Future directions of space-borne missions in support of ecological studies

In the coming decade, accelerating climate change and human modification of the landscape will cause tremendous changes in ecosystem distributions and function.  These changes in turn will affect the rate of global warming as well as the provision of ecosystem services for human welfare. Changing land use may also increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to changing climate, moving ecosystems closer to thresholds beyond which there is no recovery.  In order to quantify, diagnose and predict ecosystem dynamics in the Earth’s climate system we need global continuous observations of ecosystems, the carbon and water cycles.  The recent NRC report “Earth Science and Applications from Space:
National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond” recommends a set of next-generation ecological remote sensing missions.  Recommended missions include global hyspectral imagery of ecological function, radar and LIDAR remote sensing of ecological structure, observations of coastal and global marine ecosystems and direct, diurnal observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Taken together, these new missions will revolutionize ecology from space, but will also challenge the theory, algorithms and models the community now uses to analyze space-based data.