A group of Louisiana and Mississippi students are spending their summer break giving back to their communities. But they're aiming higher than most standard volunteer efforts.

Using NASA satellite data, they hope to come up with a better way to detect and map the hurricane-induced vulnerabilities of Mississippi's forests.

The team of five DEVELOP Program participants at NASA Stennis Space Center have written a proposal to use remote sensing information – data gathered by satellites – to find better ways to measure forest disturbances after hurricanes. They also hope to predict fire hazards and invasive species threats in timberlands on both sides of the Mississippi-Louisiana state line.

Deirdra Boley, a civil engineering major at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La.; Team Leader Lauren Childs, a geography graduate student at the University of New Orleans; Assistant Team Leader Jason Jones, geography major at University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg; and Craig Matthews and Denise Spindel, geography majors at UNO, began their project this spring. They started by brainstorming ways to meet DEVELOP's goal of extending NASA's Earth science research to the communities in their region.

DEVELOP is a student-led, student-run program that provides a framework for initiating projects to help communities. Under the guidance of science advisers from NASA and its contracting agencies, high-school and college students demonstrate to community leaders prototype applications that could help them solve local problems using NASA's rich store of remote sensing data.

Image to left: This image compiled at NASA Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss., shows satellite data 'tracks' or paths over three proposed study areas in Louisiana and Mississippi. The study, proposed by a team of DEVELOP Program students at SSC, aims to determine if this data can be used to accurately depict the extent of forest destruction in the three areas after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Credit: NASA

According to NASA's Cheri Miller, DEVELOP's Southern Regional Office coordinator, the program has grown over the past nine years "because it's effective. The students learn by doing, not just by reading or imagining. These are life lessons that complement the collegiate or academic environment. And they come up with great ideas like this foresty project. Past projects are being implemented now in places like Mobile, Ala., and Monterey County, Calif."

Assistant Team Leader Jones recalled a project that built a 3-D visualization model of a massive hurricane-associated storm surge inundating New Orleans with 27-foot floodwaters. The project was completed in mid-summer 2005.

"It was creepy to look at it again after Hurricane Katrina," Jones said. "But the team nailed it. The data was there, and they accurately predicted the floods."

Begun in 1998, DEVELOP was first conducted at SSC in 2002 with four students. Since then, it has expanded to include 28 students (many return for second and third terms) from 11 schools. Most recently, Southern University has joined the list of schools partnering with SSC to enlist students and conduct the program.

During the next calendar year, the students propose conducting their project in three phases: first, find a better way to locate and quantify the hurricane-related damage in coastal Mississippi forests; second, to improve current methods and models of damage detection; and third, to map areas vulnerable to invasive species intrusion.

"Since Katrina, Mississippi has had an astonishingly high number of burns due to excess fuel from downed trees,” Team Leader Childs said. "This project could be extremely important to this area. Our first step will be to evaluate the satellites, the instruments they carry and the kinds of data available to see which will provide what we need."

After that, the team will compare satellite imagery before and after Hurricane Katrina, reading changes in canopy heights and leaf color to see if they can build a model to accurately predict fire hazards. The team has identified potential partners in the U.S. Forestry Service, its Forestry Inventory Analysis program and DeSoto National Forest.

"Hurricanes come every year," said team science adviser, Kenton Ross of Science Systems and Applications Inc. (a contractor for NASA's Earth science research at SSC). "With so many forests and managed timber tracts in this part of the country, can you imagine the impact if we could monitor and forecast how storms affect those inventories?"

Because the proposal aligns with several of NASA's Earth science Applications of National Priority, team members hope they can parlay the project into a broader understanding of how and where hurricanes create the most forest fire fuel; how that fuel plays into the natural fire cycle and how those fires affect the nation's carbon management activities.

"NASA benefits from the students' fresh ideas, young minds and attitudes," Miller said. "The students learn about career opportunities in science, technology and public policy."