Remote Sensing for Biodiversity: Insights from the BioSCape Campaign

The Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (BioSCape) is NASA’s first biodiversity-focused airborne and field campaign, designed to advance understanding of ecosystem structure, function, and composition, and how these are changing over time and space. The regional focus is the Greater Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, a biodiversity hotspot. This international collaboration involving ~160 US and South African scientists across 19 PI-led projects produced an unprecedented, open-access dataset spanning >50,000 km², integrating imaging spectroscopy sampling from 0.35 μm to 12 μm (AVIRIS-NG, PRISM, HyTES), LiDAR (LVIS, ELMAP-V), and extensive ground data from ~2,600 field samples. Data are publicly archived through NASA Earthdata and accessible via a cloud computing environment, fostering open science and reproducibility. In this presentation, we will summarize the results to date across the BioSCape project, highlighting key scientific outcomes from both terrestrial and aquatic landscapes. We will also discuss some of the broader implications of the project, including laying the groundwork for achieving ethical and equitable benefit-sharing via compliance with the Nagoya Protocol. A core principle of BioSCape is "use-inspired science," which involves co-developing research questions with local partners to directly address pressing conservation and resource management challenges. This ensures that our scientific findings translate into actionable data products for decision-makers in South Africa and globally. For example, BioSCape's data and products are already informing conservation and resource management efforts, including kelp range maps for ecosystem classification and woody invasive alien plant maps that feed into national ecosystem condition assessments. The project's contributions have been recognized in the 2024 State of Environment Outlook Report for the Western Cape Province of South Africa. This work serves as a demonstration for other regionally-focused biodiversity campaigns, and is directly advancing remote sensing of biodiversity methods for the next generation of satellite-based technologies to enable improved biodiversity measurements globally.  It was also the subject of a short documentary film, “The Spectrum of Life,” available at bioscape.io/film.