The first of two Nasa Gulfstream jets touched down in Cape Town on Wednesday to begin a unique aerial survey with local scientists of one of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots.
The Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (dubbed BioScape) involves an airborne and field survey of South Africa’s world-famous biodiversity hotspot, the Greater Cape Floristic Region, spanning much of the Western and Eastern Cape.
The novelty is that the survey uses hi-tech aerial photography (imaging spectroscopy) to measure many bands across the visible, near infrared and short-wave infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. “Imagine seeing 300 additional colours, most well beyond the human visible range,” Nasa expert Dr Phil Broderick told TimesLIVE Premium.
Data provided will help scientists better understand the surveyed areas, including how they adapt to climate change. It links survey information, obtained via aerial photography and satellite imagery, with a broad range of field observations from vegetation type to bird and frog call recordings.
The project is a US-SA collaboration involving about 150 scientists, half of them South African, co-funded by a host of organisations including Nasa, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), the South African National Space Agency (Sansa) and the National Research Foundation (NRF). It started in 2001 and is led by scientists at the University at Buffalo, the University of California Merced and the University of Cape Town.
“We're super excited to have the planes arriving and things getting under way,” said UCT lead scientist Dr Jasper Slingsby. “This has been an eight-year journey for the science leadership team and even longer for Nasa's biological diversity and ecological conservation programme. It'll take a few days to get the pilots rested after transit from the US and planes prepped for the survey, but we hope to start surveys on Friday if the weather permits,” said Slingsby.
The jets will conduct flights through to late November.
“The data collected will be valuable for many years to come, but we hope to have some of the research products starting to appear early in 2024.
“We've worked hard to make sure that all the teams have South African collaborators to ensure that the science performed and applied products generated are well embedded in the local understanding of our biodiversity and fit for purpose for potential end users,” he said.
“This is a broad collaboration between several organisations,” principal investigator Adam Wilson, a biogeographer at the University at Buffalo, told TimesLIVE in a previous interview. “The Greater Cape Floristic Region is a really fascinating place — it has extremely high plant diversity, and there’s been dramatic environmental change over the past 50 years, due to both climate and land-use change.
“Our data will capture this region’s biodiversity in greater detail than ever before from a plane or satellite. In combination with the field observations, these new data will help us understand this dynamic region and improve our ability to monitor biodiversity from space globally.”
The NRF said the “cutting-edge” project was a testament to South Africa’s world-class biodiversity research, much of it conducted by its South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) business unit.
“We are committed to contributing to the collection of data and using the information generated by BioSCape to inform environmental management decisions in the region,” said NRF-SAEON MD Dr Mary-Jane Bopape on Tuesday.
