Plane to Spy on Beetles Eating Alaska Forest

Jon Little
Anchorage Daily News

August 8, 2001

The U2, a high-altitude spy plane made famous when one was shot down
over the Soviet Union in 1960, will conduct reconnaissance over the
Nikiski forest in Alaska late this summer.

But instead of prowling for Communist missile sites, the mission is to track a far more insidious foe: spruce bark beetles.

Hyperspectral cameras aboard the plane, which see on ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths beyond what the eye can see, will produce images of a 60-square-mile (155-square-kilometer) swath of the mixed birch and spruce forest just north of Kenai, Alaska.

The hope is that infrared energy captured on film will allow experts not only to discern dead and live forest but to actually pick out strands that are in danger.

Experts will spot trees still alive but stressed out by the gnawing bugs, said Marvin Rude, head of mapping for the Kenai Peninsula's spruce bark beetle mitigation project.

It's a U.S. $271,000 experiment, one of eight in Alaska funded by a special $3.5 million congressionally mandated U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant.

Rude selected the area north of Kenai because its rolling hills and boggy tundra contain a mixture of birch and spruce trees. It's also on the road system, so information collected from the plane can be matched against ground observations.

The old spy plane, flying at 30,000 feet (9,000 meters) after taking off from Anchorage, will shoot pictures with a relatively blurry 10-meter (33-foot) resolution. That means a single pixel, or point of color on a photo, can discern something the size of an individual rooftop.

The test will also involve another set of images, these taken by a passing satellite. While the satellite camera has a one-meter (three-foot) resolution, which can single out individual trees, it is limited to pictures in the band of light visible to the human eye.

Rude said he doesn't know which technology will work best. But if he can come up with a system that quickly tracks beetle migration, he said, he would like to use it elsewhere.

The swarming beetles can mow through stretches of timber so fast that it has been tough for mappers to keep up with them, he said. "What you see today isn't necessarily what's going to be there tomorrow," he said.

Entomologists say the infestation, which has wracked 1.4 million acres (570,000 hectares) of spruce forest on the Kenai Peninsula, appears to be winding down because the bugs' prime targets, old growth spruce trees, are mostly dead.

Copyright 2001 Anchorage Daily News