Earlier this winter, Center for Limnology graduate student, Sophia Skoglund, stepped up to a scaled-down version of NASA’s “Hyperwall” presentation screen in a cavernous room of the New Orleans Convention Center. Skoglund was there to tell attendees of the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference about her work bringing satellite data down to earth – or, more accurately, to our lakes.
Skoglund was one of the grand prize winners of AGU’s Freilich Student Visualization Competition for her work translating and explaining a her work with high-resolution cameras on satellites as a way to better document and understand what’s going on in lakes at a global scale. Dubbed “LakeView” the project is covered in a past edition of the CFL newsletter.
The Freilich Award is given to students who have shown skills at finding ways to display their data that help better communicate their science. While a lot of presentations at AGU are held in rooms designated for specific areas of study, Skoglund had to give her talk in an areas frequented by researchers from all sorts of scientific backgrounds. “The presentation was a cool part of the award,” she says, “the challenge in this was that anyone at the conference could show up, so I had to think about that. I wasn’t just going to talk to limnologists and other people with relevant backgrounds.”
Skoglund says she was honored to receive the award and also proud of her ability to wrangle complex data into accessible and informative graphics. Her data came from hyperspectral imaging equipment mounted to a Wisconsin DNR plane that did overflights of Lake Mendota. It was a test run of the technology. While the plane was overhead snapping pictures, Skoglund was out on a boat getting real-time data of conditions on the lake.
Analysis of the resulting images was “nuanced, and it was sometimes difficult to understand what the computer was doing behind the scenes,” she says, “but I was able to plot my data in a way that really highlighted the benefits of this work.”
One of those benefits, she says, was the fact that the data from her study was able to get at a more ecosystem -level understanding of what’s going on in a lake at a given time.
“A lot of papers are specific to one lake or one point in a lake or a single moment in time but, other than the people who live and work and care about that waterbody, it’s hard to then know how that study applies to other lakes. This work helps researchers better understand the bigger picture,” Skoglund says.
