CSU-led team wins top prize in NASA competition

FORT COLLINS — A team at Colorado State University has won the top prize in an online competition in the NASA Develop program, beating 25 other projects involving 100 researchers at 12 other locations across the nation.

Each member of the winning team will receive a one-year trial version of ArcGIS software, furnished by the Redlands, Calif.-based Environmental Systems Research Institute, which sponsored the competition.

The team’s project focused on analyzing cheatgrass cover across the area burned by the Arapaho Fire in south central Wyoming.

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NASA Develop, part of the agency’s Applied Sciences Program, runs a competition three times each year that gives research teams 10 weeks to use NASA earth observations to address a community concern. Teams must produce scientific results, interact online with other researchers who comment on the findings, create a video, respond to judges across the miles and effectively  explain their science.

Cheatgrass is a non-native, invasive plant species, said team adviser Amanda West, a postdoctoral researcher with CSU’s Natural Resources Ecology Lab, part of CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources. The species crowds out native grasses that are an important food source for mule deer and elk.

The CSU team partners with the U.S. Geological Survey and was the first university-based NASA Develop location to partner with a federal agency, West said. Led by Darin Schulte, a graduate student at the University of Denver, the team analyzed satellite images, building on previous cheatgrass research spearheaded by West.

“It wasn’t feasible to survey the locations by hand, which is part of the reason for using the remote sensing data as an approach to monitor where the cheatgrass is,” Schulte said.

Findings from the team’s research will help the Wyoming State Forestry Division decide how much herbicide it will need to purchase, and where to apply it, to destroy the invasive plant species. The team’s partners also can use the CSU team’s maps in grant proposals, to help secure funding for cheatgrass management.

“That’s something that we all recognize when we start to work with land-management agencies, the importance of resources and the ability to do things they’d like to do to manage lands,” West said.

The NASA Develop program in Fort Collins was launched in 2012, and has from 24 to 30 participants each year, said Brian Woodward, a CSU graduate student and lead organizer of the program.

How big of a celebration did the team have when they learned that they won? Given the “virtual” aspect to the competition, Schulte said the party was somewhat subdued. “Everybody smiled depending on where they were,” he said. “People were pretty dispersed.”