Scientists who study the Earth from space are converging on Bowling Green State University, as a part of a $320,000 National Science Foundation grant, to learn the latest in remote sensing techniques.

“The whole purpose is to bring in undergraduate and graduate students for remote sensing, especially students of color,” Anita Simic-Milas, Ph.D., said. “NASA and other government agencies that are providers of the remote sensing data collecting huge amounts of data, and they don’t have enough students and enough professionals to use this data.”

Remote sensing utilizes satellite and airborne data detected with cameras through the reflected and emitted radiation of physical characteristics of the Earth. Simic has pioneered the use of drones for this purpose, but she also uses Landsat satellites and large aircraft, mostly from NASA sources.

Her research is concentrated vegetation science, both forest and agriculture, hydrology and water quality. She has been the editor of the Drones section of International Journal of Remote Sensing since 2018.

The students will take part in the Integrating Spatial Literacy into Geoscience: Bridging the gap between education and workforce in the United States workshop, which is part of the annual SPLITGeoscience Professional School. The workshop is part of the recent NSF grant Simic-Milas won to support the promotion of the field.

She said that the students have the potential to go into a wide array of fields outside of teaching, such as mineral research, farming and water research.

The week-long program has speakers from NASA, the United States Geological Survey, the University of Louisiana Lafayette and Idaho State University. Workshop topics include remote sensing for disaster response, machine learning in remote sensing and applications of geospatial technology in grasslands and croplands.

“I will help them find internships, so they can maybe have a job with a company, government, another university, or our university, so that they are ready for the marketplace,” Simic-Milas said.

The workshop is just one of the SPLITGeoscience programs taking place around the world. There is also a monthly luncheon study event, as well as a similar workshop program in Europe for the past seven years.

“Over there I don’t have any funding, so I charge students, but in Europe the distances are shorter, with cheaper flights and other travel,” she said.

Simic-Milas emphasized that the NSF funding is for the attraction of the new researchers to the field. She said that just with her research on water and vegetation in Northwest Ohio there are massive amounts of data collected every eight days, when the two Landsat satellites pass over the area.

“I’m not sure how much data, terabytes of daily. We have so many satellites going around collecting data all the time,” she said. “Just one satellite, with open-source data, that flies over Bowling Green every 16 days.

“That’s just one, the Landsat, then NASA and the USGS, collaborate with the European Space Agency, they have a whole series of satellites, which alternates between the two Landsat satellites,” Simic-Milas said.

She uses that data in conjunction with additional information she captures with drones.

“My dataset is in gigabytes, for just one snapshot, and there are not enough professionals who know what to do and how to do the data analysis,” she said.

The website with more information on lectures and other events can be found at: https://splitgeoscience.com/workshop/.