An aerial photo of the East River watershed shows trees and open meadows in varying shades of green. But looking through an infrared lens, the trees quickly change color, some aspen illuminated in bright blue, and others in yellow. Although these shades are invisible to the human eye, the trees’ unique color signatures contain clues about how the Gunnison Valley’s forest may be altered by drought and wildfire in the decades to come.
New research at Gothic’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) using hyper-spectral imagery will give scientists a better understanding of how climate change will impact forests in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The project is backed by just under $1 million in congressionally directed spending from Sen. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper. Planning is set to begin this year.
“As Colorado and the West face the worsening effects of climate change, this funding will support the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s work to manage the Colorado River Basin water and forest health to meet our state’s changing needs,” Bennet said in a press release on March 12.
The money will pay for the collection of hyper-spectral images in portions of the Taylor and East River drainages in 2025. While a regular camera only captures red, green and blue, this remote sensor, mounted on an airplane, breaks up the light reflecting off trees, soil and the wider landscape with more than 400 bands of color. The result is a high resolution neon image.
The technology, part of a new wave of rapidly advancing sensors that will soon be mounted on satellites, was pioneered by NASA. These hyper-spectral sensors cost tens of millions of dollars apiece and are placed on planes flown by the Boulder-based National Ecological Observatory Network. The organization maintains only a few of these sensors, which are in high demand across the country.
Adding to the scientific story
In hyper-spectral images, tree species have different color signatures. Scientists use the colors to infer how much water is present in a tree’s canopy and leaf structure and the amount of photosynthesis occurring. In early stages of environmental stress, trees will start to lose water from their tissue and drop leaves, said Ian Breckheimer, RMBL’s project lead. Photosynthesis is the tree’s ability to capture sunlight and grow, another mark of its overall health.
Studying these features will allow RMBL to predict which trees are likely to die, and map areas that are suffering from beetle kill or are at a higher risk of wildfire. It will also help researchers see how water moves through the mountain system after the snow melts.
While forests provide timber, habitat for wildlife and opportunities for outdoor recreation, they are also instrumental in what happens to the region’s snowpack, Breckheimer said.
“One of the biggest uncertainties is how well forests in the Upper Colorado River Basin are going to be able to deal with increasing drought and climate change,” he said. “This project is one powerful way of adding to the scientific story that will help us tease that apart.”
This is not the first time RMBL has captured hyper-spectral images of the East River Basin. In 2018, the same crew did a similar airborne survey — one of the first in a mountain environment. Collecting a second data set in 2025 will give researchers a snapshot of seven years of change, allowing the RMBL team to ask a new set of questions about the future.
“What are the things we could see in 2018 that were predictive of forest mortality, the encroachment of willows into the alpine or the spread of sagebrush into environments that were formerly meadow?” Breckheimer said.
Scaling up
Western Colorado University students will have a chance to participate in the project thanks to a new partnership between RMBL and Western’s Rady School of Engineering. Students will help RMBL interpret the massive pools of data the project is expected to produce. Rady’s incoming aerospace program, set to start in the fall of 2025, will also help RMBL prepare for the arrival of the next generation of satellites.
“Field biologists are often out there with a notebook and pen collecting data … Now, with these advancements in remote sensing, engineering opens up ways that we can see the world,” said RMBL Executive Director Ian Billick.
Remote sensing is the acquisition of information from a distance, often using satellites or drones. New technology is expected to expand the limits of field biology, allowing scientists to substantially scale up the measurements they take in the field, Billick said. For example, RMBL researcher David Inouye has been using small plots around Gothic to monitor the timing and abundance of the blooms of more than 100 species of wildflowers for nearly five decades.
Inouye will continue to collect long-term data from his observations that cannot be replicated with remote sensing. But with the rise of increasingly powerful drones and satellites, scientists may eventually be able to measure plant flowering times for the whole basin, rather than just isolated plots around Gothic.
The increasing scale of the data available is a “fundamental step forward” for field science and understanding how the earth works, Billick said.
“We've really struggled to figure out how to connect the different pieces of the ecosystem because we were locked into the scale of human observation … It's a real transformation in how field science is done. It's not a matter of degree, to where we'll just have a lot more information, we'll actually be able to ask completely new questions.”
(Bella Biondini can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or bella@gunnisontimes.com.)
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