Atmosphere, plants, and soils control terrestrial carbon and water cycles. Researchers need to gain a better understanding of ecosystem dynamics at the biosphere-atmosphere interface to enable more accurate climate forecasting. Although our ability to forecast ecosystem functions and climate at the regional and global scales has advanced significantly, little is known about how local phenomena—such as variations in water and carbon fluxes at a daily time scale—interrelate with large-scale phenomena and vice versa. A more thorough understanding of ecosystem functions and climate change interactions is a key knowledge gap in our research to improve climate change models. The spectral response of the terrestrial surface is a function of the composition, abundance, and configuration of elements (e.g., plants and soils) and their properties. These properties determine ecosystem functions, and they are strongly tied to continuously changing environmental conditions such as temperature, moisture, and light intensity. These ties suggest the potential for identifying meaningful relationships in temporal dynamics between fluxes of water and carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and the spectral reflectance signatures of land surface across spatial and temporal scales. This presentation will discuss the ongoing effort of the EcoSpec project including development of a new tower-based sensor system, data flow and preprocessing, as well as upcoming data analysis effort.

Bio:    Yuki Hamada is a specialist in using remote sensing to estimate, monitor, and map biophysical properties in terrestrial ecosystems. She leads multiple projects requiring quantification of current environmental conditions and monitoring of those changes over time, which may be associated with energy development and climate change. Yuki is also the Principal Investigator for the Ecosystem Spectroscopy (EcoSpec) project, which investigates interactions between near surface atmosphere and biosphere using high-temporal frequency hyperspectral data and meteorological and biological measurements. In this role, she works with hardware and software engineers and scientists in the optical remote sensing community of North America and Europe in order to improve our understanding of how local phenomena—such as diurnal variations in water and carbon fluxes—interrelate with regional and global phenomena and vice versa. Yuki’s research interests include ecosystem functions and processes, big eco-geospatial data analytics, and geospatial cloud analytics.

Yuki holds a B.A. and M.S. degrees in Geography from San Diego State University and Ph.D. degree in Geography from University of California, Santa Barbara and San Diego State University. She is a member of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and American Geophysical Union (AGU).