Biodiversity is essential for ecosystem functioning and the provisioning of ecosystem services. Global change threatens biodiversity in many parts of the globe. Thus, a major goal for society is to explain and forecast patterns of biodiversity. A key component of this goal is to determine how geophysical and biological drivers influence biodiversity across spatial and temporal scales – often through modeling. However, current modeling approaches lack crucial information. For example, most models forecasting changes to biodiversity assume that coarse-scale climate and weather drivers – temperature and precipitation – are sole drivers and leave out other potentially important geophysical and biological drivers. In addition, the influence of these drivers may change from local to continental-scale biodiversity patterns, and over short vs. long timescales. Finally, different forms of biodiversity including taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity may exhibit different scaling relationships owing to a range of mechanisms. This session brings together researchers in biodiversity science and remote sensing to ask the question: How are remote sensing tools advancing biodiversity science in the face of global change? These Ignite talks will introduce a number of concepts and research tools that will then be discussed further in an evening Special Session, which will contribute to detailed recommendations for derived NASA remote sensing data products that will be of greatest use to biodiversity scientists.