The NASA researchers had to develop a receiving and management system. We handle the field data, which NASA will use to support the satellite data. The 24 sites are located around the world many in the United States and Canada in a variety of environmental settings and ecosystems. What the DAAC provides to NASA will help them extrapolate conditions on the ground from the space-based views. For instance, says Cook, the Walker Branch area is one of the sites being looked at from space.
Data are collected from small plots, say a few square meters.
What you see from space is an image one kilometer on each side. Data on the amounts and types of vegetation and other ecosystem characteristics enable the scientists to scale up from meters to kilometers, so that researchers can interpret the satellite data. We re more than an archive, notes Cook. What s new is predicting, from these chunks of landscape, how much carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored as plant biomass, Olson says. The more leaf area, for instance, the more carbon is stored.