A specialized plane from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) flew over the rainforests of Panama and Costa Rica last February to create an “algorithm” that will help “better understand tropical ecosystems through remote satellite sensors in the future.”
The Smithsonian Institute of Tropical Research (STRI) in Panama reported on Tuesday that the NASA plane arrived in the canal country “to acquire aerial images that will inform scientists about the diversity of tropical ecosystems.”
Thus, the research entity took the opportunity to “collect similar data from the ground,” all in order to “create an algorithm to better understand tropical ecosystems through remote satellite sensors in the future.”
“Tropical forests are tremendously diverse in their composition of species and structure (…) Data from remote satellite sensors has already greatly increased our understanding of large-scale patterns in tropical forests, but extrapolating from the small sample for which we have field data is problematic,” said Helene Muller-Landau, an STRI scientist and one of the campaign leaders.
The NASA plane flew over “the forest and the tropical ocean, capturing pixels of colors invisible to the human eye with a specialized camera” while on the ground, scientists collected “canosy leaves corresponding to those pixels, which represent vegetation of different ecosystems such as mangroves, mountain forests and tropical dry forests,” the STRI highlights in its statement.
The AVUELO campaign, led by NASA, was carried out in February 2025 in Panama and Costa Rica, to acquire land and air data and thus “understand the unique characteristics of tropical vegetation and the ocean to create a mathematical formula, an algorithm, using real data collected both on the ground and in the air.”
This algorithm “will be used by remote spatial sensors to improve our understanding of tropical forests and oceanic ecosystems around the world,” according to official information.
“(The results of this project) have the potential to provide a large amount of new data on the geographical variation in the functional and taxonomic composition of tropical forests,” Muller-Landau added.
During the campaign, the ground team managed to collect 941 leaf samples from 456 plant species, covering 307 genera and 96 families, while the plane accumulated 64 flight hours and the spectrometer collected 20 terabytes of data, according to the STRI.
The campaign was carried out in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research and the Costa Rican Fishing Federation (FECOP), with additional contributions from several scientists and different institutions, under the coordination of the Panamanian scientist of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Erika Podest, according to official information.