I first arrived at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in August 1987. I had left my research position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, to return back East (I'm originally from Vermont) and to return to the college classroom. As a research scientist at JPL, I had devoted seven years of my life to developing earth-orbiting satellites as a means of monitoring environmental conditions, with a specific focus on assessing and monitoring air pollution effects of forest species. I had also learned just how difficult it can be to characterize ground conditions, especially vegetated (and especially forested) ground conditions, so that the ground measurements are meaningful for the purpose of assessing satellite data. New Hampshire struck me as an especially challenging place (i.e., heavily forested) to characterize on the ground conditions in an effective way. One of my first thoughts was "its going to take a lot of graduate students."
One of the great challenges to the research scientist in remote sensing is how best to get a truly representative sample of ground conditions for a given area that is meaningful at the scale of a 30 meter pixel (the minimum ground resolution point in a Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite image). Each 30 meter pixel is represented by a single reflectance value (at each of six distinct wavelengths) at which you ". . . can't see the trees." In addition to the trees, each 30 meter pixel is composed of understory vegetation, soil, and possibly bedrock, each with their own characteristic spectral reflectance properties. If there is more than one type of tree . . . , well, you get the picture. What is needed is lots of data points, each representing minor variations in supposedly similar pixels. I came to New Hampshire wanting to characterize red spruce pixels, so I needed lots of red spruce data points. Red spruce was important to me because at high elevation (on mountain tops) it was undergoing a dramatic decline across New England, supposedly in response to "acid rain" damage.
One of the first pieces of mail that I opened once I got to UNH in August 1987 was from a high school teacher in Concord, New Hampshire. Phil Browne was a biology teacher at Concord High School and had been a colleague of Christa McAuliffe when she was selected by NASA as a "Teacher in Space." Phil's letter to me noted how upset he was that Concord High students had such a poor image of NASA, and he asked me to help him change that image. Wasn't there some way that his biology students could assist me, a NASA research scientist, to do my work and in the process develop a more positive image of NASA and its role in monitoring environmental problems on planet Earth? Several phone calls (and a visit) convinced me that Phil was very serious about getting his students involved in my research effort. I decided to give some serious thought to how I could include them in "ground truth" activities that could provide me with useful data for the purpose of assessing both the state of health and the frequency of occurrence of red spruce on selected mountain tops in New Hampshire. If I involved students from other high schools, I could cover more mountain tops.
After several discussions and years of planning by Phil and me, the red spruce student monitoring project was ready for presentation as a teacher training activity in 1991. It was decided that all schools should make their forest stand measurements at about the same time of year and that all students would follow standard field research protocols in measuring the canopy height, trunk diameter, canopy closure, and ground cover type. Since most high schools study vegetation topics in the spring semester, it seemed that the spruce project should be conducted on or around Earth Day. After one year of operation, participating teachers had high praise for the project but some misgivings about monitoring red spruce on or around Earth Day. Since red spruce occurs mostly at elevations above 900 meters, field sites are likely to still be covered in snow at the end of April. Given the cost of hiring buses, the difficulty of arranging a full-day field trip, and slippery, snow-covered trails, the one-time field effort was becoming a burden to teachers.
In the "lessons learned" follow-on workshop that was held in fall 1991, teachers asked if there wouldn't be other types of trees that could also be measured by students in much the same way they had measured red spruce. My answer was a definite "yes!" The university had just been awarded a large, three-year National Park Service grant to study the effects of ozone (low-level, tropospheric ozone—a form of air pollutant) on a wide range of forest species (both canopy and understory species). White pine was one of the species to be studied, and I had a new graduate student (Arnold Theisen) who was going to look at the spectral response of white pine to controlled exposures of ozone. While Arnie was monitoring the white pines in open-topped, controlled-exposure chambers, characterizing ozone damage symptoms, students from middle schools and high schools around the state could be looking for those symptoms, along with measuring and monitoring white pine pixels growing right outside their classrooms. Since the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services measures ozone levels during summer months at seven (13 in 1996) cities and towns where Forest Watch schools are found, an effective network of schools, monitoring stations, and research interests have come together. Forest Watch has evolved into a successful SSP, in part because I needed data and in part because I was asked.