The DuMond Conservancy was fortunate enough to receive a summer of innovation grant from NASA. It allowed us to inject technology into a program we offer to encourage minority, middle school girls to embrace Science.
Eighty percent of non-human primates live in tropical rainforests, and the Amazon Basin is the largest reserve of Earth's biodiversity. NASA lesson plans on remote sensing explained how the technology works and how it can be used to help understand, manage and preserve tropical rainforests.
Primatologists are using remote sensing technology including Landstat satellite imagery to document deforestation and identify critically located areas in proximity to, and perhaps impacted by, various forms of exploitation or encroachment. Scientists can also identify, by remote sensing specific areas of rainforest, where threatened and endangered species might be predicted to exist and thus initiate physical surveys of these areas. The importance of continuing investigation and the guarantee of new discoveries to be made was highlighted, as physical mapping of rainforests is also needed to fully understand the significance of the spectral profiles of the satellite images.