This scientist uses satellites to map the Earth’s plant life — and help combat climate change

Stephanie Pau remembers the moment she knew she wanted to study biogeography, when she first saw a satellite map of a section of the earth that was brightly color coded. The colors didn’t correspond to states or countries, but instead represented a diversity of plant life based on light reflectance not visible to the human eye.

“All these different colors on the maps, they weren’t made up. They were reflecting real properties of the Earth’s surface,” explains Pau in this 101 in 101 video, which challenges UC Berkeley professors to explain the basics of their work in just over a minute and a half. “That was what really struck me.”

Maps like those can tell us a lot about our changing planet, and they drive Pau’s work as an associate professor with joint appointments in the Department of Geography and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management.

Her lab uses satellite data from the U.S. government’s LANDSAT system and others, and is often augmented with information gleaned from fixed camera systems, drones and good-old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground research. Today, she’s juggling a number of different projects around the world. In Panama and Hawaii, she’s studying tropical forest canopy temperatures, which can be much hotter than more commonly measured air temperatures in climate change projections. Her lab is also examining the diversity of grasslands across the United States and working to understand how climate change may interfere with grazing for California’s grassland species.

Using remote sensing to get a better sense of what is happening to our natural world is critical, says Pau. 

“Humans are changing the Earth in really rapid and dramatic ways,” she says. “These satellites are really one of our only tools that can give us a view across a large landscape and help us understand changes over time.”

Watch more 101 in 101 videos featuring UC Berkeley faculty and experts here.