Gearing up for fieldwork, Summer 2019

The ice is finally melting here in Ottawa, and we're getting ready for this season's fieldwork.

- In Gatineau Park, satellite image processing based on field and drone data from 2017 and 2018 allowed us to predict the locations of three large patches of wild leek - a threatened plant species in Quebec. This spring we will go to those locations to test whether our predictions were correct - and find out whether out image processing was good or not!

- In central Ontario, we will take our new drone and our new hyperspectral camera into the forest, to collect 3D hyperspectral data over a couple of forest plots. We will then test whether such data can be used to identify the tree species in those plots (a task that usually requires a trained human observer in a helicopter).

- In the High Arctic, we're going to collect lots of data on remote sensing reflectance, which we will ultimately use to test how well existing atmospheric correction algorithms work in the Arctic (these algorithms are all calibrated with data from mid-latitudes, so their performance in the Arctic is unknown).