By using a data analysis tool developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with funding from NASA, satellites can help researchers study birds flying through your backyard. Scientists from ORNL's Distributed Active Archive Center (the ORNL DAAC) are collaborating with Cornell University researchers through a project called DataONE (Observation Network for Earth) to enable advanced analysis of bird species distribution and migration patterns. The ORNL tool allows the Cornell investigators to pull specific data generated by NASA's MODIS satellite sensor and link it to 65 million observations archived in Cornell's eBird database. "The combination of satellite data with the bird observations is a novelty," said Suresh Santhana Vannan, an ORNL DAAC scientist. "They're normally two separate research areas." By incorporating data extracted from MODIS such as the normalized vegetation density index, or "greenness" of the local area, researchers can conduct more complex analyses using supercomputers, such as modeling how variations in vegetation linked to climate change can affect bird migration.
