Advent Day 24: Asking the right questions (and choosing the right tools)
Dec 24, 2025
Remote sensing can be a powerful addition to the ecological toolbox, but it is not the right tool for every question. One of the most important skills ecologists can develop is knowing when remote sensing can meaningfully advance understanding, and when it does not.
For me, that decision starts with exploration grounded in both ecological and remote sensing theory. Before any formal analysis, I spend time specifying the process I am actually interested in. How is it expected to operate? At what spatial and temporal scales should it manifest? Is the signal likely to emerge through vegetation structure, phenology, disturbance, or surface properties? What remote sensing data could plausibly observe this signal? And what would a pixel or point represent biologically in this system? These questions matter more than whether a dataset is readily available or computationally convenient.
This is also where integrating ecological and remote sensing frameworks becomes particularly powerful. Some variables that are well established in remote sensing, such as tasseled cap transformations, are used less often in ecological modelling, not because they lack relevance but because they may be unfamiliar to ecologists with limited remote sensing experience. My PhD work showed that these variables can be ecologically informative for modelling bird habitat precisely because they encode gradients in structure and moisture that align with known ecological processes. Data-driven exploration can help reveal such connections, but ecological theory is what allows them to be interpreted and used meaningfully.
Remote sensing is most effective when the properties it measures align naturally with the process of interest. It excels at capturing spatial context, gradients and change through time. It struggles with fleeting, rare, or belowground processes, or with dynamics dominated by fine scale interactions, behaviour or demography. Recognizing these limits early helps avoid analyses that may be technically impressive but ecologically misaligned.
At the same time, remote sensing reshapes the kinds of questions we can ask. Instead of asking whether a process occurs at a single site, we can ask how it varies across landscapes, along climatic or elevational gradients, or across disturbance histories. Field measurements are no longer isolated observations, but anchors that help interpret broader spatial and temporal patterns. In this way, remote sensing does not replace ecological thinking—it expands the space in which that thinking operates.
Many of the challenges discussed in this series are not technical in nature. They arise at the boundaries between disciplines: between ecology and remote sensing, between field observation and modelling, between pattern and process. Working across these boundaries takes time and often collaboration. Remote sensing encourages ecologists to think at scales that are difficult to observe directly, while ecological questions push remote sensing scientists to engage more deeply with processes, mechanisms and biological meaning. Doing this well does not require everyone to become an expert in the other field, but it does require curiosity, humility and a willingness to engage seriously with unfamiliar ideas.
The question framing this series on Day 1 was “What can remote sensing do for ecologists?” A more useful version might be: What does remote sensing allow me to understand that I could not otherwise, and what assumptions am I making along the way? When those assumptions are explicit, remote sensing becomes not just a source of data, but a way of asking better ecological questions.