Multinational Effort to Map South Africa’s Biodiversity from the Air Earns NASA Award

BioSCape, a multinational research project co-led by UC Merced, the University at Buffalo and the University of Cape Town, which monitored Earth's biodiversity from the air, has received a Group Achievement Award as part of the 2024-25 NASA Honor Awards.

A new documentary also showcases the project's impressive results.

The honor is given to NASA-funded groups that contribute substantially to the agency's mission to Earth science, including climate, the sun, the solar system, and the larger universe. The BioSCape team was credited for "outstanding achievements in advancing the understanding of ecosystem structure, function, and composition and their change over time."

BioSCape was NASA's first biodiversity-focused campaign. Researchers used a combination of aircraft equipped with remote sensing technology and field work to collect data about South Africa's Greater Cape Floristic Region, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

Co-led by Proessor Erin Hestir of UC Merced, Adam Wilson of the University of Buffalo and Jasper Slingsby of the University of Cape Town, the BioSCape team deployed advanced remote sensing technologies on aircraft throughout 2023.

Two NASA aircraft and one South African aircraft flew missions over the cape to collect ultraviolet, visible, thermal and other images, which can provide insights about everything from the surface temperatures of the sea to the amount of nitrogen in a forest canopy. Meanwhile, scientists gathered additional data on the ground, such as recording bird and insect calls and extracting environmental DNA from water samples.

"To understand life in the universe, we have to start with life on Earth," said Hestir, a civil and environmental engineering professor. "BioSCape is about seeing life on Earth in a completely new way, from genes to leaves to landscapes. BioSCape is a team effort to see life in all its dimensions from the air, the ground and space. This award is a reminder that discovery is something we do together."

The team is now synthesizing its data and writing studies. Since the beginning of the project, the team has published over 40 studies and scientific presentations in various journals. The data is publicly available online on the NASA website . All of the data collected is open access, meaning anyone can see and use it.

"The 283 people named on this award represent a wide range of contributions, including students who spent time in the field collecting data, engineers who built the instruments, pilots who spent weeks flying the research lines, professors who designed study components, postdocs who analyzed the observations, and data scientists who processed and archived everything," said Wilson, associate professor of geography in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "This award is a wonderful milestone that honors the dedication and persistence of everyone involved."

The researchers hope BioSCape has laid the foundation for monitoring biodiversity from even higher up - that is, from space. NASA uses some of the tools used in the project to study other planets and stars outside our solar system.

"By gathering this kind of data from a plane, we learn more about how we could do the same thing from satellites," Wilson said.

BioSCape is also the subject of a new documentary, "The Spectrum of Life," which premiered at the 2025 Buffalo International Film Festival this month and is expected to show in Merced early next year.

The 36-minute film was directed by the founders of Fishwater Films, South African ecologists and filmmakers Otto Whitehead and Jeremy Shelton, who accompanied the BioSCape team members on the ground and in the air as they conducted their research.

"Otto and Jeremy synthesized our complex science into a compelling narrative. They crafted a much larger and more captivating story about how this project resonates with the human experience and global efforts to understand our place in the universe," Wilson said. "The film really puts BioSCape in the broader context of the human experience and our connection to the fabric of life."

"What Otto and Jeremy achieved goes far beyond documenting a field campaign," Hestir said. "They captured the wonder and purpose behind the science, showing that exploring life on Earth is inseparable from exploring who we are and where we fit in the vast story of the universe."

The film premiered Oct. 10 as part of "BIFF Shorts: Climate Stories + Earth Works," which features films about "how we value, measure, monitor and conserve ecosystems around the world; as well as what's at stake on a cultural and personal level."

Patty Guerra