BioSCape Data Skills Workshop - From the Field to the Image. October 9 - 11, 2024, Cape Town, South Africa

BioSCape, the Biodiversity Survey of the Cape, is NASA’s first biodiversity-focused airborne and field campaign that was conducted in South Africa in 2023. BioSCape’s primary objective is to study the structure, function, and composition of the region’s ecosystems, and how and why they are changing. BioSCape’s airborne dataset is unprecedented, with AVIRIS-NG, PRISM, and HyTES imaging spectrometers capturing spectral data across the UV, visible and infrared at high resolution and LVIS acquiring coincident full-waveform lidar. BioSCape’s field dataset is equally impressive, with 18 PI-led projects collecting data ranging from the diversity and phylogeny of plants, kelp and phytoplankton, eDNA, landscape acoustics, plant traits, blue carbon accounting, and more This workshop will equip participants with the skills to find, subset, and visualize the various BioSCape field and airborne (imaging spectroscopy and full-waveform lidar) data sets. Participants will learn data skills through worked examples in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, including: wrangling lidar data, performing band math calculations, calculating spectral diversity metrics, machine learning and image classification, and mapping functional traits using partial least squares regression. The workshop format is a mix of expert talks and interactive coding notebooks and will be run through the BioSCape Cloud computing environment.