Students join forces with NASA to help protect Gulf Coast forests

A team from Southern University, Baton Rouge joined group of Louisiana and Mississippi students who spent their summer break giving back to their communities. Using NASA satellite data, they hope to come up with a better way to detect and map the hurricane-induced vulnerabilities of Mississippi's forests.

The team of five DEVELOP Program participants at NASA Stennis Space Center have written a proposal to use data gathered by satellites to find better ways to measure forest disturbances after hurricanes. They also hope to predict fire hazards and invasive species threats in Mississippi and Louisiana timberlands.

Deirdra Boley, a civil engineering major at Southern University, Baton Rouge; Team Leader Lauren Childs, a geography graduate student at the University of New Orleans; Assistant Team Leader Jason Jones, geography major at University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg; and Craig Matthews and Denise Spindel, geography majors at UNO, began their project this spring, brainstorming ways to meet DEVELOP's goal of extending NASA's Earth science research to the communities in their region.

The student-led, student-run DEVELOP program was first conducted at SSC in 2002. Most recently, Southern University has joined the list of schools partnering with SSC to enlist students and conduct the program. "Our idea and hope is to incorporate Louisiana forests into the proposal," said SU Assistant Professor of Urban Forestry Andre Johnson. "Potential sites in Washington Parish and Kisatchie National Forest would be very relevant to this study."

During the next calendar year, the students propose conducting their project in three phases: first, find a better way to locate and quantify the hurricane-related damage in coastal Mississippi forests; second, to improve current methods and models of damage detection; and third, to map areas vulnerable to invasive species intrusion.

"Since Katrina, Mississippi has had an astonishingly high number of burns due to excess fuel from downed trees," Team Leader Childs said. "This project could be extremely important to this area."

The team compared satellite imagery before and after Hurricane Katrina, reading changes in canopy heights and leaf color to see if they can build a model to accurately predict fire hazards. The team has identified potential partners in the U.S. Forestry Service, its Forestry Inventory Analysis program and DeSoto National Forest.

Because the proposal aligns with several of NASA's Earth science Applications of National Priority, team members hope they can parlay the project into a broader understanding of how and where hurricanes create the most forest fire fuel; how that fuel plays into the natural fire cycle and how those fires affect the nations carbon management activities.