A conversation with Chad Frost from NASA and Susan De La Cruz from the USGS. This is the second episode of a mini-series about NASA and USGS collaboration. In this episode they focus on tracking wildlife and what that information can tell us about the social networks between animals.

For more on Next Generation Wildlife Tracking visit:https://www.usgs.gov/news/usgs-and-nasa-team-help-scientists-study-social-networks-wildlife

Transcript:

Host 1 (Matthew Buffington):You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley episode 79. Today we are continuing our collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, the USGS with a series of podcast episodes highlighting our work together. As we mentioned last week, the USGS center here in Silicon Valley is moving from Menlo Park to our very own backyard on Moffett Field, right next to Mountain View, California.

In this episode, we are talking about how NASA and the USGS are working together on tracking wildlife and what that information can tell us about the social networks between animals. From Orbit to Core, both NASA and the USGS are taking in numerous data points to better understand our favorite planet.

Our guests are Chad Frost, our deputy director for Engineering here at Ames and recent guest on a NASA in Silicon Valley Live episode on Space video games that you can find on Twitch.TV/NASA.

We also have Susan De La Cruz, a Research Wildlife Biologist at the USGS.

As reminder, we are a NASA podcast, but we are not the only NASA podcast. You can check them all out on NASA Casts, which combines all of the NASA podcasts into a single rss feed that you can find on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Soundcloud, or just plug the rss feed into any podcast app of your choice.

You can even go to NASA.gov to find transcripts or listen to all of the episodes. In fact, you should head over to the page this week to find a link to a USGS story about how we are working together. I find it easiest to just do an internet search for NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast, and it should be the first hit.

But without further ado, here are Chad Frost and Susan De La Cruz.

Host 1: So, we always start these out the same way, get to know our guests a little bit more, like how’d you get to NASA, how’d you get to Silicon Valley? Slightly different with Chad, because for folks who are fans, who have listened, we’ve had Chad on before, but not as an official guest, but asking questions from our callers-in, from people who called into the show. Yeah, we have Susan and Chad over here. But Chad, tell us a little bit about the normal questions — how did you join NASA, how’d you get into Silicon Valley?

Chad Frost:Oh boy, that goes back. Technically, I was here before Silicon Valley, because I am a San Francisco native.

Abby Tabor (Host 2):Before it was hip.

Chad Frost:Before it was hip. Actually, it was hip at the time.

Susan De La Cruz:It was always hip.

Chad Frost:It was the summer of love.

Host 1:Not too hip. Too hip. Government show.

Chad Frost:And I haven’t been here all that time, but a lot of it. So for me, coming to Ames Research Center was really coming back to my roots. I wasn’t living here at the time, but I found my way back as a graduate student, working for the Army, and mostly working on helicopter stuff, as a matter of fact. And one thing leads to another, as it often does, and I found myself hired here into NASA, and have spent the rest of my career working on autonomous vehicles and robotics and space vehicles and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Host 1:Seems a bit of a jump, of just working for the Army on helicopter stuff. I feel like there’s a couple of jumps in there. Were you always into engineering and science, as a kid, that landed you into that stuff?

Chad Frost:Oh, yeah. So, the canonical story I always tell is, as a little kid we lived in a small town up in the Sierras. And a news helicopter landed on the school field, which was probably the event of the year for us, for the whole town. And the pilot of the news helicopter in retrospect took a lot of time out for a silly little kid and let me ask tons of dumb questions, climb in the cockpit, fiddle with the stick. And he answered all my questions. He told me all about helicopters. And he followed up by sending me an FAA book on how helicopters fly, which for a 10 year old kid was huge.

And that singular event probably set my career in motion. It took me a while to find my way into doing helicopter flight research, but that’s what I did. Helicopters fly, sometimes they have people in them, sometime they’re autonomous, so I ended up working on all kinds of autonomous vehicles as well. And that led me into a whole new phase of my career, where I wasn’t just doing piloted helicopters, I was doing all sorts of unmanned flying things. And that led me into managing more of those kinds of programs. One thing leads to another, next thing you know you’re doing something totally different, and not what you expected at all.

Host 1:It keeps it exciting.

Chad Frost:It does keep it exciting.

Host 1:Susan, how about you? How did you end up in Silicon Valley, but then also how did you end up working with Chad?

Susan De La Cruz:Well, I’m actually a biologist in Silicon Valley. My office is up in the north end of the Bay, but I grew up around here. I grew up in Livermore. And Livermore was a lot different when I grew up — it was a while back. There was a lot more open space, and I was outside a lot of the time. I was very into animals, so whatever pet my parents would let me have, I had, and it culminated in a horse, which I worked very hard for, but I did get out and ride a lot. So, I was able to really be out in open spaces, and looking at animals and trying to figure things out.

And I ended up going to UC Davis and wanting to do veterinary work, which a lot of people going to UC Davis want to do. But once I got there, I started taking wildlife classes, and I think that’s where it really all came together. So, I just started pursuing that path, and that led to years of graduate school in various wildlife and ecology fields, and then back to the Bay Area for work on migratory birds.

Chad Frost:Birds are a long way from horses.

Susan De La Cruz:Yeah.

Host 1:That’s the funny thing about veterinarians. It’s like, when you’re a doctor, they study humans, but it seems like veterinarians, we’re going to let you study everything. How did that work?

Susan De La Cruz:They actually, they really do specialize. I work with a lot of vets now, and I work with a reptile vet and horse vets and bird vets. Yeah, there is a lot of specialization there too. But yeah.

Host 2: So, Susan works on birds and Chad works on helicopters?

Chad Frost:Well, once upon a time.

Host 2: Okay, so you’re both into things that fly.

Chad Frost:Things that fly are cool.

Host 2: They are cool. So, what is the connection between you two?

Chad Frost:That’s a long story, but that’s why we’re here. Okay, I’m going to tell the condor story. I was just telling this to Susan.

Host 1:I was warned about a condor story before coming in.

Chad Frost:This actually goes back several years. I was hiking with my family at a park called Pinnacles National Monument, which is about 100 miles south of here. And it turns out that Pinnacles Monument is part of the California condor range. And California condors are these absolutely huge, amazing, very endangered birds. There’s not very many of them. And so, they try and keep track of where they are and what they’re doing.

So I’m hiking up this ridgeline with my family, and I see somebody standing there with this crazy-looking antenna that they’re waving around in the air, and a set of big headphones on their head. What is that person doing? And I thought okay, maybe they’re trying to track wildlife. I talked to them. Sure enough, they’re trying to track the condors.

And the more I talked to them, the more unbelieving I was, because what they were using to try and track all these amazing birds was really old-school technology — this great big antenna, a backpack full of radio gear, and a headset. They’re trying to track this radio transmitter on the condor’s wing by waving the antenna around and listening to the beeps, trying to get the beeps as strong as they can by waving this antenna in the right general direction.

And of course, one of these signals isn’t enough. That just tells you the approximate direction and about how far away, roughly. So, you need several measurements from widely different places to triangulate where the bird is. So, it’s not the most efficient or effective way to do this, but this is how they’ve been doing it for years and years, decades.

Susan De La Cruz:Since the ’50s.

Chad Frost:Since the ’50s. So I thought at the time, there’s got to be a better way. The technology we use throughout our work at NASA is much more advanced than that. How come they’re not using modern technology to do this job? I got home from that trip and scribbled some notes in a notebook and put it on the shelf, and that was the end of that, off to my day job.

Until a few years later, we were having a meeting with our USGS colleagues over in Menlo Park — there’s a workshop every year. And we got talking with folks about trying to track birds. And my recollection of this condor experience popped my notebook off the shelf. I said, I think there’s something we could help you with. And that led to talking with Susan and her colleagues, and we found out a lot more about what they were doing.

Susan De La Cruz:Yeah. I was one of those people that used to go around with a big antenna, trying to track birds. And one of my first jobs in the Bay Area was tracking black crown night herons, which is a bird that nests on Alcatraz. And we were following juvenile birds, and we had a big old truck with a giant antenna on it, and we would drive around the Bay Area and we’d go into San Francisco and try to get the signal from the birds, and it was bouncing off the buildings and everything else. And people would stop us and ask, what is that truck, what’s that antenna on the truck? Are you the FCC, or are you put of a study?

Chad Frost:Do I need to go get my tinfoil hat now?

Host 1:You are in the Bay Area.

Susan De La Cruz:It was crazy. And telemetry has definitely progressed since then. There’s a lot more using satellite transmitters and things like that. But part of our frustration has been with using transmitters that we can’t track the species we want to track, because the transmitters are too big, or they don’t have the capabilities, the sensors, that we’re interested in to learn more about the environment around the birds. So, this meeting up with Chad and his group was this, the possibilities suddenly opened wide, so we were really excited.

Host 1:For folks who may not be familiar, is tracking these birds primarily a conservation effort, or is there something else you’re trying to figure out there?

Susan De La Cruz:We track birds for a lot of reasons. Primarily, we’re looking to try to identify what habitats they’re using and when they’re using them. And then ultimately, that can translate into conservation efforts. So, you use that information to plan perhaps where you’re going to put some kind of infrastructure so it doesn’t interfere with the birds, or you use that information to understand more about an endangered species and the type of habitat they need. And so, that’s why it’s pretty universal across wildlife studies to use telemetry, and not just for birds but for all different species.

Host 2: What kind of factors did you need the sensors to detect? Like, temperature, things like that?

Susan De La Cruz:We’re looking at a lot of things, but a lot of transmitters now will detect things like movement of the animal or internal temperature, depending on the type of transmitter. But, not so much sensing the environment around the birds, the external temperature, any kind of sounds or even visual — I guess that might be something that’s more in the future.

But, different chemicals they might be responding to, and even things like there’s a sensor in development now to look at dimethyl sulfide, which is a chemical cue from the ocean that sea birds use to figure out where to forage. That’s another project that’s going on with NASA and USGS and UC Davis.

Chad Frost:We started out talking with Susan and her team about just addressing the basic question of, where do the birds go? And some of these are migratory birds, they go off for thousands of miles for months at a time. And you hope the bird comes back, you get the data, but that’s not guaranteed. And so we wanted to find a way to get that kind of information on a continuous basis, over a large area, over a long period of time.

But what came out of some of our conversations was this notion that the birds are going places that there’s things happening in the environment there that we don’t necessarily have much insight into. You can observe from a satellite, but that’s not the same as being there. And you might have ocean buoys that can give you some data, but that’s one little point, and there’s only a few of those. So, wouldn’t it be great if the birds and other animals could serve as carriers for sensors that could tell you more about what was going on in the environment?

This has been something we’ve really been working towards, is taking this in a whole new direction, where the wildlife can in fact help us learn a lot more about what’s going on, wherever they happen to be going.

Host 2: And about the environment, not just about that animal population?

Chad Frost:Right, not just what that particular animal is doing, or what that group of animals are doing. Their behavior of course is important, where they’re going is important, but what’s the environment around them? How does it influence their behavior? What are they seeing and experiencing and feeling?

Host 1:As a throwback reference, it reminds me of one of the podcast episodes we did with [Laura Aracche], who’s here at NASA Ames, and she does airborne science. And talking about the difference of, you have satellites that are flying around getting measurements, and that’s great, but she was able to arrange to get airplanes that will also fly in and get, in the same location, try to get extra measurements. So, you have the big satellite measurements, then the measurements that are coming from the plane that are more specific, and you’re not waiting for that satellite to come circle back around.

But I’m thinking, this seems to be a natural one more step further, because then, if you have the satellite data, if you have data from, like for a forest fire — satellite data, you have data from airplanes, but then you have data from wildlife from tags and different things, and you’re knowing where are they running, where are they going, what’s happening, it helps you better understand the entire everything that’s going on, I guess.

Susan De La Cruz:I think that’s right, and I think one way that we’re trying to move is to try to layer data like that, so remotely-sensed data and data that’s captured where the animal is, and even data from a mid-level, a drone level. And so, that’s what we’re trying to do in our tracking projects, and even some of our other field projects on the ground. And I think trying to combine those levels of information is going to broaden our inference of what we’re learning.

Host 1:It’s an interesting mix of, if you stereotypically think of the US Geological Survey, I always think of earthquakes. And you think of NASA, you always think of astronauts and rockets. And here you guys are playing in worlds that they’re not typically people would think there’s an overlap.

Susan De La Cruz:Right, yeah, well, USGS, most people don’t even realize there’s a whole component of ecologists. So, I’m with the Western Ecological Research Center, and most people still ask me, do I work on earthquakes or maps?

Host 1:It can only be one of the two.

Susan De La Cruz:And I know nothing about either.

Host 2: So, you said that you needed sensors to detect the factors you were looking for, and they needed to be smaller, is that right? Too heavy, and is that where Chad comes in?

Chad Frost:Susan’s crew told us all sorts of interesting things that we never had any appreciation for whatsoever, one of them being that when they put a device on a bird, they’re aiming for the mass of the tracking device to be less than 3 percent the mass of the animal. The thinking being, you don’t want to influence its behavior.

Host 1:You’re not getting accurate data, I guess.

Chad Frost:Right. So obviously, smaller and lighter is better, but 3 percent was this threshold. So we said okay, the devices they’re using now, even the smallest, lightest ones, they’re pretty small and they’re pretty light, but they don’t do as much as we would like them to do. So, how do we add capability without turning it into this big, giant box that you’re trying to strap on the back of a bird?

Susan De La Cruz:Right, yeah, I think our goals were to get the mass as light as we could, and then add these capabilities, as Chad was saying. And then, from this we’ve evolved to even an additional objective, I guess, in trying to look at interactions between different individuals. So usually, the way a tag works is, it’s just transmitting data to a satellite or to your VHF receiver, and you’re only getting information on that one bird.

But in reality, a lot of species are interaction with — the individuals are interacting with each other, and they’re also maybe interacting with species in a community. And so, if you can create transmitters that actually talk to each other, you can be picking up that information too, information on predator/prey interactions, or in the case of otters, which is one of our species of interest — folks that we’re working with in USGS that working down in Monterey are looking at otters, and they’re really wanting to know what the social structure of their population is. And so, these otters will pass each other, and the idea is they could have tags that actually pass information about who they’ve seen along the way.

And then, that also can work in a community sense, if you have a larger animal that can carry more weight that can have a transmitter that’s heavier, with more capability, and can be picking up information from these smaller animals that are transmitting to the larger animal. So, that’s been this new offshoot of the project, and a really exiting one, I think.

Chad Frost:Just so everybody understands, this is not Facebook for otters.

Susan De La Cruz:It could be.

Host 1:They’re checking in, sending selfies, the whole thing.

Susan De La Cruz:They’re liking.

Chad Frost:We do talk about the internet of things a lot. This is the internet of critters, if you will. The ability to get at what’s going on in the interactions between animals and species, but also it gives us a way to potentially pass data around so that if one animal happens to be coming near a base station where we can collect the data, they don’t necessarily all have to come past that base station. The data might be able to be relayed around the population of animals.

Host 1:Like a network.

Chad Frost:Yeah, so it could serve as an animal network to get us the data we want.

Host 1:That’s not too different from some of the stuff that NASA’s looked at in terms of drones and other — the same idea, more or less.

Chad Frost:Exactly. And that’s exactly why NASA’s involved in working this problem with USGS, is that there’s a big overlap technology-wise in what we do already, whether it’s for unmanned aircraft systems or robotics or planetary science or satellite research. There’s a lot of commonality across these things. So, it allows us to bring all that body of work to bear on a really unique, interesting, and pretty hard problem.

Susan De La Cruz:Another thing to note is that we’re working with multiple biologists. So, we’re trying to think how this technology works for multiple species. So, we have biologists that are looking at broad-ranging seabirds that go across entire oceans, and are certainly in areas where typically you couldn’t sue VHF telemetry, and sometimes satellite communication doesn’t reach those areas.

And then, we’re working with terrestrial mammals and birds that go way up into the Arctic and the Boreal forests. So, we’re trying to make these transmitters as versatile as possible, so that we can service as many species as we’d like to. And, hopefully have a broader applicability someday to other species.

Host 1:As a throwback to one of our earlier episodes with Ian Brosnen over here at NASA Ames, who’s been working a lot with USGS, so I understand, you’re in the process of moving from Menlo Park, coming over here to Moffett. We talked a lot about understanding the entirety of the earth from orbit to core. Are you in that mix, are you going to come hang out with us and go over to the space bar?

Susan De La Cruz:I am, yes, I am going to come hang out with you. I’m excited about the space bar and the coffee situation.

Host 1:Yes, good coffee.

Susan De La Cruz:I’m actually not at Menlo Park. I’m up at a little field station in the north end of the Bay. I think I’m one of the only people that’s not at Menlo Park that’s coming down here. But yes.

Host 1:It’s either going to make your commute much better or much worse.

Susan De La Cruz:It’s probably not going to make it better.

Host 1:You’re like, we don’t want to talk about it.

Susan De La Cruz:That’s the only part I’m not looking forward to.

Chad Frost:I’m thinking we need drone delivery of our personnel.

Host 2: I’d sign up for that.

Susan De La Cruz:Are you working on that?

Host 2: This is cool, because everybody’s really excited about the USGS move, and the potential that has for the two agencies working together. And you guys are already working hard on this project, right?

Chad Frost:It’s going to be great, because our teams right now, we don’t get a lot of facetime, because we’re not located all that close to each other. And so, having everybody together I think just, it accelerates things, because you can just walk next door and talk to each other.

Host 1:Especially at NASA. With 10 NASA centers, we have three virtual institutes based here in Silicon Valley — we’re not strangers to working remotely, but there’s something different of, I can go and talk to you, we can get lunch. There’s this flow of information and ideas back and forth, it’s so much faster.

Susan De La Cruz:Yeah, for sure. I’m really looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be a great opportunity. And it also puts me in closer touch with the folks at Menlo that I’m not in communication with either. But the NASA draw is really exciting.

Host 2: So, this is awesome. You guys are already working this, and collecting lots of data from wildlife, I gather, right? And what are you going to do with it next? How can you apply the things you’re going to learn from this telemetry?

Susan De La Cruz:Well, we do a lot of different things with telemetry data, from looking at survival in population demographics to looking at, like I already said, habitat use and how that might influence conservation of the species. One thing I’m particularly interested in is looking at cross-seasonal relationships. So, I look at bird species that are wintering in these really urban estuaries, like the San Francisco Bay, where they’ve got a lot of things to content with in terms of human population pressures, and then they migrate off to reproduce in these somewhat pristine areas in the Boreal forest. And so, how does what they encounter in winter affect how and when they migrate, the timing, and then subsequently how well they’re able to reproduce when they do go there.

So, getting more detailed information on their movements and what they’re encountering here can then help me to understand how they might fare in terms of reproduction and just timing of their annual cycle. But there’s a multitude of things you can do with telemetry data to try to understand questions like, for otters, looking at foraging frequency and trying to understand how well is the environment providing food for these species based on the information you’re getting about their diving behavior and the cues in the environment that you can pick up from the transmitter.

And for migratory sea birds, like we were talking about with the dimethyl sulfide sensor you might put into a transmitter, ultimately that can tell what they’re cuing into, or what areas of the ocean might be important for them to try to understand what cues them to migrate certain places, and to use certain areas of the ocean and when might they intersect with things like shipping traffic, or things that could be a conservation risk for them.

Host 2: All kinds of things, cool.

Host 1:Yeah, I’d imagine probably some possible uses for the data haven’t even been thought up yet. There’ll be some paper 10 years from now, they’ll be like, thank you, Susan, that Susan got all these data before, and now because of these reasons, you can come up with something different. That seems to be the way science works nowadays.

Susan De La Cruz:It is, yeah. I think we’re always adding to each other’s discoveries.

Chad Frost:And it’s one of the interesting things we’ve been thinking about. It’s not really so much a part of this project as something we’re having to understand a bit. As you collect all this data, what do you do with it?

Host 1:Yeah, where do you store it?

Chad Frost:Where do you store it, how do you give it context, how do you make it available to people who care about the data, both now and decades in the future? That turns out to be a pretty big, interesting problem in its own right. And there’s lots of people who are in fact looking at that, trying to address it. But it was not a piece of the puzzle I was really aware of until we started working with Susan and her colleagues. It’s like, yeah, that’s interesting and hard.

Host 1:Not only touching this work, but just all science in general. Everybody’s like, how do you work with — because, we’re government agencies, but then there’s the larger scientific community, there’s academics, there’s different groups, and how you work with that community and managing that community is…

Chad Frost:We see it from the NASA perspective, we see it from the earth science standpoint, where all this data generated by NASA’s earth science satellites comes in and gets archived, gets collected, databased. Likewise, from the planetary missions, all that data comes back, gets archived, it gets databased. So, NASA’s used to thinking about that and handling it, but not so much from animals and being out there in the world. It’s a whole different way of looking at things.

Host 1:Excellent. So, for folks who are listening, if you have any questions for Chad and for Susan, you can always hit us up on basically all the social media platforms. We’re @NASAAmes. We’ve been using #NASASiliconValley. And as Chad’s well aware, we’ve also gone analog, where we have a phone number. So, you can reach out to us at (650) 604-1400. Just call and leave us a message and throw your question out there, and we can bring you guys on back and go ahead and answer that. But yeah, thank you so much for coming.

Chad Frost:Thanks a lot, Matt.

Host 2:Thanks, guys.

Susan De La Cruz:Thanks for having us. Thank you.

[END]