The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is preparing to conduct its first Biodiversity field campaign incorporating airborne imaging spectroscopy, lidar, and field observations across South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) including surrounding coastal and marine environments.
The Cape Floristic Region region has seen the second-worst number of plant extinctions in the world. Almost 40 plants in the Western Cape have gone extinct since 1900. This is about 500 times higher than the background extinction rate, which is the natural rate at which plants become extinct. The Cape Floral Kingdom is one of eight floral kingdoms in the world and the only one contained within a single country. On top of this, 69 percent of it is endemic, home to the greatest non-tropical concentration of higher plant species in the world. In 2004, the Cape Floral Region protected areas were inscribed as a World Heritage site.
The GCFR contains two Global Biodiversity Hotspots with the richest temperate flora and the third-highest marine endemism in the world. The field campaign includes collection of new hyperspectral data ranging from UV to thermal wavelengths acquired by PRISM, AVIRIS-NG, and HyTES spectrometers combined with the LVIS laser altimeter aboard the NASA GIII and GV aircraft.
These remotely sensed data will be combined with existing and new observations of the spatial distribution of species, ecosystems, and their traits to enable high-resolution mapping of biodiversity, functional traits, and three-dimensional structure across environmental gradients and times-since-disturbance. The campaign is organized around three major themes aimed at understanding: the distribution and abundance of biodiversity, the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function, and the impacts of biodiversity change on ecosystem services.
This focus represents an important paradigm shift from previous NASA field campaigns, which were primarily biogeochemical, toward an approach for measuring and understanding functional, phylogenetic, and taxonomic biological diversity as key components of ecosystem function.
