Denali National Park, Alaska (Credit: Peter Griffith/NASA)
The laboratory for ABoVE is vast. The field campaign – the Arctic Boreal and Vulnerability Experiment – covers 2.5 million square miles of tundra, mountains, permafrost, lakes, and forests in Alaska and Northwestern Canada.
ABoVE scientists are using satellites and aircraft study this formidable terrain as it changes in a warming climate, but remote sensing by itself is not enough to understand the whole picture. So teams of researchers will go out into the field to gather data – and through this blog, they will bring you along.
With funding and assistance from NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program, ABoVE researchers will investigate questions about the role of climate in wildfires, thawing permafrost, wildlife migration habits, insect outbreaks and more. They’ll reach remote field sites via dogsled, ATVs, helicopters, floatplanes and river rafts, and deploy both old and new technology to monitor ecosystems.
Credit: Peter Griffith/NASA
The data that they gather on-the-ground and from airborne campaigns over the next several years will be used together with data collected by NASA satellites and instruments to get a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of Arctic and boreal ecosystems to environmental change. One goal? To provide scientific results that decision-makers can use locally, nationally and internationally.
For more about ABoVE, read our announcement here — and stay tuned to this blog!
Wow, I think it’s really cool that you use every day objects to catch the birds. Who would of thought to use a coke bottle, a sponge, and a plastic container to catch birds.
how do you get the sadalites totrack the really small GPS’s on ther e tiny back?
how do you guys trnslate with the satelite/ i mean like what do you use like a laptop or a phone any device i want to know.