How to see trees and plants in a whole new light

The trees, it turns out, are a helpful way to explain a smart new technology that he and several researchers at Aalto University are now seeking to exploit. It’s called hyperspectral imaging, and it relies on analysing light to reveal things about trees, plants, and agricultural crops that would otherwise be invisible.

To explain, Westerlund gestures at the pines and other evergreens surrounding him. When you look at a tree or a plant from a distance, he says, how do you know if it’s healthy or not? ‘Looking at these trees from the outside, you cannot necessarily tell with your eyes if the tree has been attacked,’ he says. 

In northern Europe, foresters are reckoning with hidden invaders that infect trees: a fungus that causes rot and pests like the bark beetle are becoming more common under climate change. Such infiltrators spread from tree to tree, often hidden within the trunk and roots until it’s too late. In Finland, tens of millions of euros are lost to the damage each year.

Knowing whether or not plants are thriving is also a challenge in agriculture, Westerlund explains. He asks you to imagine you’re a farmer running a commercial greenhouse: ‘Are you using too much fertiliser or too little? Is there enough CO₂ available? Do you have too much lighting or not enough? Do you have a pest problem, or are you applying too much pesticide? Are you providing enough water or not enough?’ 

Experienced growers can find answers by examining their plants up close, but in large-scale farming it’s necessary to monitor enormous fields of crops from a distance. Keeping one plant healthy is doable, but hundreds of thousands at once? That’s a bigger challenge.

That’s where hyperspectral imaging comes in – allowing foresters and farmers alike to monitor vegetation from a distance, revealing details that might otherwise go unnoticed.

So what is hyperspectral technology, and how does it work? To answer that, you first need to know a bit about the nature of light and how cameras see it.

Hidden light

When you take a picture – say, a selfie – a sensor inside your phone camera analyses the light that scatters off your face. To construct a picture, it assigns each pixel a mixture of the colours red, green and blue. This is similar to how our eyes work. But through this process, a great deal of information about the light is lost. 

When light hits a hyperspectral camera, it is analysed into far more than three colours per pixel. The camera records the ‘spectral signature’ of the light from each point in a scene, taking in much more information about its wavelength and intensity than a standard camera and making measurements across a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It sees things that even our eyes cannot.

The view from above

At Aalto University, one research team is finding that hyperspectral imaging can be an excellent tool to monitor and understand forests and peatlands – and they’re doing so by peering down at the Earth with cameras in space.

Miina Rautiainen and her colleagues in the Remote Sensing Research Team at the Department for Built Environment are turning to hyperspectral cameras mounted on satellites – and occasionally planes – to help them model the character of forests and peatlands from up high. 

When combined with field observations, this remotely-collated data is helping Rautiainen’s team build enhanced computational models of the vegetation in three dimensions. In a forest, that means everything from the leaves at the treetops down to the shrubs on the forest floor – as well as how the 3D structure differs over a region. 

This is helpful to know for many reasons. The team’s modelling can help predict biodiversity, as well as the productivity of the vegetation and its ability to suck up carbon from the atmosphere. ‘That’s something that’s very, very interesting at the moment in terms of trying to understand climate change,’ says Rautiainen. 

The three-dimensional modelling of the forest can also predict its radiation regime – essentially, how it absorbs and reflects the sun’s radiation.‘I​f we want to forecast future climate scenarios, having a realistic description of the vegetation’s shape or 3D form is important,’ she says.

What makes hyperspectral cameras on satellites and planes so useful is that they can reveal things about forests and peatland that would be difficult to monitor in-person. ‘The biggest strength is that we get spatially continuous coverage of the environment,’ says Rautiainen. ‘With satellite data, we get to cover areas where we don't have observation networks or where it's politically impossible to go for fieldwork. Or sometimes it's just that the regions are so remote: there are no roads, no rivers that we could use to get there.’ 

Satellites also pass over regions regularly, providing continual updates on changes over time. ‘We can, for example, follow the growing season of vegetation in much more detail than what we would be able to do if we were on the ground doing some fieldwork,’ she says. 

Rautiainen relishes getting out into the field – indeed, she and her team recently used laser scanners and other tools to measure the physical structures of trees and vegetation up close, and they were shadowed by photographer Sheung Yiu for a project called Ground Truth. Combining field observations with remote sensing data helps them ensure their modelling is closer to reality. Though it’s sadly not possible to spend time beneath the canopies all year round, by peering down from satellites and planes, she can at least stay connected to the forest without leaving her office.