Air Force, Army, Navy, and Others Team Up with Local Scientists

BOZEMAN, Mont. - Later this summer, researchers from U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and NASA labs will join Bozeman ecologists and land managers for a sweeping project in Yellowstone and southwest Montana that will result in unique, high-quality maps of the region's terrain.

"There are growing needs to develop remote sensing technologies to aid both national security and natural resource management agencies," said Bob Crabtree, chief scientist of HyPerspectives, a Bozeman company that is participating in this project with the federal research labs. "We expect to make major breakthroughs in the use of state-of-the-art remote sensing technologies by joining forces with the military and NASA and combining our areas of expertise." The goal is to create accurate, detailed, high-resolution maps of the terrain of northern Yellowstone region and in doing so, to develop a method that military and federal land management agencies can use to generate and interpret terrain maps of unmatched quality.

This is important because natural resource managers and military personnel alike use terrain maps to help them make decisions. An accurately interpreted image of a forest in mid-summer, for example, can give a resource manager a good idea of what the fire danger is, which leads to informed decisions about how to manage it. Military personnel gather similar terrain information to make strategic decisions about troop deployments and supply logistics.

The military has superior remote sensing equipment and surveillance technology, but remote sensing scientists and biologists in the private sector have developed a greater ability to understand and identify remotely sensed features. "Natural resource managers who use imagery collected by satellites and aircraft are trained to recognize and characterize vegetation, soil, slope, and aspect in these images," Crabtree explained. "But these same terrain features are known as 'environmental clutter' to military technicians who scan terrain for manmade targets, such as vehicles or buildings - things that can be hidden under trees."

A unique feature of this project is that it will 'fuse' together several different types of remote sensing data, including radar and hyperspectral imagery. Fusion of these different data types will allow normally hidden features to be highlighted.

This project was facilitated by the Montana State University TechLink center, which linked HyPerspectives with the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy's main research center, to undertake the YOGI data collection mission. YOGI is the acronym for Yellowstone Optical and Ground Imaging. Nine other organizations will participate in this project.

Participants in the YOGI data collection mission:
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Washington, DC
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts
HyPerspectives, Inc., Bozeman, Montana
Yellowstone Ecological Research Center, Bozeman, Montana
Army Communications-Electronics Command, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
JPSD Rapid Terrain Visualization Program, Fort Belvoir, Virginia
Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio
U.S. Forest Service, Gallatin National Forest, Bozeman, Montana
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

CONTACTS:

Will Swearingen
MSU TechLink
(406) 994-7704
wds@montana.edu

Bob Crabtree
President, HyPerspectives
(406) 556-9880
crabtree@hyperspectives.net

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