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Barrientos Island	Cuverville Island	Whaler's Bay

Researchers from a terrestrial ecology group (Systems Ecology Group, Univ. of Texas-El Paso), part of the IPY-ROAM expedition, recently visited Antarctica for a large series of measurements using the PP Systems UniSpec-DC Spectral Analysis System.  The main purpose of the research was to address the question about the dependency of terrestrial ecosystems in Antarctica on the nutrient flow from the oceans.  Vegetation reflectance measurements were made at many sites including Barrientos Island, Half Moon Island, Whaler's Bay, Telefon Bay, Cuverville Island and Petermann Island.  As expected, the weather conditions were quite harsh with temperatures ranging from 0-5^o C and %RH ranging from 66-93%.  Cloud cover was more than 80% at all field sites.

During this trip, researchers were able to obtain a rapid assessment of the antarctic shore-based ecosystem based on reflectance data obtained with the UniSpec-DC.  They tried to correlate the reflectance properties of the landcover to other parameters such as vegetation cover, number of nesting penguin pairs close to the sampling site as well as other micromet data.  Thank you to Santonu Goswami (Univ. of Texas-El Paso) and his colleagues for the pictures and reports from this most beautiful place.

Click here for more information on the UniSpec-DC.