The slow-moving plane gliding back and forth over Crested Butte last summer looked like it was going to fall out of the sky. The deliberate pace and low flight were intentional, however; they were a key part of a large aerial imagery campaign led by Dr. Ian Breckheimer at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL).
In 2024, RMBL was awarded a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to conduct a flyover to map the landscape surrounding RMBL. Breckheimer was given two years and $1 million to complete the work. Called the Colorado Headwaters Ecological Spectroscopy Study (CHESS), Breckheimer’s project combines field components with data collected via flyovers to elucidate climate change’s effects on landscape patterns — particularly those related to how plants use water.
Breckheimer spends his summers at RMBL as the lab’s sole staff research scientist, conducting research as a landscape ecologist. For nearly a century, RMBL has been dedicated to understanding the world around us from its home base in Gothic and now its four-season building in nearby Crested Butte. Each summer, scientists from around the world gather in Gothic to research a wide variety of subjects, including species interactions in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, surveys for climate change’s effects on high-altitude systems, and plant biology and phenology.
The 2025 campaign focused on the plants, since plants affect the hydrology of the Colorado water system: any changes in these key traits affect the entire ecosystem. The study was partially spurred by the ongoing water supply crisis in the Colorado River Basin, according to Breckheimer.
“This was a wake-up call for everybody in the Colorado River system,” he says.
One of the barriers to managing the river is forecasting flow, because an unexplained disparity exists between the snow in the mountains and the water that actually comes down. “It’s a bit of a mystery where all of that water goes,” Breckheimer explains, adding that this research would ideally lead them towards an explanation.
Drought stress from climate change is increasing, which puts more stress on trees. When trees are stressed, they can produce fewer leaves, and fewer leaves in the environment could mean more water available in the soils and streams. Mapping the leaves and their water content right now will create a key piece of historical information and a unique vantage point for how climate change has altered this ecosystem.
Breckheimer used the CHESS grant to contract with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to bring their Aerial Observation Platform to RMBL. This system integrates an imaging spectrometer and LiDAR into a small prop plane. An imaging spectrometer functions a bit like a camera, but instead of seeing red, green, and blue light, it senses over 400 different light wavelengths, from visible to shortwave infrared. At the same time, the LiDAR pings the landscape with laser beams to measure the elevation of the ground and the heights of the trees. From June 12 -July 19, 2025, Breckheimer and his team used NEON planes to fly over RMBL and its vicinity.
The spatial resolution of these instruments is unrivaled. Spatial resolution, which refers to the size of the pixel of the image on the ground, determines if you can see a blurry picture of a forest, or the individual trees that make it up. Many satellites have a resolution of tens or hundreds of meters. By putting sensors on an airplane flying close to the ground, the data from CHESS will be 1×1 meter, a very high spatial resolution indeed.
In addition to being technologically complex, the planes have an extraordinarily bumpy ride, flying over the mountains at an altitude of 2000 feet (passenger planes typically fly around 30,000-42,000 feet in the air) in parallel, tight knit lines to accurately survey the land below — hence the slow, methodical planes buzzing over Crested Butte last summer.
A large aspect of this CHESS study is the field work component. Researchers must arrive at a site within 72 hours after the airplane has flown over, aiming to collect information that closely aligns with what the planes’ cameras captured.
This means that scientists were working, and working hard, throughout the six weeks of flights. Once the plane takes flight, researchers need to quickly get into the field, collect samples, and process everything back at the lab. This research will build on a similar flight campaign done in 2018, where scientists collected data about the watersheds surrounding RMBL, using a large team of field workers and enhancing their field data using remote sensing.
According to Breckheimer, the 2018 team was essentially building an atlas of the environments around RMBL for the first time. With recent data, they can see how much change has happened over the last seven years.
“My hope is that this data set is going to be an important reference, and that a generation from now, people can go back and see how things were in the summer of 2025,” says Breckheimer.
The money for the CHESS study was allocated by Congress, then funneled through NASA to RMBL. Coincidentally, the NASA program that received that money for RMBL was working on a larger satellite study that happened to directly relate to Breckheimer’s work.
Currently, NASA is working on the Surface Biology and Geology Mission (SBG) that will launch in the early 2030s. This satellite will have a similar sensor to the NEON plane, meaning that it will be able to map ecological features and gather comparable data from space.
By working with NASA, the work from the CHESS campaign will contribute to this global database for field reference data, and will then be used to train the algorithms related to the satellite. The larger SBG project will include many different teams collecting data globally in unique environments to train the machine to monitor different ecosystems.
Part of this work for Breckheimer is trying to understand what’s in store for the next couple of decades given global shifts toward hotter and drier climates: “We’ve committed to enough warming to change the ecosystem’s functions. But we’re still not sure how vulnerable [these ecosystems] are.”
This research will provide more than just historical data: it will produce science that demonstrates how to manage forests better under drought stress. We’ve begun a steady descent into a new world with a much different climate. Breckheimer recognizes this truth, which guides his research more thoughtfully.
He says, “We need a lot of new science to determine how to live in that world well.”