Think of Nasa and the images that spring to mind are probably rocket launches or the International Space Station. Certainly not fynbos.
But in 2023, the US space administration plans to spend six weeks — and about R12.4m — flying planes over the “greater Cape floristic region” to map marine, freshwater and terrestrial species and ecosystems in one of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots.
The data gathered will be used to map the south-western Cape's biodiversity, providing estimates of the distribution and abundance of species and the boundaries of ecosystems, and researching how biodiversity affects the physical environment and vice versa.“This is a broad collaboration between several organisations,” said principal investigator Adam Wilson, a biogeographer at the University at Buffalo.
The project — titled “Marine, Freshwater, and Terrestrial Biodiversity Survey of the Cape ” — is funded by Nasa. Wilson's team will get $873,000 to complete their share of the work.The leadership team includes Jasper Slingsby from the University of Cape Town, Glenn Moncrieff from the SA Environmental Observation Network and Erin Hestir from the University of California, Merced.
“But non-forest ecosystems harbour a substantial proportion of the world’s biological diversity, and perhaps the most diverse of these non-forest ecosystems are the shrub lands of the greater Cape floristic region. Slingsby said BioSCape would boost the use of remote sensing in the region and innovation in remote sensing of biodiversity in general.
In a separate but related project, Wilson and a team including some of the same partners are developing a tool that uses satellite remote sensing and artificial intelligence to monitor ecosystems in the Cape floristic region.
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