type of machine is used. But the device with the electronic eyeballs wears all of those spectacles at once.

Most of the light cannot be seen by the human eye.

"It's seeing rainbows where we can't see them," Crabtree said.

The device, which will be carried in an airplane, then generates a computer tape which is fed into a high-speed computer for analysis. The system works somewhat like a digital camera, which creates images by using computers instead of film, but with better quality.

Then, Crabtree said, comes the time to compile a "glossary" for interpreting the tapes. That part is important.

Each light band is assigned a number, but whether that number indicates a down log or an exposed rock must be determined through "ground-truthing," which means putting people on the ground to compare what the airplane saw to what is there.

YES won the highly competitive grant, Swearingen said, partly because the organization's researchers already have compiled so much on-the-ground data.

The two-year experimental project will focus on the Cach Creek and Soda Butte drainages in norteastern Yellowstone National Park. Researchers have been studying the effects of the 1988 Yellowstone fires and have lots of data.

That means the aerial data can be quickly compared to the existing data for compilation of the glossary.

Then Crabtree said, the project may be expanded.

Possibilities include mapping whitepark pine trees and assessing their health in the face of blister rust, a disease that threatens them, mapping the type of habitat preferred by lynx, a candidate for listing under the Endangerd Species Act, and providing detailed maps of outbreaks of knapweed and other exotic weeds that threaten both agriculture and wildlife.

"It's the first ecological application of this new technology," Crabtree said, adding that it provides data with a clarity 1,000 times greater than that of commercial satellites.

If it works as well as expected, he said, "it's going to pop the top off ecosystem management and monitoring."

Most of the data could be gathered in conventional ways, he said, but doing so would take countless manhours. This technology allows much greater detail than older satellite photos but doesn't cost any more.

The data could be used in a variety of ways, from weed eradication to stream management to planning better timber harvests.

"If you want to really get into the game of ecosystem management the first thing you need is really good maps," Crabtree said. "This is a lot better of a tool to do that. If it works."

Swearingen said he's confident that it will.

"It's going to be a very powerful tool," he predicted.

An Idaho company, Earth Search, has already figured out how to pull knapweed images from the machinery, he said.

On-the-ground weed busters have long been asking for such maps, but they have proved too difficult to compile with land-based technology and air-based images couldn't do all the job until now.

Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., a major supporter of MSU TechLink, said this is the kind of project he had envisioned when he obtained funding for the center.

"We're now linked to the space age like few other states," Burns said.

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