The Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative research team (UHPSI) has recently received a “Google Earth Engine Research Award”. The award has been granted in support of UHPSI’s ongoing land-cover studies and will provide the team the opportunity to make advanced methods for rapid land-cover detection and assessment available to the public through the use of freely available satellite data. Specifically, the team will work to integrate various statistical methods into Google’s new Earth Engine platform as preset tools that will allow users to evaluate vegetation or land-cover types of interest for any portion of the globe. The research will incorporate contemporary methods for remote sensing, coding, and multivariate statistic analysis, and the team plans on releasing their work at the end of the 2014 calendar year. These preset tools will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection and a Google account.
The UHPSI team is one of two Google Research Awards given to a Yale research lab; Professor Walter Jetz’s lab team (www.mappinglife.org) has also received an award.
Using satellite imagery embedded with data on reflectance, the UHPSI team will work on developing statistical tools that rapidly scan a large area to locate plants or land-cover of particular interest. In northeastern Wyoming, the team will be using the tools to locate leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula; displayed within the inset image above), an invasive species that displaces native rangeland vegetation.