NASA BigFoot Project: Ground Validation Data for MODIS Carbon Products, 1999-2004

NASA's BigFoot Project collected multi-year, in-situ field measurements from 1999 to 2003 at nine sites across North and South America to validate MODIS satellite products. The data includes FPAR, nitrogen content, LAI, tree biomass, soil respiration, and NPP, characterizing areas up to 49 square kilometers around CO2 flux towers. This project was funded by NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program to assess the spatial and temporal patterns of ecosystem properties.

Use Cases

• Validating satellite-derived land cover and Leaf Area Index (LAI) products based on ground vegetation inventories.
• Modeling Net Primary Production (NPP) and Gross Primary Production (GPP) based on field measurements of biomass and soil respiration.
• Analyzing inter-annual variability in ecosystem characteristics across distinct biomes like Arctic tundra and tropical forests.
• Calibrating ecosystem process models like Biome-BGC using site-level ecophysical parameters and meteorological data.

Strengths

• Covers nine distinct biome types, including Arctic tundra, boreal forest, and tropical evergreen broadleaf forest.
• Provides multi-year data from 1999 to 2004, allowing analysis of temporal trends.
• Combines ground measurements, high-resolution remote sensing, and process models for validation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program via the BigFoot Project.

Collection Method

Field data collection combined with Landsat ETM+ imagery and ecosystem process modeling.

Time Range

1999 to 2004

Freshness

Data collection concluded in 2004; archive freshness is unknown.

Geography

Nine EOS Land Validation Sites from Alaska to Brazil.