NASA DEVELOP Project - Arizona Agriculture Spring 2017
Objective: Demonstrating the Potential Applications of ECOSTRESS Evapotranspiration Products in Plant Phenotyping and Predicting Patterns in Global Species Richness
Team: *Molly Spater, Sol Kim, Leah Kucera (*indicates Team Lead)
Mentors: Dr. Christine Lee, Dr. Joshua Fisher
Partner at USDA: Dr. Andrew French, Research Physical Scientist
Community Concern:
- A changing climate impacts water and energy availability, both of which are crucial to plant health. Changes to these environmental variables therefore threaten both agricultural systems and global biodiversity as a whole
- Selecting superior crop varieties is currently very costly and labor intensive
- Demonstrated need for non-destructive, large-scale phenotyping via remote sensing to catch up to progress made in plant genotyping
- Need for global, remotely-sensed tool to study biodiversity