Biological Diversity & Ecological Conservation

Member Spotlight Archive

Simcelile Chenge
PhD Candidate
University of Cape Town

Posted Date: 2024-10-22

Simcelile Chenge, a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, studies three major plant lineages in the BioSCape Domain (Restionaceae, Ericaceae and Proteaceae). He is exploring seasonal variation in leaf reflectance spectra in representative species of the three families, and how this may affect our ability to map these lineages with imaging spectroscopy. In the Restionaceae he is also exploring the relationships between culm (akin to leaf) and canopy reflectance spectra, and the hydrological niche preferences of these plants. Chenge’s work aims to address a key gap in that BioSCape was a once-off set of flights in the Austral spring, and thus cannot address questions around seasonality. He is spent the summer in the lab of BioSCape scientist, Prof Phil Townsend, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. This visit is made possible through funding from NASA BDEC, UNESCO, and the University of Wisconsin and is a testament to the potential impact of Chenge's work. The primary objective of this visit is to equip Chenge with new methodologies for measuring and analyzing plant traits using field and imaging spectroscopy. These techniques provide detailed insights into plant characteristics, enhancing our understanding of plant lineages in the BioSCape domain and their environmental interactions.

Africa Flores-Anderson
Associate Program Manager
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

Posted Date: 2024-07-22

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Africa Flores-Anderson as new Associate Program Manager for the Ecological Conservation Program. Africa is a Research Physical Scientist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) working with optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to advance forest change detection in the tropics. She is a former National Geographic Explorer, and previously worked at SERVIR, a joint initiative between NASA and USAID, where she led the Land Cover Land Use Change and Ecosystems thematic portfolio. She is a NISAR Envoy and in addition to SAR, has expertise on multispectral and hyperspectral satellite data to develop water quality products for freshwater bodies. Her research products have been used to take management decisions in Central America. At MSFC she will be supporting science applications for the upcoming Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) Mission and the Ecological Conservation Applications Area. She is also chairing the LP-DAAC User Working Group. Welcome Africa!

Woody Turner
BD Program Scientist and EC Program Manager
NASA Headquarters

Posted Date: 2024-03-04

Along with Keith Gaddis, I’m the program scientist for the Biological Diversity program and the program manager for the Ecological Conservation program at NASA Headquarters. As program scientist, I oversee the agency’s basic research efforts to use satellite information to understand the relationship of biodiversity to climate, landscape change, and ecosystem function. As program manager, I co-direct an applications activity combining satellite data, ecological models, and in-situ observations to support decision making for nature conservation. My vision is an integrated NASA Earth System science effort bridging the divide between basic biodiversity research and real-world conservation to build a sustainable future for all. I have long felt called to contribute to maintaining and restoring the natural world for future generations. In my free time, I enjoy the outdoors and books (and watching UNC basketball). Fun fact: I am as enthusiastic about dinosaurs as the average six year old. |

Delaney Bellis
EC Intern
NASA Headquarters

Posted Date: 2024-03-04

I’m a current senior at the University of Tennessee, majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. As an outreach and communications intern with Ecological Conservation, I’ve enjoyed using my artistic skills to create interesting and engaging one-pagers, newsletters, and other digital products that inform targeted audiences about research or news relevant to the program. In the future, I hope to use my graphic design and illustration skills and my background in ecology to have a successful career as a science communicator. In my free time, I enjoy baking and cooking, taking care of my houseplants, and hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fun fact: I found a trilobite fossil last year!

Yilun Zhao
Ph.D. Student
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Posted Date: 2023-01-09

Yilun Zhao, M.Sc. is a first year FINESST recipient at the University of Illinois advised by Dr. Chunyuan Diao. Zhao’s FINESST project aims to investigate the impacts of biocontrol treatments of the noxious weed, Tamarisk (Tamarix species), on riparian plant biodiversity of the Colorado River. To achieve this aim, Zhao’s project is grouped into three parts. First, the COLD (Continuous monitoring of Land Disturbance) model will be used to detect Tamarix spp. defoliation and regrowth, and to understand relationships with beetle species of genus Diorhabda. Next, changes to local- and landscape-level biodiversity caused by the Tamarix species biocontrol program will be evaluated with convolutional autoencoder (CAE) time series clustering model. Finally, Zhao will investigate the relative effects of pre-biocontrol biodiversity, soil water content, and soil salinity on post-treatment biodiversity levels.

Jenna Keany
Ph.D. Student
Northern Arizona University

Posted Date: 2023-01-09

Jenna Keany is a second year FINESST recipient at NAU, advised by Dr. Christopher Doughty. Jenna’s research uses NASA lidar data from LVIS and GEDI to quantify how critically endangered African forest elephants impact canopy structure. “By determining how they change the structure of African tropical forests through the creation of trails and dispersing the seeds of more carbon dense trees, we can understand how forest elephants act as ecosystem engineers,” Jenna Keany explains. Keany’s research interests include impacts of megafauna on forest structural dynamics, and enjoys teaching, mentoring, and promoting women in STEM. Seeking a career in academia, Jenna seeks to continually bridge the gap between the remote sensing and conservation biology communities through technical workshops and community conservation. To achieve this aim, Keany recently led a hands-on workshop at AGU (December 2022) titled, “Studying Forest Structure from Space: An Introduction to GEDI Lidar Data Preprocessing and Analysis in Ecological Applications.” Products relevant to Jenna’s FINESST award (80NSSC21K1636) can be found at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ahr03FwAAAAJ&hl.

Amanda Koltz
AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow
NASA Headquarters

Posted Date: 2023-01-09

Dr. Amanda Koltz is an ecologist with expertise in the links between community, ecosystem, and global change ecology. She is supporting the Biological Diversity and Terrestrial Ecology programs. In this role, Amanda is excited to help expand opportunities for the use of Earth observations data in Ecology and to support NASA’s interagency and international activities. Amanda’s past research has focused on understanding the consequences of changing species interactions for ecosystem functioning in rapidly changing ecosystems. She joins us from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was previously a Senior Scientist in the Department of Biology. Amanda is mentored by Keith Gaddis, Woody Turner, Hank Margolis, and Mike Falkowski.

Jessica Burnett
AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow
NASA Headquarters

Posted Date: 2023-01-09

Dr. Jessica Burnett is a wildlife ecologist with expertise in population parameter estimation, scientific programming, open science, and avian ecology. She supports the Ecological Conservation program and has a deep interest in advancing the use of remotely sensed and other NASA data by government and non-governmental wildlife organizations. Dr. Burnett joins us from the U.S. Geological Survey, where she was a Research Ecologist and Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow in Core Science Systems Science Analytics and Synthesis, and the Eastern Ecological Science Center (Patuxent Wildlife Research Center). She is mentored by Keith Gaddis and Woody Turner.

Erin Hestir
Associate Professor
University of California, Merced

Posted Date: 2021-06-24

Dr. Erin Hestir is an Associate Professor at University of California, Merced. Dr. Hestir’s research interest are within aquatic ecosystems that are threatened by competing pressures to meet society’s needs for water and food security while sustaining biodiversity and other ecosystem duties. Dr. Hestir’s expertise spans geospatial analytics, hyperspectral and satellite remote sensing, and sensor networks in inland and coastal waters and wetlands. Dr. Hestir is currently leading NASA’s first biodiversity campaign, BioSCape. This biodiversity field campaign takes place in the Greater Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, and the focus of this campaign is to begin understanding distribution and abundance of biodiversity, role of biodiversity in ecosystem function, and the impacts of biodiversity change on ecosystem services. |

Jie Dai
Postdoctoral Scholar
Arizona State University

Posted Date: 2021-03-30

Jie Dai uses remote sensing data to study forest biodiversity dynamics of both flora and fauna, incorporating both imaging and anthropogenic data for a holistic view of ecosystem change over time. For his recently completed doctoral dissertation, funded by the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, Dai used Landsat imagery to map the spatial extent of an invasive vine in the understory of Chitwan, Nepal, a biodiversity hotspot and a frontier of human-environment interactions. Dai investigated the historical green vegetation dynamics of the forest ecosystem, and then combined the results with the mapping data to project the future of the invasion and provide guidance to combat it, taking into account other environmental and anthropogenic inputs. In his current postdoctoral work at the Arizona State University Global Discovery and Conservation Science Center, Dr. Dai works on airborne & spaceborne imaging spectroscopy for biosphere applications, with a particular focus on terrestrial and coastal ecosystems. Additionally, he reviews, designs, and develops scientific products for future satellite-based imaging spectroscopy missions |

Stephanie Dutkiewicz
Senior Research Scientist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Posted Date: 2021-03-30

Stephanie Dutkiewicz is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. She is affiliated with the MIT Center for Global Change Science, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to climate science, and the Darwin Project, which brings together ocean science fields to model marine microbes and their communities. Dr. Dutkiewicz develops and uses models guided by laboratory, field, and satellite data to study how ocean chemistry and physics determines phytoplankton biogeography, focusing on how this system will be impacted by climate change. In her NASA-funded project, she collaborated with a group of scientists in using high-resolution imaging to observe nanoplankton dynamics in the North Pacific Ocean, finding a strong relationship between net community productivity - how much carbon the phytoplankton sequester - and biomass in these intermediate-sized phytoplankton. Dr. Dutkiewicz’s modeling showed that this size class is a particularly important component of the global marine ecosystem. These results suggest that including phytoplankton size classes may be key in modeling and understanding ocean biological production. |

Mary Blair
Director, Biodiversity Informatics Research
American Museum of Natural History

Posted Date: 2020-02-20

Dr. Mary Blair is a conservation biologist who integrates spatial modeling and molecular genetics to understand the evolutionary processes that generate biodiversity and the influence of environmental variability on evolutionary divergence. Her NASA funded work is expanding the open source species distribution modeling software Wallace to facilitate biodiversity change indicator calculations for national biodiversity assessments and reporting with satellite derived products. This work is conducted in partnership with the Colombia BON to enhance their existing BON in a BOX tool, BioModelos . Products from BioModelos have formed the basis for conservation decision support products including national risk assessments, reintroduction plans, regional land use planning and biodiversity compensation manuals. Improvement in these tools will lower the entry barriers to generating EBVs and level the playing field for who can create high quality products . Dr. Blair is the Director of Biodiversity Informatics Research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation within the AMNH and an Affiliated Professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Columbia University's Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. |

Tony Chang
Data Scientist
Conservation Science Partners

Posted Date: 2020-02-20

Dr. Tony Chang examines long and short term response of plant populations to changing global climate using rapidly developing artificial intelligence technologies. A former NESSF awardee, his graduate work leveraged machine learning methods to forecast suitable habitat change for "early responder" tree species in the Northern Rockies under alternative climate change scenarios. Currently, he is using modern software development capability (containerized environments, version control, continuous integration/deployment, and cloud computing) to develop data downloading, preprocessing, and analytic capacity within an open access toolkit for near real time forecasting of global phenological patterns (Advanced Phenological Information System). Dr. Chang’s work is leading the field of automated machine learning to process high resolution Earth observation data . His model, a multi task recurrent convolutional neural network (Chimera), integrates varying resolution aerial and satellite imagery to simultaneously classify forest cover and estimate forest structure metrics. This work enables automated detection of forest degradation due to insects, disease, land use, and fire in threatened environments. |

Ben Carlson
PhD Candidate
Yale University

Posted Date: 2019-10-29

Ben Carlson studies how individual animals respond to their environments and the patterns, causes, and consequences of variation in these “individual environmental niches” within and among populations. Individual variation influences species’ responses to global change, but many popular methods, such as species distribution modelling, ignore variation among individuals. Ben’s work leverages recent advances in the availability and resolution of both remotely sensed environmental data and animal tracking data, as well as platforms that aggregate and can link these data together, such as Movebank and Google Earth Engine. Pairing these data types enables analyses that relate fine-scale animal responses (like movement) to the local conditions that an animal actually experiences, as opposed to long- term mean variables which are uninformative at this scale. Time-series remote sensing data is essential to Mr. Carlson’s analyses, as it provides long-term, cross-comparable independent variables that can be matched with movement datasets gathered across space, time, and taxa. Mr. Carlson is a NESSF awardee, completing his dissertation in the lab of Dr. Walter Jetz. |

Danielle Rappaport
PhD Candidate
University of Maryland

Posted Date: 2019-04-01

Ms. Danielle Rappaport examines the human transformation of forested landscapes. She uses emerging analytic and remote sensing technologies to characterize the ecological legacy of land-use change at policy-relevant scales. Her current work advances our understanding of the long-term impacts of forest degradation from fire and logging on carbon storage and biodiversity at the Amazon frontier. Ms. Rappaport has developed approaches for integrating 3D sound and structure data to target operational forest monitoring needs. Her research enhances the use of remote audio surveys to enable routine multi-taxa monitoring system that bypasses the need for manual species identification. Ms. Rappaport ’s work is on the leading edge of remote sensing science utilizing the latest Earth observations and in situ tools to detect and understand previously intractable biological phenomena. These advances bridge the scale gaps between field-based and space-borne observations to measure subtle ecosystem variability at the landscape scale. Ms. Rappaport is a NESSF awardee. Her dissertation is scheduled for completion this winter. |

Adam Wilson
Assistant Professor
University of Buffalo

Posted Date: 2019-04-01

Dr. Adam Wilson studies the impacts of global change on biodiversity and ecosystem function at regional to global scales. He uses long-term records of ecosystem dynamics recorded in satellite remote sensing products and field observations, together with mechanistic and statistical modelling, to infer how ecosystems have responded to past environmental change. He is especially interested in the role of biodiversity in modulating ecosystem resilience. Dr. Wilson has a history of support through the NASA Biodiversity program as well as interdisciplinary calls with Ecological Forecasting and AIST. He additionally serves as a NASA GLOBE educator in a local elementary school to get students excited about science, the Earth system, and NASA. His work has been featured in the NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, Vox, and Wired. In addition, his NASA-funded work on the effects of climate on post-fire recovery in Southern Africa received an award from the United Nations in 2017. Dr. Wilson leverages NASA’s multi-decadal remotely sensed records of ecosystem change to use patterns of past environmental change to improve our prediction of the future. |

Celio Sousa
Research Scientist
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center-USRA

Posted Date: 2019-01-01

Dr. Celio Sousa is a NASA scientist with expertise using cloud-computing and multi- temporal/multi-sensor data for characterizing and quantifying land cover extent and change in tropical regions and its biophysical and socioeconomic impacts. He is currently supported through the NASA Earth Science Division’s Partnerships Program which seeks to build commercial and NGO relationships that amplify our understanding of the Earth as an integrated system and enable societal benefits. In partnership with Conservation International, Dr. Sousa is providing decision support tools for African countries who have committed themselves to incorporating ecosystem service accounting into national decision making through the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa. With CI and AGEOS scientists, Dr. Sousa has developed repeatable methodologies to map ecosystem extent, meet international standards for ecosystem accounting, and satisfy the requirements of a broad range of nation specific decision support needs. Dr. Sousa’s work pushes the frontier of remote sensing and applied science. |

Neil Carter
Assistant Professor
Boise State University

Posted Date: 2019-01-01

Dr. Neil Carter is a NASA Ecological Forecasting funded researcher studying the dynamics and governance of complex socio-environmental systems, particularly as they relate to wildlife conservation. Dr. Carter’s project examines the effects of anthropogenic nightlight and noise on the behavior and habitat integrity of wildlife across the US. In partnership with the US National Park Service, this information is being used to mitigate the impacts of sensory pollutants on the park system. NASA data are absolutely vital to this project. In particular, the Day-Night Band on NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor provides a synoptic measure of nightlight at an unprecedented global scale and daily temporal resolution. These data, combined with other NASA imagery, enable a data-driven approach to forecast locations where reduction of light and noise pollution will yield the greatest benefits for large landscape conservation. This project supports Dr. Carter’s aim to inform management strategies that allow sustainable coexistence of humans and wildlife in shared spaces. |

Phoebe Zarnetske
Assistant Professor
Department of Forestry
Michigan State University

Posted Date: 2018-10-01

Dr. Phoebe Zarnetske is a NASA Biodiversity funded researcher examining how global change and Earth’s geophysical attributes alter the composition, function, and distribution of ecological communities. Her work transects scales from mesocosm experiments to continental and global spatial analyses that connect process-level understanding with geographic patterns of species and biodiversity. Her taxonomic focus spans birds, mammals, trees, and macroinvertebrates, with her field and experimental work largely based in grasslands and ponds. Through NASA support, she has led a working group of interdisciplinary scientists spanning ecology, remote sensing, and statistical modeling, to understand and quantify scaling relationships among Earth’s geological and biological diversity. Dr. Zarnetske’s work leverages the global coverage, fine resolution, and temporal scale of NASA remotely-sensed products to forecast spatial and temporal shifts in biodiversity. |

Camrin Braun
Postdoctural Research Associate
University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory

Posted Date: 2018-10-01

Former NESSF fellow, Dr. Camrin Braun recently defended his dissertation with the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, and has begun a postdoctoral position with another NASA Biodiversity and Ecological Forecasting PI, Peter Gaube. Dr. Braun’s dissertation work found that mesoscale eddies in open ocean are a key feature of blue shark habitat. This work utilized popular NASA remote sensing products like SST to help characterize the ocean environment and leveraged the NASA-funded HYCOM model to simulate ocean conditions and dynamics in the vertical plane to better understand how predators interact with ocean dynamics whose key influence may actually be at depth. In his new position, Dr. Braun will scale these analyses up to a multi- species, global analysis of pelagic predators interacting with (sub)mesoscale ocean physics to determine if these same relationships hold in other geographic and taxonomic systems. |