Dr. Dierssen, professor in Marine Sciences, is participating in a new NASA-funded project to conduct airborne mapping of coral reef ecology as part of the COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL). Her team will collect field data to validate the remote sensing observations collected in Hawaii, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Great Barrier Reef. For each reef, the spectral imagery will be processed to assess the distribution of coral and rates of coral primary productivity and calcification. A recent Nature article describes the project: http://www.nature.com/news/marine-ecologists-take-to-the-skies-to-study-coral-reefs-1.20004

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