Throughout the summer of 2014, anyone watching the Piper-Cherokee, single-engine, piston-powered airplane fly repeated passes over interior Alaska’s Tanana Valley might have thought the airplane was like the other small planes that fly Alaska’s skies. This was not a typical Piper-Cherokee though; it carried a state-of-the-art multisensory airborne imaging remote-sensing system that can measure the structure, spectral reflectance, and thermal emissions of the landscape at a tree-scale resolution.

To answer the question of how forests are distributed and changing in interior Alaska, Forest Service and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researchers are looking down from the skies and up from the ground.

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U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station
December 2019 | Issue 222 Science Findings