The ORNL DAAC’s sessions gave participants the skills to find, subset and visualize the various BioSCape field and airborne datasets as well as corresponding NASA Earthdata satellite datasets. Participants learned to wrangle LiDAR data, perform calculations and spectral diversity metrics, were introduced to machine learning and image classification, and instructed on mapping functional traits. Thornton, Shrestha and other presenters conducted a mix of lectures and interactive coding.
“There’s nothing that beats personal interaction with users,” Thornton said. “The users got to hear what the campaign focused on and why, how observations were collected and how to access and utilize data. Plus, it was a two-way street for us. We got a better understanding of what the challenges are for regional land managers, how data can meet their needs, and how we can make the information more meaningful and available to them.”
Interested users can check out the BioSCape website for more information on how to engage with the campaign’s data. Workshop content is available at https://ornldaac.github.io/bioscape_workshop_sa/, and at this DOI.
The workshop was a collaborative effort by the ORNL DAAC, BioSCape, the South African Environmental Observation Network, University of Wisconsin Madison, The Nature Conservancy, University of California Merced, University of Cape Town, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Biodiversity insights take flight at ORNL DAAC South Africa workshop" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news
