NEON airborne remote sensing

Background/Question/Methods

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is being developed to enable the understanding and forecasting of impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology. Airborne remote sensing plays a critical role by providing measurements at the scale of individual shrubs and larger plants over hundreds of square kilometers. The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) is being developed to bridge scales from organism and stand scales as captured by plot and tower observations, to the scale of satellite based remote sensing. Fused airborne spectroscopy and waveform LiDAR from the AOP will quantify vegetation composition and structure and panchromatic imagery at better than 30 cm resolution will retrieve fine-scale information regarding land use, roads, impervious surfaces, and built structures. NEON is building three airborne systems to facilitate the routine coverage of NEON sites and the capacity to respond to investigator requests for specific projects. The first NEON imaging spectrometer, a next-generation high fidelity pushbroom VSWIR instrument, has recently been delivered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to NEON. This instrument has been integrated with a small-footprint waveform lidar on the first NEON airborne platform and initial test flights conducted. 

Results/Conclusions

The remote sensing instrument payload for the NEON Airborne Observatory Platform has been developed to support the mapping of vegetation over the continental-scale defined by the NEON sites. The broad range of ecosystems represented by these sites and the range of atmospheric conditions under which operations will occur, place significant constraints on instrument performance, calibration accuracy, and atmospheric correction during operations. Results from the initial test flights of the first AOP payload are presented demonstrating the suitability of this instrument for measuring the chemistry and structure of vegetation.