Ecologist Jeff Kerby is using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), or drones, to count chimpanzee nests and monitor their habitat in Tanzania's Ugalla Forest. Such counts typically are performed on foot, but UASs allowed researchers to cover a much larger area at reduced time and cost.
Oklahoma State University (OSU) as well as the universities of Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kentucky will share a $6 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a small Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) that improves weather forecasting by studying atmospheric physics.
The European Union has been conducting simulated flood-disaster situations monitored by Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) technology. The Driving Innovations in Crisis Management for European Resilience (DRIVER) project features a D-CODE research aircraft, a Do-228, circling over the simulated disaster, taking situational images in real time, which rescue workers can use to coordinate the disaster response.
According to a tally by an international team of scientists, there are roughly 3 trillion trees on Earth”more than seven times the number previously estimated. The study also finds that approximately 15 billion trees are cut down each year; since the onset of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, the number of trees worldwide has dropped by 46 percent.
A collection of worldwide scientists are calling for a global strategy to monitor Earth's biodiversity from space. As biodiversity loss intensifies, traditional means to track biodiversity aren't keeping up, so satellite remote sensing is seen as the key.
A map published in Nature Scientific Reports shows what the world would look like if we could see the trillions of neutrinos that emanate from the surface of the planet each second. Dark spots on the map indicate nuclear reactors and parts of Earth's crust rich with radioactive uranium and thorium, which emit neutrinos when they decay.
A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the Twin Jet Nebula's shells and knots of expanding gas, as two iridescent lobes of material stretch outwards from a central star system. Within these lobes, two huge jets of gas are streaming from the star system at speeds in excess of 1 million kilometers (621,400 miles) per hour.
A NASA satellite launched just seven months ago lost the use of one of two science instruments, but the space agency said the mission to map global soil moisture will continue.
As part of a broad effort to study the environmental and societal effects of climate change, NASA has begun a multiyear field campaign to investigate ecological impacts of the rapidly changing climate in Alaska and northwestern Canada, such as the thawing of permafrost, wildfires and changes to wildlife habitats.
NeXOS is developing standards and technologies that would allow users to share data and operate the sensors via the Web, creating a complete, end-to-end system that would dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of gathering and disseminating ocean observation.
