ISU and NASA team up

ISU Research teams and NASA are collecting data on cheatgrass in southeastern Idaho.

It’s a serious problem and researchers at ISU are working hard to prevent the spread of cheatgrass.

“The NASA Develop Program provides students the opportunity to work on environmental projects where they can use NASA technology to address societal concerns,” said Jeff May, lead developer of the program.

So what does this exactly mean?

“Grass begins its growing cycle much sooner then native vegetation; it also dies earlier, making it prime for fire, making it much sooner than any other grasses,” said May.

The researchers have been using new imagery they collected using Landsat 8 satellite to get a closer look of areas that are dominated by cheatgrass.

NASA also funded all the research for the program..

So what’s the result?

“Almost a year’s worth of research and what we found is we are able to use imagery from a satellite up in space to locate where cheatgrass is growing dominantly,” said Keith Weber, ISU director of GIS.

How is this project helping? Well, the Bureau of Land Management said it will make a difference.

“The models that were created have some very amazing potential effects for us in our planning processes, so we do a lot of planning for fuels reduction and we do planning and implementation for fire restoration,” said Shelli Mavor, fire ecologist.

The next endeavor the team has its eye on is the Juniper Conservation Mapping project.

NASA will also take part in the project.