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6.10.24
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By shifting a little focus from space to Earth, NASA is helping ecologists protect endangered species like tigers and elephants with its powerful satellites.
Habitat loss is currently the greatest threat to species on our planet. As human populations explode in number, we are altering more wilderness and using an ever greater share of resources. Larger species, like tigers and elephants, are some of the most vulnerable to extinction.
Once widespread across Asia, tigers (Panthera tigris) have lost a staggering 93 percent of their habitat over the past 150 years. Scientists estimate less than 4,000 of these majestic predators are alive today.
But NASA’s satellite data reveals there’s cause for hope, identifying suitable habitat for these vital predators, which they were not currently accessing.
“There’s still a lot more room for tigers in the world than even tiger experts thought,” conservation ecologist Eric Sanderson, now at the New York Botanical Garden, told Emily DeMarco at NASA. “We were only able to figure that out because we brought together all of this data from NASA and integrated it with information from the field.”
This NASA data includes infrared and spectroradiometer imaging – which can monitor vegetation health from above in almost real time. Along with geographic mapping, and historic ground-based field work, Sanderson and colleagues were able to identify potential habitat that tigers can migrate or be reintroduced into.
NASA Earth Observatory image showing tiger habitat in 2020. (Wanmei Liang using data from Sanderson et al., Front. Conserv. Sci., 2023).
“We find significant potential for restoring tigers to existing habitats, identified here…,” Sanderson and team explain. “If these habitats had sufficient prey and were tigers able to find them, the occupied land base for tigers might increase by 50 percent.”
Other researchers at NASA used similar techniques to map the changing habitat of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in southern Bhutan. Elephants are essential to the functioning of forests, yet they also face shrinking habitat that is exacerbating their conflicts with humans.
That team integrated data on habitat suitability and movement resistance to identify the most suitable corridors between elephant protected areas. These habitats have the potential to alleviate human-elephant conflicts.
NASA is also working to develop satellite based strategies to protect vast areas of public US land under the stewardship of the Bureau of Land Management. Their aim is to protect the Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii, endangered), greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus, at risk) and bighorn sheep (Ovis Canadensis, at risk).
Previously, conservation scientists have had to rely on slow, expensive and logistically challenging groundwork to obtain much smaller snapshots of habitat and movement data. NASA’s satellites capture this information at a vastly greater scope at near real time scale, giving wildlife biologists the unprecedented chance to respond to threats much faster and more efficiently than ever before.
“Satellites observe vast areas of Earth’s surface on daily to weekly schedules,” says NASA biogeographer Keith Gaddis. “That helps scientists monitor habitats that would be logistically challenging and time-consuming to survey from the ground – crucial for animals like tigers that roam large territories.”
The tiger research was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science.
See the full article here .
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About NASA Science
Science is interconnected; no important question stands alone. The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is an organization where discoveries in one scientific discipline have a direct route to other areas of study. This flow is something extremely valuable and is rare in the scientific world.
NASA leads the nation on a great journey of discovery, seeking new knowledge and understanding of our planet Earth, our Sun and solar system, and the universe out to its farthest reaches and back to its earliest moments of existence. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and the nation’s science community use space observatories to conduct scientific studies of the Earth from space to visit and return samples from other bodies in the solar system, and to peer out into our Galaxy and beyond. NASA’s science program seeks answers to profound questions that touch us all:
This is NASA’s science vision: using the vantage point of space to achieve with the science community and our partners a deep scientific understanding of our planet, other planets and solar system bodies, the interplanetary environment, the Sun and its effects on the solar system, and the universe beyond. In so doing, we lay the intellectual foundation for the robotic and human expeditions of the future while meeting today’s needs for scientific information to address national concerns, such as climate change and space weather. At every step we share the journey of scientific exploration with the public and partner with others to substantially improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education nationwide.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.
Since that time, most U.S. space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Commercial Crew vehicles. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program (LSP) which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches. Most recently, NASA announced a new Space Launch System that it said would take the agency’s astronauts farther into space than ever before and lay the cornerstone for future human space exploration efforts by the U.S.
NASA science is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System, advancing heliophysics through the efforts of the Science Mission Directorate’s Heliophysics Research Program, exploring bodies throughout the Solar System with advanced robotic missions such as New Horizons, and researching astrophysics topics, such as the Big Bang, through the Great Observatories [NASA/ESA Hubble, NASA Chandra, NASA Spitzer, and associated programs.] NASA shares data with various national and international organizations such as from [JAXA]Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite.
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