Progress in the development of airborne remote sensing instrumentation for the National Ecological Observatory Network

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a planned facility of the National Science Foundation with the mission to enable understanding and forecasting of the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology. Airborne remote sensing plays a critical role by providing measurements at the scale of individual shrubs and larger plants over hundreds of square kilometers. The NEON Airborne Observation Platform is designed to bridge scales from organism and stand scales, as captured by plot and tower observations, to the scale of satellite based remote sensing. Fused airborne spectroscopy and waveform LiDAR is used to quantify vegetation composition and structure. Panchromatic photography at better than 30 cm resolution will retrieve fine-scale information on land use, roads, impervious surfaces, and built structures. NEON will build three airborne systems to allow for regular coverage of NEON sites and the capacity to respond to investigator requests for specific projects. The system design achieves a balance between performance and development cost and risk, taking full advantage of existing commercial airborne LiDAR and camera components. To reduce risk during NEON construction, an imaging spectrometer design verification unit is being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate that operational and performance requirements can be met. As part of this effort, NEON is also focusing on science algorithm development, computing hardware prototyping and early airborne test flights with similar technologies. This paper presents an overview of the development status of the NEON airborne instrumentation in the context of the NEON mission.