Botanist Big Bend National Park Big Bend National Park, Texas, United States
Non-native grass species such as Buffelgrass, Lehmann Lovegrass, and Johnsongrass have become a massive problem in recent years in Big Bend National Park, increasing fire danger, displacing native species, and threatening to convert its desert environment to grassland. To try to identify where invasive grasses are distributed throughout the park, two different models were created. Both of these models were created using Sentinel-2 imagery in Google Earth Engine and attempted to isolate when these grasses were most photosynthetically active. The models were then evaluated by ground truthing vegetation surveys and statistical analyses.
