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Challenges of Scale in Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change: A NASA Perspective

Explore how NASA research addresses challenges of scale in ecosystem responses to climate change, including plant species migration, invasive species, and coral bleaching. Learn about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in multi-scale data analysis.

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Challenges of Scale in Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change: A NASA Perspective

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  1. Area versus Frequency of Lakes and Ponds(Downing et al. 2006) Lake frequency (per 106 km2) Lake area (km2)

  2. Ecosystem responses to climate change that involve challenges of scale (Examples) • Plant species migration* # • invasive species* • selective logging* • coral bleaching* • coastal eutrophication* # • expansion of tropical gyres* • algal bloom dynamics #* • algal bloom dynamics in response to sea ice retraction # • pollutant plumes and responses • Vegetation phenology # • Phenology and Foodweb dynamics # • Greatest challenge: * Spatial #temporal

  3. NASA Research and issues of Scale Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) • Strengths: • Excellent multi-scale data capture (e.g., MODIS, MISR, Seawifs, Landsat, EO-1, AVIRIS). • Ton of existing data and validation opportunities. • Weaknesses: • Relating measurements and processes across scales still represents a huge challenge. • Wealth of data, but insufficient people-hours to fully analyze them. • Still difficult to pull together multiple-scale data sources for a single analysis.

  4. Opportunities: • Investing in people to conduct multi-scale analyses represents a huge opportunity, given the already paid costs of instruments and data acquisition. • Aircraft have multiple-scale capabilities that can compliment satellites • Treatment of “Scaling” as a fundamental science issue can lead to significant breakthroughs in understanding impacts. • Threats • Continued underutilization of existing investments • Lack of data continuity for detecting longer-term impacts from global change.

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