Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The Landsat satellite archive provides an extraordinary time series of environmental change, but many key processes occur at spatial scales too small to be studied at its native resolution. However, techniques for image super-resolution provide an exciting opportunity to infer environmental changes occurring at smaller spatial scales and, in doing, unlock the potential to study sub-pixel changes in biodiversity going back nearly 50 years.

This project is a collaboration between the USGS, NASA, the University of Wisconsin - Madison and Stony Brook University. We will leverage the temporal repeat imaging capability of Landsat and the statistical regularity of Earth’s features to infer sub-pixel scale patterns in the population dynamics of Adelie penguins, colonially nesting seabirds whose guano stain is visible in satellite imagery. In doing so, we will address fundamental questions about the long-term dynamics of Adelie penguins and develop an image super-resolution methodology with wide applicability to other biodiversity applications.