In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth's environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE land cover/biology protocols. This project will modify existing protocols, develop and test new ones, and review GLOBE data submitted to the archive. The project will support the overall training and outreach activities of the program, fostering student scientist partnerships. The scientific issue addressed by this proposal is the need to integrate reference data collection and accuracy assessment (i.e. validation) into land cover data sets generated from remotely sensed data. Other GLOBE protocols provide data that are currently collected by other sources around the world (e.g. temperature, precipitation), however, no other source of regional, continental, much less global validation data is currently being collected anywhere except by GLOBE students. This land cover/biology investigation has the double benefit of allowing student to experience the process of science while providing for a unique and valuable validation data set for use by the remote sensing community. This project is collaborating with NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) team to provide the calibration and validation data for this new NASA Earth Observing System sensor in order to generate regional land cover maps worldwide. Students will work primarily with Landsat data, as well as learning how to use geographic information systems (GIS) to answer scientific questions about land cover mapping. %%% In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth's environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE land cover/biology protocols. This project will modify existing protocols, develop and test new ones, and review GLOBE data submitted to the archive. The project will support the overall training and outreach activities of the program, fostering student scientist partnerships. The scientific issue addressed by this proposal is the need to integrate reference data collection and accuracy assessment (i.e. validation) into land cover data sets generated from remotely sensed data. Other GLOBE protocols provide data that are currently collected by other sources around the world (e.g. temperature, precipitation), however, no other source of regional, continental, much less global validation data is currently being collected anywhere except by GLOBE students. This land cover/biology investigation has the double benefit of allowing student to experience the process of science while providing for a unique and valuable validation data set for use by the remote sensing community. This project is collaborating with NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) team to provide the calibration and validation data for this new NASA Earth Observing System sensor in order to generate regional land cover maps worldwide. Students will work primarily with Landsat data, as well as learning how to use geographic information systems (GIS) to answer scientific questions about land cover mapping.
