Applied Users

The Pacific islands offer an ideal laboratory for the study of human-environmental interaction. Satellite and airborne NASA technologies offer tools that can provide unprecedented insights into this relationship. Archaeologists examine the material left by past societies; using airborne and satellite remote sensing technologies, landscapes altered by human activities offer enormously informative material evidence that is often linked directly to environmental processes and change. We seek to apply these technologies to not only refine the chronology and pattern of human occupation of the islands of Micronesia, but to better understand how environmental change drove migration, conflict, and alliances in the region throughout the past several millennia.

We will use fine-scale, high-resolution topographic maps derived from airborne  LiDAR to reveal archaeological landscapes on the Micronesian islands of Pohnpei and Yap; use optical (Landsat) and radar (Sentinel-1) imagery to assess the ongoing environmental impacts of a changing climate including sedimentation of coastal waters  on those islands; combine multispectral (Sentinel-2) and satellite altimetry (ICESat-2) data to generate regional- and island-scale bathymetric maps to better understand the environmental factors that influenced the selection of coastal locations for  political, ritual, and economic centers and further assess environmental changes there; and use airborne LiDAR data and field observations to determine whether topographic profiles from  NASA’s  satellite  laser  altimeters  (Global  Ecosystem  Dynamics  Investigation or GEDI, and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2 or ICESat-2) can be used for archaeological discovery in heavily vegetated environments.