This summer, Dr. Ian Breckheimer has been busy with CHESS — not the game but the Colorado Headwaters Ecological Spectroscopy Study, a project funded by NASA with help from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. It combines new remote sensing technology with field measurements to understand how plants and ecosystems in the upper Gunnison Basin are responding to drought and climate change. But more than their responses, scientists want to know the consequences. 

Ultimately, the team is looking for how landscape changes will impact the water available for the Colorado River system, essentially the water faucet for the western U.S. Given that the Colorado River is in the worst drought period in 800 years, the study is critical. 

Scientists expect that merging field data with remote imaging spectroscopy could create a sea change in our understanding of the Colorado River’s source of water. Certainly, snowmelt is a dominant factor. But it’s not that simple. There have been years (like 2025) when scientists expected a much higher amount of runoff than occurred. So the ultimate scientific question is where’s the water going? 

Dr. Breckheimer says that we’re good at measuring water in the snow, but not so good at tracking the water through the ecosystem on its way to the river. CHESS aims to measure the traits that affect how plants use water. This will help us better understand how much water from snowpack ends up in the ecosystem and back into the atmosphere instead of moving into streams. 

Airborne imaging spectroscopy offers scientists a highly detailed picture of plant properties. Our eyes see shades of green. But an imaging spectrometer can capture hundreds of different wavelengths of light, and how a plant reflects those lights reveals its species, level of stress, leaf thickness, nitrogen level, and more. 

Coordinating with the crew operating the airplane-based spectrometer, an army of field researchers fanned out across the landscape around RMBL, collecting hundreds of field samples of plants with different amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon and water. AI tools will match field and spectrometer measurements to corroborate airborne and ground-based data. 

CHESS is an enlightened partnership. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provided the plane and spectrometer. NASA supplied the funding and expertise to interpret the spectrometer data, and RMBL and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provided the field team and its measurements. As primary investigator, Dr. Breckheimer helped to orchestrate the whole operation. 

-Article written by RMBL contributor, Carol St. George 

Photo: Sophia Todorov – The CHESS team with Ian Breckheimer and “Bruce” the drone, that support the NASA-funded project collecting field measurements and samples that will be linked to hyperspectral remote sensing data from an airborne platform.