Summary Report and Recommendations
The workshop was held at the H.J. Andrews LTER site near Blue River Oregon on May 21 and 22 with support from the LTER Network Office. Twenty people attended, including participants from Brazil, Hungary and Korea. The workshop was intended to promote data exchange between the remote sensing community -- which has begun to produce global land cover, leaf area index, and net primary production products -- and the field sites where relevant validation data is being produced. Specifically, the workshop was aimed at fostering participation of a variety of field sites in the LTER sponsored NPP Demonstration Project. The more general context was the evolution of the Global Terrestrial Observing System which will ultimately provide policy makers with assessments of status and trends for variables such as global NPP.
Initially, a review of the 1 km resolution gross primary production and net primary production products from the satellite-borne MODIS sensor was given. There followed a series of site reports from locations where NPP data layers, with potential to serve in a validation capacity, are being generated. The biomes represented included the arctic tundra, boreal forest, temperate deciduous forest, temperate conifer forest, cropland, and tropical moist forest. The minimum requirement for participation in the NPP Demo Project is a well-georeferenced, 3 x 3 km, NPP data layer, and a number of valid approaches to developing these data layers were reported.
After the site reports, a session was devoted to data transfer from the remote sensing community to the sites. At present, near real time MODIS data is available on the Internet in the form of 1100 x 1100 km "tiles" from the EROS Data Center. For sites which participate in the NPP Demo Project, it is planned that regular 11 x 11 km cutouts of selected MODIS products will be provided beginning summer 2001 by the ORNL DAAC. Potential applications of the MODIS products include regional estimation of wood or crop production, tracking of drought effects, and evaluation of snow cover.
Recommendations
The workshop concluded with a discussion of how to promote wider participation in the NPP Demonstration Project. Recommendations include: 1) developing and distributing specific instructions for participation, 2) getting several sample NPP data layers in the preferred format on the NPP Demo Project web site now (this will be done for some of the BigFoot sites), 3) encouraging GTOS to provide an ETM+ scene to participating sites on request so that a land cover map could be readily generated, 4) encouraging the collection of the 250 m resolution MODIS products for the NPP Demo Project sites, 5) encouraging continued support for the NPP Demo Project, perhaps with involvement of FAO and/or the ORNL Mercury System for database management, 6) planning a workshop for early 2002 to do an assessment of the first year of MODIS NPPs, and 7) continuing support for sites and projects involved in the development of the validation data sets.
Contacts: David Turner (david.turner@orst.edu), John VandeCastle (jvc@LTERnet.edu)