Pollinator Research Takes to the Skies with NASA Grant

As a North Carolina Space Grant Graduate Research Fellow, Gwen Kirschke is shooting for the stars — but not in the way you might think. 

At the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Crested Butte, Colorado, Kirschke, a doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in geospatial analytics at NC State University, is pairing traditional boots-on-the-ground pollinator monitoring methods with aerial imagery captured by the U.S National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Airborne Observation Platform. Her goal is to create a floral resources map of the East River valley in Colorado and determine if it can accurately predict ecological factors such as the nesting rates of bees. 

This fellowship is awarded to graduate students conducting research in STEM fields related to NASA Mission Directorates. Kirschke’s project represents NASA Science, which “seeks to discover the secrets of the universe … and protect and improve life on Earth and in space.” 

The 2025 field season was Kirschke’s sixth visit to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. She previously studied floral nectar production as an undergraduate student and later worked as a research technician on related pollinator projects. Kirschke’s interest in geospatial analytics and pollination pairs perfectly with the interests of her advisor, Applied Ecology Associate Professor Elsa Youngsteadt, who studies plant-insect interactions on a landscape level. 

“I’m thrilled that Gwen has been able to bring this project to the lab,” Youngsteadt says. “First, as an ecologist who studies flying insects by walking around on foot, I’ve always felt like I’m missing the real context of what resources a flying bee could perceive and access. Gwen’s project is a really exciting step toward getting those continuous, landscape-scale floral data that can really cover entire foraging ranges of individual bees.” 

Thanks to the Space Grant, Gwen was able to scale up the project and bring several researchers with her to RMBL to help collect data. “This was a huge benefit to the dataset, and also to all of us who hadn’t previously been to this amazing field site, or been part of a ground-truthing campaign before.” 

Immediately after a NEON aerial imaging flight, Kirschke and a team of NC State research technicians recorded the vegetation composition as well as the floral abundance and diversity of quadrats within the flight area–as well as metrics of pollen and nectar production for each flowering species. Data collection was a huge undertaking, with 480 quadrats surveyed between 8 sites.

“The overall premise of making my map is that by taking a subset of information from the hundreds of quadrats sampled and matching them to a specific pixel of aerial imagery, I can create training data to put into a model,” Kirschke explains. The model should be able to accurately predict vegetation and floral resources of unsampled, imaged areas. 

Pollen and nectar samples collected from flowers at each site combined with other floral resource data will be used to scale the numbers of flowers predicted at a location into the total amount of food a foraging bee might find there.

“This data and the resulting maps will provide valuable insights into the floral landscapes utilized by bees, and will open up many possibilities of using remote sensing to understand foraging patterns of bee communities,” April Sharp says, an Applied Ecology graduate student and research technician for the project. 

Throughout the summer, Kirschke and her team also monitored the nesting rate of solitary, cavity-nesting bees by counting bee nest cells twice per week. They collected pollen samples from nests and compared them to field samples to learn which species of flowers are being visited by female bees. 

“I want to know, once I make the resource map, whether it can predict biologically relevant things about local pollinator populations, such as bee nesting rates,” Kirschke shares.

This collaborative project will help scientists to see the bigger picture.

“Ecologists, particularly at long-term research stations such as the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, have a lot of information about plants and their pollinators. For example, for over 40 years, scientists have monitored the timing of flowering in quadrats at RMBL, and collected long-term bee data from those sites.

“But all of those data come from specific locations in the broader landscape that bees navigate. By scaling up the information we already have using aerial imagery, we can understand how flowers are arranged in space. Then we’re able to learn things such as the challenges bees face in finding the food they need to raise their offspring.”

Back at NC State for the fall semester, Kirschke is continuing her research project through data entry, pollen analysis and modeling. She also remains focused on exploring how to use GIS maps and aerial imagery to study the relationship between drought and floral resources in North Carolina. 

With abundant possibilities, Kirschke hopes her maps can assist other researchers studying the natural world.

This post was originally published in Department of Applied Ecology.