Dr. Greg Asner, first became enamored with Hawaii's natural wonders when he left his job as an engineer, to work as a technician with the nature conservancy of Hawaii. He also worked in the Bosnian (inaudible). Greg left the nature conservancy in UH to attend the University of Colorado where he earned his Masters degree in ecology and then his PhD in biochemistry. His Masters Thesis research brought him back to Hawaii where he has done forest surveys in Hawaii's Alakai following the Hurricane (Iniki). He has worked on (indiscernible) physiology in (indiscernible) in the (indiscernible) conserve. Since 2001 he has been a faculty member of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution and in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. His scientific research centers on how human activities alter the composition and functioning of ecosystems at regional scales. I am reading this but I have been told that Dr. Asner is calling this his mother of presentation. It's a presentation of the technology that he could give to his mother for which I am grateful because my mother, State Representative Cynthia Thielen is in the audience. Most Recently Dr. Asner worked to include satellite monitoring and selected logging in forest disturbance throughout the Amazon basin, invasive species and biodiversity in Hawaii rain forest and the effects of El Nino on tropical forest. He has used the unique technology; he would be discussing today, to map species richness, invasive plants and bio maps on the Big Island, Hawaii, Mali and in Australia. The applications of this system extend far beyond forestry however and there is great interest in using this system to study ecosystems on all the continents. We are very fortunate that Dr. Asner has an interest in Hawaii. I am looking forward to hearing his technology here today and future applications that we can use in our state, thank you very much. Well, that is quite an introduction. I am so excited to be here, it seems like its long coming, it's the feeling I am having standing up here. A lot of people were here who I have either worked with or touched based with over the years and I am excited to in a way show off what we have accomplished as a subset of people on community here, but also to try to inspire you to see what we could be doing next. To do that I am going to be highlighting the work that we have accomplished very recently with a brand new technology, it's an airborne system, flies around in an airplane. You might hear overhead if you are on the Big Island. But before I do that I really need to thank the people that have made this airborne program come to to its level where it is today and that list long list of people was on the screen as you see there. I have people at the Carnegie Institution who have absolutely sacrificed their time, their a lot of their lives to make it get to this stage, believe it or not. These people worked five, six, seven days a week, 20 hour days to make this happen and it's really them who I represent. There are a large number of other people listed here who have been major catalyst and facilitators to make Carnegie able to be where it is today. And that's the connection I want to draw back to and give back to as we develop a plan in the coming years. I want to make sure I talk about our sponsors. None of this I am about to show you its very expensive to achieve and none of this has been possible without major backing from the WM Keck Foundation, William Hearst, one of the trustees of the Carnegie institution, Carnegie itself, the forest service, DOFA, and NASA. All had major contributions to this effort. I want to start zoom to way out and talk a little bit about what makes me tick when I have pulled this system with all our collaborators together. The questions that I think of every day and that I am kind of haunted by every day have to do with the rate of change of what's going on here and elsewhere. And as Laura mentioned I have worked heavily in Latin America on the same issues but I keep coming back to Hawaii for a lot of reasons. One, because it's such a unique and special place, its biological and geophysical and cultural resources are intertwined in a way that they cannot be looked at separately. To do so usually leads to problems in our management conservation efforts. The second reason is that as a kind of global scientist in a way, although I don't really work globally, I think about Hawaii as a very unique model, one where what we learnt in regional ecosystem science has the potential to have major impacts on management conservation approaches here in Hawaii but also as a demonstration. And it's that I want to try to continue to emphasize throughout my talk today. Hawaii has a very unique portfolio and I do think of it as a portfolio of ecosystem goods and services that we care about as a society and that have an intrinsic value. Those are listed there. Things that used to seem esoteric like Carbon storage, until we started pumping so much of it into our atmosphere have become real issues. Water quality and quantity here, a proximal very clear issues here in Hawaii, cultural recreation, aesthetic values that are important to people here in Hawaii whether you have just recently come here or have been here for generations and generations. But at the same time I think its pretty clear that we don't really have a way to managing conserve the major contributors to these services, the contributors to these services. Who are the major contributors and I say who kind of loosely, I really mean what are the major contributors? And here is my list. And you might have a different list or an extended list or a shorter list. But they tend to be always going back to these issues, what's happening with the structure of our ecosystems, state wide in terms of habitat, what's happening to the plant diversity overtime, what's happening with invasive species, pollinators as a special group that are still critical to the long term resilience of our ecosystems, carbon stocks again. The topography and terrain are actually changing here, not just naturally but we are changing it. Just go to a corner side and you see that. Water inputs and losses of course, these are all major contributors to this term this phrase that we use now in science about ecosystem services, but it's real. So my kind of my emphasis in trying to develop this science, our science that I am going to present and our airborne system as an example of that science is driven by three things that bother me everyday. And it makes me want to partner science much more tangibly to conservation management and resource policy development in a way that's active and rapid and get something done at the regional scale. So why do we need it? In my mind Hawaii has absolute finite amount and quality of its resources. Those resources have very questionable ecological and economic renewability ore economic renewability. One or the other, either the ecology of the system or the economics that we have to deal with in very practical terms makes resource management very difficult, think of water quality, you let your water get dirty, its quite expensive to renew it and that might be an economic barrier, in the simplest terms in that way. Another one is native habitat and diversity. Sometimes we can do a restoration project locally and renew that habitat or diversity but if the problem becomes regional, statewide, it could become non renewable economically, we just can't afford to fix a problem that big. Environmental changes tend to be hard to track; some times they are subtle before they become obvious. And they are usually nonlinear and that's to try the most technical I will use here. They tend to happen across thresholds, some tipping point is crossed and something happens. One example of that I have noticed that over the years here is that there seems to have a change in native bird habitat that might be facilitated or it might suddenly happen when the population density of some invasive plant species reaches a threshold, and we have seen that on the Big Island, I am sure elsewhere too. And third, the local causes of environmental change or degradation tend to be interwoven with distal changes, kind of distant changes. But these connections between what happens off island and on island are rather hard to understand sometimes and that's the regional perspective that resolves the detail, at the same time as being regional is really critical. An example of that one will be habitat loss as a local phenomenon and you might see it in your backyard or next door and that might be somehow impacted by what's going on in our climate system. We don't know yet but these are things that I think about and that have motivated a lot of the science that my collaborators here and I have done. Another one is local spread of invasive species of absolutely clear one that most of us tends to have a lot to do with whether the species was introduced from another island or state. So somewhat simple, proximal to distal connections and some are a little more fuzzy, like climate change. But we are trying to get an understanding of what's going on as climate is changing. What does science offer to conservation and management and resource policy development in Hawaii? What does regional science offer? I think one big one are - is what I am here to talk about, observations. What's going on in the environment? Without the observations we have little basis to do any thing, make plans, we just don't know. Those observations can be rapid a rapid type, say fire hazard, dry season fire hazard type rapid response. A very long term records as to what's going regionally. Another kind of science contribution in this area are on processes which may not be regionally observed but may be understood by a network of measurements, say in the field like a lot of you do here some of you do here at least. Those can be local impact local or regional understanding and then science offers in its grandest form, prediction, what might happen next? And that those predictions are usually based on trends in the observations or on an understanding as those processes. So predictions rely on observations and knowledge of the processes as shown there. So when it comes to this observation stuff the technologies are rapidly evolving and I tend to tell people it's kind of like Google, you saw Google earth come in and you know Google is evolving rapidly. Well, so is science in this area and its doing some amazing things that hasn't made it quite out yet. The technologies tend to focus on satellites, aircraft, and the In Situ monitoring systems. In the In Situ monitoring systems there tend to be things that you might place it in a stream to measure stream flow that you can't remotely sense from an aero plane or a satellite. Well, chemistry of the stream or whatever it is. Those are still remote sensing systems, they are very local. They are measuring some thing or on an automated basis. All of these are important, absolutely critical. I have personally worked with all of them heavily. The In Situ systems tend to be for understanding those processes. They have they also can help you with the kind of the regional observations but they tend to be focused more on trying to understand a process, say hydrology of a given stream and the effects of land use change on that stream, as an example. Satellites give a very broad pattern. They are often hard to link back, I think people know that. It's the state of the technology of satellites, that's just they way it is. And that leaves me with aircraft which is some thing that over the years, working heavily on the satellite side I found myself focusing here in Hawaii more and more on the aircraft side. So what is it about this these measurements that are useful to policy and and resource policy in particular and conservational management. It's that if you can get a set of what I call synoptic observations of things that have to do with what's going on in our ecosystems, the structure of the ecosystem, the function and the diversity in particular. If you can do that you could direct the right kind of field measurements for the detailed stuff. Habitat, carbon, stream discharge whatever it is there is it's a long list that could do better and could be a lot more cost effective if this were doing its job well. Doing its job well in terms of the what kind of information it gives, but also have often it gives it. And these don't work separately. There is an idea here that there is a potential iteration that could be done to both understand what's going on in our systems better and to save money doing it. I am really going to talk about this wild aircraft stuff today but I want to make sure that I focus for a minute criticality of the linkages that we have built. With this list of agencies and others, very active right now, some of you are here trying to look at processes in the field based on or associated with the remote sensing in the mapping that we were doing. A very tangible example is a close collaborator of mine at the Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry in Hilo, (Fern Hughes). We can remotely sense often we can remotely sense something that is connected to something back in the field and this just a graph, it doesn't really matter the details here that links something that I will show you we remotely sense very well, the height of the vegetation, with something related very closely to it's biomass. That's my only point here and that's just driving home the connectivity between air and ground studies. So this is kind of the wild, weird technology part because I was asked to talk about the technology as generally as I could. I will start out with a picture of somebody I know with a couple of colors in their eyes just the couple of MnM's goofing around onboard of aircraft and the idea is that we can see things that you can't see with the naked eye. You can't well, I am about to show you our technologies are developed because we cannot measure them in the field and we cannot measure them from space. Yet they are the measurements are needed in the science my world of science that might have the strong connectivity to resource policy development, management conservation. So I am going to show a few little science slides here. I think my mom would understand this. I am just going to just so that I have some credibility and then I will move on to the picture show, I think. One of the technologies is a name that doesn't matter to lot of you but its very high performance spectral imaging, you are used your digital camera that you bought and you take a picture in it; basically it captures three bands of light. We have systems now that can capture hundreds of bands of light from an aircraft and that's quite hard to do. And for every map that you might be used to so here is just a map, there is third dimension that goes down. For every one of those pixels you have what, a five mega pixel camera, about for each pixel we have a very detailed information spectrum as to what's there chemically. And here is some examples of things, atmosphere, soil, water and vegetation and it doesn't matter just look bumps and wiggles and know that there is information there. I am just telling you that. For vegetation in particular these bumps and wiggles, they tell us a lot about the chemistry of the vegetation in the canopy. That's new and some of the information has to do with the colors of the plants, some has to do with the water content, some has to do with the nitrogen and carbon, things that matter to growth rates and fertility and that kind of stuff. Here is an application of it. Just to get right to an application just this portion of this technology, here is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Kilauea Caldera, Kilauea Iki, I think these are the 73 flows, here's what is known as (indiscernible) forest, this is in this part of are Big Island if you are not sure. And this area has been heavily studied and this was more of a test area for us than kind of exploration. Here is what it looks like flying over in helicopter looking back on Kilauea Iki and you see some variation in color here that might tell you there is something going on. When you do this chemical mapping with an airplane, you can make up maps of things well, as I said, like nitrogen and water, here is the same area and all that matters here don't even worry about the bottom, is that there are colors from white to blue and there are some areas of association between these two chemicals but there are some that are radically different like over here versus over here. And you put those layers together; many layers of this stuff and you come up with a map like this which depicts the landscape radically differently than you got from Google Earth or that you would from Landsat or lot of the technologies. And it turns out that these areas in red are dominated by one of the most famous nitrogen fixing invasive trees that's causing a lot of financial and biological problem to the park and to the surrounding area outside of the park and that there are these different types of plants that are dark, that are expressing themselves in these chemical signatures. That's all that really matters for this part of my talk. Here is Kahili Ginger, absolutely stands out in dark blue, in the under storey even I might add. So that kind of facilitate this is old work, I am kind of building up to the new stuff work. This facilitates a large amount of effort that's ongoing now to try to detect a range of Hawaii's most problematic invasive species. Some of them, we have been successful, some we haven't we haven't been as successful. I would say that like Strawberry Guava, African grasses and nitrogen fixing plants and certain types of under storey species were quite easy to do. Miconia has been sometimes successful; sometimes failure and we are trying to understand as scientists, why? Another way that this chemical, for remote sensing, has worked is on the Big Island, this a map of essentially fire fuel wood and that's something I was shocked we don't have good handle on is how we do fire fuel wood on the islands? And here is a map; these are our aircraft data and I'll get to those. But we use the aircraft data in this case to train a satellite. Satellites don't see this stuff very easily by themselves; they kind of have foggy goggles. But you you train this satellite to see like the aircraft and suddenly you can get a Big Island picture. And here what's the picture that in the red at this moment in time and this changes weekly and seasonally. The red were areas of very high fire fuel wood danger. Here is a zoom of Laupahoehoe forest reserve that's just let me go back, that's just this section right here. And these are areas, this is Laupahoehoe, this is towards the summit, this is the bird park in the woodland grating into the grassland and our results which were validated and evaluated by Fern Hughes at the Forest Service show really detailed patterns of where the fire fuel wood is just within this one reserve. And the potential for management base on this is unexplored in a lot of ways. But it's really there is a lot of potential. This was covered and mapped in about 30 minutes. So imagine trying to do that everywhere on the ground. This is the this is the (indiscernible) itself and if you've been there, you can realize how big that feature is on the landscape. Well, basically the entire mount side down to the coastline here, this is what I am talking about. This blue line, this line over here is with blue on that side, the blue were areas where there was not much fire fuel wood, it's either bare, lava or in this case, a fire burned here about a month before we flew it. So you see a line where the fire fighters stopped the fire, right on (indiscernible) highway. And that's all burned and this is still high fire field. So those are some examples, just concrete things that we haven't reached out well enough on my end to get to the management side. That was one technology, that's the chemical technology; think of it that way. This is the structural technology called LIDAR and there is a lot of hype about LIDAR right now. It's amazing, how much hyper is. LIDAR is basically firing a laser from an airplane and timing the bounce back to the airplane. If you could get a fancy laser, meaning pre-2006, you get a laser that shoots down and returns and counts up a few different bounces. So you can get an idea of where the top that count appear and may be the ground. These older LIDAR and this is what makes me feel like Google or Microsoft. My group is calling that old. And these are old methods, pre-2006. And there is a bunch I'll put this here for anyone here who cares but there is a bunch of reasons why the older technology has been trouble. One really good reason is the lasers weren't good enough and I'll just whittle it down to that. It weren't good enough to guarantee that you are seeing the forest floor. If you can't see the forest floor you can't see the tree height, if you can't see the height of the trees you can't estimate their bio mass accurately, it's not possible physically. So here is an old map of biomass of (indiscernible) and Ohio forest in Hilo, that turns out that I was about 30 percent wrong, I never published it because LIDAR wasn't good enough. That brings me to the new LIDAR. The new LIDAR is radically different and it has been around the NASA World a little bit. But it just made itself out way out, I think we us, I call it the 2007 wave form LIDAR, super high pulse rates. So what that means is instead of just the bounce off the canopy, you get a very clear vertical profile of the canopy, it's a very, very high tech laser that sees all the energy that it sends out and then its comes back, some of the energy hits the top, the middle, the middle and middle to bottom and so forth. And you see 3D, and I'll show you that. So what we've done is do what people thought was really not possible and we completely integrated these two technologies that I just explained here. And this is the end of my technology discussion; I'm going to go into what it means. But the technology brings the structure that I told you about. The four structures and I'll tell you the terrain in a minute as well, with the chemical information to really break open a bunch of barriers and how we can look at the region in detail. Here, basically the makeup of our system and here is our web site, if you are interested. Nice simple web site, Carnegie airborne observatory, we lovingly call it the flying cow and it's basically this all of this high tech stuff I told you about plus another piece of major piece of navigation instrumentation that gives us a chance to look at 3D ecosystems and I want to emphasize here, that involves a lot of people. That it doesn't just fly on its own and spit this stuff out. There is a lot of people involved from flight crew to data processing, to the modeling and mapping group and a very large set of engineering contractors. What does this thing look like? It's a high tech instrument on a low tech airplane, on purpose, the idea is to put all the effort into this measurement and do it as cheaply operational wise as possible and here is the guy one of my guys Ty he is controlling the laser system and also sending flight information up to the pilots. And this guy on the back is controlling the direction and altitude of the aircraft from the back. And here is the sensor system, it's pointing down out of the bottom of the aircraft, this orange plate is startling a really big hole in the plane and this plate two here, its floating on a pneumatic system, so its isolated from the vibrations of the airplane. And this thing is producing the kind of information stream that I described. One of the things that's critical it's the simple things that are hard to do. And one of the things that didn't come out too good, I am sorry but that there are a bunch of red loops in the sky here above, well I am going to end up showing you Laupahoehoe forest reserve. We are able to track our position extremely well in the air, so well that our projection back to the ground are error in where each tree crown is is on that order of just centimeters, it's critical for management. So people can find this stuff out there and you will be surprised at how much remote sensing has been stuck because it just can get the people to the right place. So we had this big underway getting underway period and I want to emphasize the people factor here, folks just random shots of people in my group, two types of airplanes we use, this Piper Navajo and this Twin Otter It's it's really I am awed by the dedication, I can't begin to tell you how much has gone in, all of it here in Hawaii, all of it on the Big Island over the last especially the last six months. We have this great laboratory that the Forest Service entered into a great collaboration with Carnegie so that we could set up a state of the art airborne remote sensing laboratory. I know that sometimes here, this is kind of average times when we are doing flight ups, people really working late to make to this stuff happen, here is just a little bit of a tour of what its like in our world, taking off from Hilo Airport here and circling around, here is Hilo Airport, the bay and so forth. And we had a big occasion, for us in my word, which was our first light, the first images taken. In this case you sense for the resolution and fidelity of the information that we collect, this is just what you would see with a raw data, nothing processed. And this is Mauka section of Laupahoehoe forest reserve, the Hilo forest reserve Laupahoehoe extension, showing trees and you can see grass and you can see clearings and you can see dead trees, and I hope this comes out, but the laser portion is perfectly, exactly aligned with it so that you get the information you are used to. By the way there is a lot of chemical information I am not showing you yet in that and then the structural information and you can see in the back here kind of a change in topography as you go down, that's the background grey. If you you can remove the topography with our algorithms and just get tree height exactly identified, vertical air is just under 50 centimeters at maximum. And often much better and you can see branches branch level details in these kinds of data. So this was our very first image taken, that was a big deal for us. We had a big party afterwards and so forth. Here is that same area, the topography, a little opening in the forest. You are looking straight down in the forest and these are tree crowns and you can see the terrain separated from these tree crowns that way with this system. Nothing radically new here, I am just giving you a tour to get you a feel for it. What's really new is that rather than just where the trees are and how high they are which is very useful, is the vertical profile of the foliage in these trees. These are tree crown profiles, just some examples. We call them wave forms in my world but that's just a science term. Well, I think it come out so well on the screen but these are just basically take home message shares, that these are different heights of these trees and you see different profiles of different types of species and combinations of species. So we are seeing down through the forest structure that way. Here is a tangible use of it, flew over a guys area in Lower Puna, here is a guy who is working his land on the edge here and then it grates right into (indiscernible) forest reserve, to fall land and here is his the edge of his cleared area and you see a lot going on here in his land and you are wondering may be what make this border land what might be happening in the border land. Our chemical analysis picks out the trees that growing the fastest. And these red trees are those that are growing fast and it turns out that these guys guava and (indiscernible) invaders. This guy has this problem on his property, he knows it, but what's going on? Is they reaching into the forest reserve from this boundary and it's that kind of information that might be critically useful to management conservation efforts. It's the basic information that you are not going to easily get any other way, you must be running around through Lower Puna very slowly I might add, to get this kind of information. This collect takes about six seconds. Here is our development from that, this is what I said the growth rates and you see reds as high growth rates, yellow as medium and our good old Ohia forest in the reserve as relatively low growth rate, slow growing, hard wood quiet forest with these invasive coming in at rather rapidly. This is a map of CO2 uptake that we derived from some other steps in our analysis, instantaneous rate of growth. Just to give you some more detail, just to give you a feel here is another guy Lower Puna here is some areas, here is this clearing, here are some I forgot now what this is, but here is some of his AG work and here is some of course 40 degree and then here is that same area and sometimes when we look at this stuff straight we see cylinders for this particular tree but that tree has that vertical profile, which turns out to be you know busier tree, one of the problematic trees down there as well. Same guy, same area, can you guys see a shadow here, from your angle, you might see kind of the align of a tree like this, the branches of a tree, can you see it now? This is an example of the data I hope when you go back, here is something here that you can't tell what it is but it's casting a shadow. And our chemical analysis picks up that thing as a standing dead tree, that's blue; this is all dead stuff in blue. But it's standing because it is casting a shadow on the ground; I thought that was just me just looking through the data the other day for you guys to find some examples. So that's the kind of it gives you the detail of what's going on. This might be dumbest thing I ever did but I am going to try to show you some movies of that Lower Puna area. Somebody has tell to me if it's too dark and I will cut out and go on. The left side shows this what happens when you fly over and you fill up the vegetation with volumes, so you can see it in volume and this one which is really hard to see are the locations of all the leaf layers in this forest. So you are flying over Lower Puna right now and this one seems to be lagging behind, over, coming to the clearing at the same time and you start seeing tree crowns and their shadows cast. You start to may be get the sense of there is a habitat kind of angle the data sets and what could be done in the management conservation world. That's all I want you to take home from that. I get back to the movie later. I survived the movie I think. I always get worried about that in public because you never know what's going to happen with these computers but once we did these test flights, its kind of nickel and dime you know, pinging away at this problem, that trying to get a 3D mapping of ecosystems, we went operational three months ago and we are really that new and with help from DOFA and with help from the forest service, we are looking very carefully now and flying these four areas, Laupahoehoe, (indiscernible) and Hilo Forest Reserve extension which is now part of the Hawaii Experimental Tropical Forest, Puu Waawaa same deal, Lower Puna there is a set of reserves there and (indiscernible) which is just Makai east of Puu o land, is a big kind of hinterland to me, a place that I have driven past for years but never knew what was in there. So we are really working these and I am going to give you lots of examples from Laupahoehoe today. But before I do that I want to emphasize the fortune that I feel just flying around. Lot of people don't get to experience Hawaii at 7000 feet, its too high for helicopters, its too low for jetliners and you just don't feel the land unless you are at 7000 feet, if you get to fly that's the height to be at. And here is kind of a dark shot of Laupahoehoe vent. I live right outside of here and I just have never felt Hawaii Volcanoes National Park the way I see it there, Puu Waawaa it's just amazing, really. It's a tree, it's a fortune, it's inspires the stewardship that scientist might want to have more often. There is the there are kind of conical hollow grasslands as well. Is that you guys picking that up? Is it too bright, too dark? I can't tell. It's all right. This is in that same vein this is I like to pick on Google Earth because they are so powerful. And we do love them. But it's easy to pick on them because they are trying to deal with the earth. And we are trying to deal Hawaii. So here is some Laupahoehoe area. Here is the some (indiscernible) and what Google Earth shows for that area. The questions that we are asking, science questions that have a lot of management impact on Laupahoehoe as kind of my mega example today to finish this up with today. Are these questions and they are kind of detail but they have huge impacts on how things how we view what's going on and how things are done on the management side? What's basic stuff what's the structure of biomass in complexity of the forest in Laupahoehoe? How does the substrate we have such an amazing mosaic of substrate agent topography effect these properties? What are the effects of the invasive species on the structuring growth of the forest? Where are the active disturbances on the landscape? And how and where does the water flow through this forest? I challenge anyone to answer those questions and we are still challenging ourselves to answer them, but we have major insight now with the system. Here is our view of Laupahoehoe with our raw data, shedding some light on the Google Earth issue. I want to take you through a tour, let me go back, this is Mauka Makai where I just make sure everybody is oriented, you see something going on here and here and some change here, right? Which is what we were used to living with as remote sensing, mapping people, about that level of detail at best. I am going to turn this thing on its side, here is the Mauka portion and here is the Makai and then I am going to move this red box around, so you can get just a feel for the data just the raw data. This is how it comes off the airplane, ortho geo rectified ready for use. Here is an area with denser (indiscernible) moving Mauka, here is an area where there is a lot of standing dead trees, very easy to map dead trees with this just like you would in a way with air photos. Although we have Mauka to this area where it opens up, again it's very interesting to look at the topography shining through a little bit. I will show you that. Back down in to the (indiscernible) and you start to see hydrological features that if you ask any scientist that I have asked, nobody exactly knows how they are coming, how they form there. And all the way down to this boundary at the bottom of the hydrological feature where we were seeing disturbances on the landscape right above where the forest picks back picks back up. And into this kind of hydrologically complex area. And this is just amazing that you can get this the day you fly it. You can pull it off done. Well that's just the beginning. That everything I just showed you is this upper thing that I am going to skip it's a lot of technical jargon and all the pictures I have showed you about the technology. What's that has done is it gives us this hybrid data set of this chemical and structural mapping information. And then really what we are trying to do at Carnegie, the thing we are doing on top of the technology and lot of people are hearing about the Carnegie observatories this hardware. That's now turned in to the small fraction of the effort. We did all that. It took years to make reality. It puts out this stuff that may be none of you want to see, unless we are trying to develop products we count products even though we are research, we are selling anything. Products that have potential big impact in green. From the terrain, to the height of the vegetation, its shape, so that how much is live or dead. To things that have to deal with their growth rates and health, physiology, to the rate of growth, I already showed you a piece of that ahead of time, species dominance and richness, hard to do doing a fair bit of that now and Carbon storage. These are the things that my lab is working seven days a week on right now. Here it is. We have exercised most of these algorithms for better, for worse. Some are very mature. Some are very R&D. I wouldn't bank on them yet. How does substrate age and topographic position affect the structure, biomass and complexity of Laupahoehoe and here is a first very clear map of the height of every single tree in that forest reserve. The resolution of these data are one meter. And what you can see here in white are the areas where the trees are tallest, simple. Here yellow, kind of medium height of trees and I will get more into this in a second. Blue, shorter trees and there is the strange hydrological feature there that has relatively short trees very short trees. And then there is this thing up here look at that. Tall trees Mauka that's odd, it turns out that that's the tropical ash plantation that seems to have now spread itself out and I will get to that in a second. That tree height is very different and the thing that's underneath the trees, our system its so high pulse rate on the laser. If you are interested in lasers, its 100 kilohertz full wave form. We can definitely cut through and grab the topography underneath the forces as if you just lifted it off. And that's one of our forte analysis, really doing that well. Here is the map of your first view that I think anyone has ever had of the terrain underneath Laupahoehoe and here is the Mauka portion down and you see major features changing on this side. This section here are the substrates that are 65 to 250,000 years old. That's what I am circling, including that weird drainage area very dissected. This area these are substrates that are four to 14,000 years old ash flow. You will see a change in texture. I can zoom in on a piece right there and show you their true fidelity of the information. So that if you are a stream hydrologist this stuff works. Another feature of the data through that work flow I have showed you don't have to deal with biomass but has to do with the growth rates of the forest. How fast is the forest growing? It's a simple question that's I challenge anyone to really tell me in the field by field methods alone. Here is a map that we estimate forest growth rates, this is instantaneous. I don't know if this applies to forest growth rates for that day or that month or that year, but it's something between a month and a year, based on other science. And here the reds are very high growth rates, yellows medium, blue this is an area (indiscernible) I showed you those dead trees very low growth rates and something that's half dead. Here is that ash tropical ash invasion plantation/invasion and showing extremely high growth rates even at high elevation which is radically different than its surrounding. I will show this later, co-Ohia forest. It's that kind of information that we are getting. Here is the biomass that's derived from our work plus the work that comes out of the Forest Service to develop clear understanding of where the carbon stocks are. From here, high, medium to low. It looks smooch together there because I am showing you this cool Google Earth thing but I am if you were to go back to the data themselves and look at that point, it's the biomass by crown by crown by crown that has the potential to really change on how we do things in the conservation management and policy development because we can see the standing biomass of every tree crown here. This happens to be a very high Ohia biomass, here is that ash invasion extremely high, like a virus and then here is that low cascading impact, on other things like bird populations. Here is work that my post one of my post docs did, Natalie Bowman that looked across as a set of ecosystems on the Big Island and found that the ratio of native to exotic birds was extremely tied to not only what type of forest there is but and so whether its dominated by native or non native canopy but also by biomass. And that's just coming out now. Just to kind of make sure that everybody realizes that there is it cascades itself through the entire food web that way. What are the effects of an invasive species on forest structure? This is the map of the tallest trees in the reserve. I just lump them together. The vertical resolution is a half a meter or so but I lump these so you get kind of a big mosaic of what's there. And you have this biomass in the tropical ash and you have this high Ohia biomass and then you have this mix and then very low biomass here. Its kind of stretched black by accident there is there is biomass there but it's not showing up. And here is our our laser system can slice through the vegetation, can slice through the canopy. And here is just the vegetation at zero to two meters off the ground. As if you are walking through, trying to make it way through the forest. And you see here are areas of relatively high amounts of the low line vegetation here and here. In the Ohia the big we call it the valley of the Giant Ohia. So there is a kind of depression here in the Ohia are awesome buttressed, big beautiful Ohia. It has got a nursery of native and non native but still heavily native under storey plants in that layer of zero to two meters. You go up to the ash and it's nearly a desert a biological desert in that under storey. See that, its blue and that's kind of data, the imagery, the airborne stuff showing what the effects are of this over storey invader on the under storey. There isn't lot of regeneration going on in there. You can slice through, look at this bar and look at this number, we are here now, bottom of the forest, you can slice through and just take any slice. I don't know why you would care about something that's 12 to 14 meters, just that slab of vegetation but may be if you are bird - you know, I don't know. Some of this stuff is still to be explored. We get to the top of the canopy and there are your tallest trees again, this is (indiscernible), this is the ash and these are the valley of the giant Ohia as we call it. More of this you can combine layers and get an idea of areas that have a lots of layers, this is that vertical remember, for every spot on the ground we have a vertical profile, and you can say hey, where is the most complex canopy? If you care about birds they tend to be very connected to the to the 3D stratification of the forest. And here is an area we have more at least 10 layers of canopy from ground up to the tippy top of the canopy. Here are areas like I said, where the ash invasion, where there are very few layers, its very boring to walk in I think or may be to fly in from I know. But that gives you a sense for something that can be done in the future; this is extremely futuristic but operational, totally working. Just the Mauka portion of the reserve, one of the things that I told you we are working on is species dominance and canopy richness. Species dominance is important for all the reasons that we know as a scientist but in management you might really care about for the invasive species problem or for trying to maintain a a certain population of species that are critical to the management plan. This is an area in Laupahoehoe and our detection system, the chemical detection system tagged all these brown areas as ash, yellow as (indiscernible) and the brown as Ohia. You can take it further and get deep down into the details of what's the fraction of the canopies that are dominated by this in particular invasive species and you see this was the nucleus of where it was planted, here where its very high densities, yellow less but this is kind of not showing up on the screen but out here, far out, I am talking three to six hours of hiking out. You are getting pockets of small ash that are coming through and those are a lot of that's new information didn't know about and this is an opportunity, an example of an opportunity where management could be brought to bear on their invasion front rather than spending a lot of money on things that are heavily established and expensive to remove. I personally think that this is the kind of map that could you be utilized for every single spot on this ground, that preface GPS point an unmistakable GPS point can be taken out. This is old work but it is pertinent to the topic of richness and dominance. To say that in Lower Puna we have done this with just the chemical mapping and this is a graph that shows airborne species richness of the canopy versus I am sorry airborne here on the y axis first is field work which the forest service did. This was flown in just a couple of hours, run through this richness algorithm that I could explain offline, its very technical but it has to do with the chemical variation of the plants, to derive something that is various for understanding the basic richness of the forest on a per hector basis. So that's the whirlwind tour and the data products are here, some of the data products. Here is the stuff that we called rapid data product that can come out of our science work relatively fast. Some of them within hours and many of them within days and then here are the higher level products, some of the stuff I showed you that we are still working on. I think the sum of what I am trying to get at is these are all new. What I just showed you (indiscernible) doesn't exist anywhere on the planet earth that I know of. And I have a lot of connection in this world and I got to tell you this is new. We have an opportunity to utilize this, Carnegie and our (indiscernible) are putting this down as a major science capability and the question is, can we dovetail this science with the state's managing conservation efforts. That we can continue to do our science which is lightning fast, everything I just showed you was did in last eight weeks, but do it in a way that's totally connected to the management conservation. Will that facilitate more adaptive management approaches where some new regional scientific finding would change the management either locally in that particular area or may be some larger plan? I don't know, but that's the dream. The dream continues and I have this grand crazy idea that I think I got permission to show, it's just an idea looking around for the thumbs up you gave to me. Well, how we can go forward and right now and I am asked this a lot, I get phone calls and emails of excited people. And we are still in this phase that I think will last a couple of years at least, where we are developing the algorithms and we are doing our science which is what I am paid to do and what I want to do. But at the same time we are facilitating collaborated conservation in management to see how we can work together and in a very tangible, very concrete, no more words, let's just measure this stuff and utilize the data in that kind of concrete way, that is the phase I think we are in now. But I have a vision to try to transfer this and I have done this in another place with a different technology where people got so interested and knowledgeable about it that it was worth Carnegie getting out of it and reproducing the hardware, the software and what I called the people ware with the improvements that we make during this phase and to build capacity through a very clear education program that builds education in the high tech sector here for these very high-tech methods. This isn't stuff that's taught right now and if it's taught it's barely taught. And so we want to really get that going here, to build the next generation of people people ware that can take this on. And then eventually my - I would feel successful at Carnegie if the science had established itself, done great science and kind of seeded this future which isn't that far off, I am talking five, six years from now at the most. A Hawaii owned and operative program where we become we fall back as science advisors and see it happen and help improve it as it goes. But not to be a service provider because that's not what Carnegie does. We trying to kick something off that's really hard to do and really expensive, make it cheaper and make it less difficult to do and then seed this for the state. Thanks.
