NASA scientists are closing wildflowers to understand our ever-changing planet

NASA research reveals that there is much more to flowers than the human eye can be found. Recent analysis of California wildflowers demonstrates how aircraft and space-based equipment use colour to track seasonal flower cycles. The results suggest new potential tools for farmers and natural resource managers who rely on flowering plants.

In their research, scientists used technology built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to investigate thousands of acres of nature conservation. Musical instruments (imaging spectrometers) covered the landscape with light of hundreds of wavelengths, capturing flowers that had blossomed and matured over the course of several months.

This study has been published in the journal Ecosphere.

“We’ve seen a lot of effort into making it easier to understand,” said David Schimel, a research scientist at JPL.

For many plant species, from crops to cacti, flowering is timed for seasonal swings of temperature, daylight and precipitation. Scientists take a closer look at plant life and seasons (the relationship between plant life and seasons known as vegetation biology) to understand how rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns affect ecosystems.

Wildflower surveys usually rely on tools such as observation of ground boots and Time-lapse Photography. However, these approaches are not able to capture the wider changes that may be happening in various ecosystems around the world, with author Yoseline Angel, a scientist at University of Maryland University Park and a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“One of the challenges is that the flowers can be quite shorter than the leaves and other parts of the plant,” she said. “They may only last a few weeks.”

To track blooms on a large scale, Angels and other NASA scientists are looking for a color, one of the characteristics of flowers.

Native shrub mapping

Flower pigments fall into three main groups: carotenoids and betarein (associated with yellow, orange and red colours) and anthocyanins (causing many deep reds, violets and blue). The various chemical structures of pigments reflect and absorb light in unique patterns.

Spectrometers allow scientists to analyze patterns and catalog plants by chemical “fingerprints.” When all molecules absorb and reflect a unique pattern of light, the spectrometer can identify a wide range of biological materials, minerals, and gases.

Handheld devices are used to analyze field or lab samples. NASA has developed an increasingly powerful imaging spectrometer over the past 45 years to investigate the moons and planets, including Earth.

One such instrument is called aviris-ng (short for air-visible/infrared imaging spectrometer and mold generation) and was built by JPL to fly aircraft. In 2022 it was used in a large ecology field campaign to investigate the vegetation of Jack and Laura Dungarmond and Sedgwick Reserves in Santa Barbara County. Among the plants observed were two native shrub species (Choleopsis gigantea and Artemisia California) from February to June.

Scientists have developed a method to tease the spectral fingerprint of flowers from other landscape features that crowded pixels in images. In fact, they captured 97% of the subtle spectral differences between flowers, leaves, and background cover (soil and shadow), allowing them to identify different flowering stages with 80% certainty.

Super Bloom Prediction

The results open the door to more air- and space-based research in flowering plants, which account for about 90% of all plant species on land. Angel said one of the ultimate goals is to support insects and other pollinators along with farmers and natural resource managers who rely on these species. Fruits, nuts, many medications, cotton are some of the products produced from flowering plants.

Angel uses new data collected by Aviris’ sister spectrometers that put the International Space Station in orbit. Called EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Survey), it is designed to map minerals around the arid regions of the Earth. Combining that data with other environmental observations could help scientists study Superbloom. This is the phenomenon of vast patches of desert flowers blooming after heavy rain.

One of the joys of studying flowers is the enthusiasm from citizen scientists, Angel said. “I have social media alerts on my phone,” she added, focusing on one way to stay above wildflower activities around the world.

Shift, an airborne and field research initiative, was jointly led by Nature Conservancy, the University of California, Santa Barbara and JPL. Pasadena’s Caltech manages NASA’s JPL.