Eyes on Earth Episode 115 – EROS Women in Science

SHERI LEVISAY:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth, a podcast produced at the USGS EROS Center. Our podcast focuses on our ever-changing planet and on the people at EROS and around the globe who use remote sensing to monitor the health of Earth. My name is Sheri Levisay.

JANE LAWSON:
And I'm Jane Lawson. We're hosting today's episode during Women's History Month, so we're recognizing some significant contributions of women at EROS to our science mission.

LEVISAY:
Women have been crucial to the EROS workforce from the very beginning in a variety of areas, from customer service and computers to film processing and administration. Today, we're highlighting the science work women have been part of, which includes plenty of variety on its own, including the mapping of landscapes and wildfire burn severities and monitoring water.

LAWSON:
Several women who have worked or still work at EROS are telling us their stories, sharing how they contributed to the advancement of remote sensing science to benefit land managers and society overall. Welcome, everyone, to Eyes on Earth.

LEVISAY: Our first guest graciously returned to EROS to talk with us about her time spent at the center from 1979 until her retirement in 2012. June Thormodsgard was among the first women to lead a branch at EROS and has a wealth of advice for women working in the science field. June, tell us what it was like coming to EROS in 1979 - both your impression of the place and the kind of work you did.

JUNE THORMODSGARD:
Well, my career started out in Washington, D.C. I worked on Skylab, which is the first, America's first space station. I worked on the altimeter, which I'm looking at topographic mapping and ocean wave heights. From there, I was coming back to Sioux Falls and I heard about this place. Had no idea it was here. So in 1979, I joined EROS, and my initial activities were in image geometry. I was part of the Landsat 4 science team, and then I joined the Spot, the French Spot 5 science team, which really, you know, gave me some outside contacts right away to get going on what turned out to be an invigorating experience here at EROS. From there I led the image mapping team in science branch. It was a fun group of very techie people. We worked on getting the sharpest images out of Landsat that we could, and I like to believe we were precursors to Google using the image mapping that Landsat provides. And then I became the branch chief, and I switched gears from my own career to mentoring and promoting individual scientists and projects. And I think that's where I offered the most to EROS. I was dedicated to assisting individual scientists to reach their full potential, and I focused on connecting them up with the outside community because I had contacts outside and I was able to and sometimes actually get them funding for their research and be known, just promote what they wanted to do and also the projects, help develop the projects that were going on here. Fire science was a particular baby of mine, and I spent a lot of time on that with Zhiliang Zhu, who was the major scientist in Fire Science who started it all here. Then I got into a lot of details, including doing the director here at EROS for a couple of times and going out and about. I got in the senior Executive Service program for the U.S. Geological Survey, and that gave me many details around the country. Spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., years at a time, then Denver, a year and a half. So I got a big view of women in science, not just at EROS, but out and about, too.

LEVISAY: 
That strikes me as interesting that you felt like, you feel like you found your key role when you became more of a manager of scientists. Because being a scientist doesn't mean that you're a good manager, but you found that to be true for yourself.

THORMODSGARD:
Yes. Yes. I really enjoyed that transition, and I reveled in it really. I mean, it was wonderful for me. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

LEVISAY:
How did the science branch evolve through the years, especially from your perspective as a woman working here?

THORMODSGARD:
When I first joined the branch, there were a few projects that were what we call reimbursable, that got money from the outside agencies. One of those was FEWS. FEWS is one of the oldest projects at EROS still active.

LEVISAY:
Just for our listeners, explain what FEWS stands for.

THORMODSGARD:
FEWS is Famine Early Warning System. It's designed to take a lot of different information, including remote sensing, to predict where there might be food shortages and get early indicators of where food might be scarce. And under my leadership, I feel like we brought in a lot more recognition from other federal agencies and funding of our activities. And so I think that was a shift. Some people didn't like it. Some people wanted to stay using what we call SIR money, which is the research money within the U.S. Geologic Survey itself. And I like to match that with outside money because I felt like it was an endorsement of what we were doing.

LEVISAY:
You were among the first women to lead a branch at EROS. What was that like for you, both professionally and personally?

THORMODSGARD:
Well, most of the time it was wonderful. Sometimes I felt out of my element and alone being the only woman. Sometimes I felt like I was too aggressive, and the men didn't like that. Sometimes I felt like I just wasn't part of the club. But mostly I felt really proud of myself and pleased to be in the situation I was in.

LAWSON:
Our next guest, Calli Jenkerson, arrived in 1999 at EROS and now manages the science division of the largest contract at EROS, involving more than 100 employees. Calli, you're the current science leader at EROS. Tell us what appealed to you about EROS when you started and what your impression was.

CALLI JENKERSON:
Oh, my gosh. So you mentioned it was 1999, so this was 25 years ago. I was young and impressionable. But coming to EROS was my dream come true. That was like the pinnacle of everything I wanted to do with my career. As a graduate student working in remote sensing data, of course we got our little photo printouts of Landsat imagery, and to think that I could be part of THE national land imagery archive was really appealing to me. And it took me three tries, but after I got employed here, I remember the first time that I came out here, and just driving around that corner in the driveway when you finally see EROS' building in full view, it was like, Wow, this place is amazing. And it has been amazing ever since then. Things I remember from day one, and to this day, is that everyone around me is so much smarter than I am. Not necessarily about the same things, but it gives you an opportunity to to learn something new every day and face different challenges every day while being supported by a community of people who are so willing to share their enthusiasm and their expertise in this subject matter, is just incredibly rewarding.

LAWSON:
Tell us a little about changes you've seen during your time.

JENKERSON:
My hair is much shorter now than it was then, but in addition to that, during my first two years at EROS, the thing that impressed me the most was the volume of data. I remember just wrapping my head around a petabyte. It was like the first time I'd encountered petabytes of things, and to think that I was helping put all these petabytes together was overwhelming to me, and it was just very impressionable. Since then, I think what's impressed me the most, changewise, is how quickly the technology has caught up with the dreams in our head. And just over the past 5, 10 years, technological advances in cloud computing, in artificial intelligence, machine learning, it makes all those things science never thought it could do, possible. And with the, well, current generation and the incoming next generation of scientists, there are a lot of old and new ideas mixing together, and they're able to do that now because the technology is making it possible.

LAWSON:
Have you drawn any inspiration from other women at EROS during your tenure here?

JENKERSON:
Yes, I did have the welcome opportunity to overlap some time with June Thormodsgard. She was, of course, you know, the division chief and otherwise just was everywhere, or all around EROS, it didn't matter where you were. She just seemed to always be there. And one thing that she did in particular that inspired me was she coordinated a science seminar that would meet every week, and it was a knowledge transfer opportunity for not just the science division in the science branch, but for the whole center to just come learn and remember about the glory of EROS science. And she insisted that everybody come because she felt there was a lot of value there. She would literally run around the building knocking on people's doors saying, "Hey, you got 5 minutes, you need to come with me." Just that she was so passionate about spreading the knowledge and getting people to communicate with each other and just pulling people together as a community with that single purpose, vision and passion, and just the way she would run around everywhere. That really struck me.

LAWSON:
Now we'll listen to clips of previous Eyes on Earth episodes featuring science efforts by women at EROS.

LEVISAY:
After June Thormodsgard offered a permanent position to intern Kristi Sayler in 1991, Kristy worked as a physical scientist for many years on different projects. Today, she is one of the supervisors for the Integrated Science and Applications Branch and the project manager for both the LSDS Science Research and Development Project and the Climate and Global Issues Project. In this excerpt, she talks about how she grew to love remote sensing science and the variety of roles she's had at the center.

KRISTI SAYLER:
It was just great to work with all these people, different people that, you know, from so many different backgrounds. And being, you know, a math major with a computer science minor, and then I got into the geography and remote sensing aspect of how to apply that, and after I looked at a couple of Landsat images, I was hooked. And so there was no going back from that. So even when I went back to school, you know, to finish my degree, I took a remote sensing class and, you know, found a work-study position in one of the GIS labs there. And, you know, everything just fell together then, and there was no question that I was going to stay. Now, I did real science for a long time, and then recently, back in 2016, which is not too far in the past, I took a position in the science branch as a supervisor. So now I'm more into the management side of things. And then during COVID, they needed someone to be a program manager for this project called LSRD, which is LSDS Science Research and Development Project, and they basically said, can you do this? And I said, Well, I'll try. And so there I am. And now I'm pretty much the full time PM for the LSRD Project as well as sticking my fingers into all other science things, as Jess knows, that I help with, have helped with LCMAP in the past, and now we're starting a new project that I'm going to be a project manager on that project as well, all in the vein of, you know, land change and science.

LAWSON:
The Jess Kristi referred to is Jess Brown, who currently is leading the effort to make significant improvements to the National Land Cover Database. She became involved in a significant landscape mapping effort at a 1-kilometer resolution that showed people what covered the ground around the entire globe.

JESS BROWN:
I was fresh out of graduate school and quite excited to start working on this. I was the only woman on the team working with a number of really wonderful colleagues. But we started in 1991, and we published our data for the conterminus US around 1993, and this launched a whole set of activities. And because of the efforts of the conterminous US land cover mapping at 1 kilometer, we had demonstrated that we could do this. We had demonstrated our capacity and capability to map. So I believe we established a reputation from that initial mapping effort that then allowed us to expand. Though a lot of these early mapping efforts led EROS to have an incredibly strong science department and to perform work that is strongly rooted in user requirements, where we focus on transparency, repeatability, robust accuracy assessment and continuous improvement of land cover mapping and monitoring. These were the jobs that I worked when I first came to EROS, and these were the people that I worked with when I was really starting my career. And the bittersweet part of it, the bitter part of it is that we've lost some of these people. The sweet part is how much I really enjoyed that work. It was quite cutting edge. It was very - it was full of creativity and experimentation, and a lot of camaraderie and teamwork was involved, which I, to this day, that's one of the things I enjoy the most about my work here at EROS is working with smart people. And as I've gotten older, you know, more and more you realize that you need to turn over the work to the people who are much smarter than you.

LAWSON:
Heather Tollerud has focused on land change mapping since coming to EROS in 2015. She's currently working on the National Land Cover Database, or NLCD, the same effort as Jess Brown. Heather's research and development work on the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection, or LCMAP, project, which involves the deep Landsat archive, is now benefiting NLCD as key features of LCMAP are added to NLCD.

HEATHER TOLLERUD:
In my area of interest in drought, there's the potential to make use of some of the LCMAP data to look for deviations from what the model might expect and to try to interpret that as differences in vegetation and impacts of drought. Another thing that's really interesting and powerful about the sort of approach LCMAP is doing, which is this dense time series approach and making use of all the data that's available that we can bring together into a good format is really powerful. It can see patterns that you wouldn't be able to see if you were just trying to pick one time of the year and what's happening then, because you can see how it changes through the seasons and between the years and across space. So the sort of large dataset, dense times series approach is really powerful.

LEVISAY:
Like many of the women featured in this podcast, Jen Rover has focused on multiple areas of land change since starting her career at EROS in 2006. She is currently the supervisory geographer of a team in the science branch and works with synthetic aperture radar to map burn severity after a wildfire. In this excerpt, she talks about the importance of observing land change in North Dakota wetlands.

JEN ROVER:
Just a little background on that geographic region. It's an area that has a really high density of wetlands on the landscape, and so it's an interesting area to look at. Wetlands are very ephemeral. They change within a season. Using that information from the change day, I can actually go in and map which pixels within a wetland extent, that wetland area, when they change, what time of year they change. So is it a wetland that has a lot of change in the spring, or is it summer, or is it fall, or is it a combination of that through these 33 years where we have data? The U.S. government has done some mapping and inventorying of wetlands, and that started many decades ago. Those maps were originally created with aerial photography, and so it was labor intensive. I'm actually looking into how LCMAP can be used to identify areas that have had a lot of change. And if we know there's been a lot of change, then maybe those areas are prioritized for updates rather than areas that haven't had a lot of changes. It's to understand from a wetlands perspective what types of ecosystem services are available. So yes, that's part of it is just understanding our resources. But wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act, and so it's important to know where they're at so they're not disturbed accidentally or somehow drained when they're expected to be a resource on our environment.

LAWSON:
Since arriving at EROS in 2009, Birgit Peterson's work has included trying to find better ways to map burn severity after wildfires. Here, she describes how this type of work helps society.

BIRGIT PETERSON:
Land owners want to know if their area has been burned severely. So if they need to do mitigation work, such as reseeding in an area to kind of keep erosion under control. That's something that they want to know from the forefront. If it's a moderate or low severity, that can actually work in our favor, because that can work as essentially a fuel treatment. But they need to know where those different types of fires occurred, because when you have a big fire perimeter, and that's kind of what we often see on maps that are out there, not everything burns the same within that fire perimeter. In fact, you might have islands that didn't burn at all. So how you manage the lands after that fire occurred, that type of burn severity information is really important. Traditionally, we've used what's called spectral remote sensing. So if people are familiar with the Landsat suite of data, we've used that heavily to look at the spectral response of the landscape after a fire. So healthy vegetation looks a certain way on these images. And then once it's been burned, it definitely has a different reflection. It looks different. It's basically a picture taken from above that allows us to do before and after comparisons. And that's been a key component and a key way of making these assessments over the spatial areas that we need to cover. I mean, people certainly go in and they do ground measurements to validate a lot of this, but that takes a lot of effort and a lot of money to do. If you could do it through remote sensing, that is certainly a cost savings. And the other advantage that it gets you is you can be consistent in your measurement or your observation over time and over space. So when you want to start doing comparisons, okay, how are things tracking over time? How is one area comparing to another, having that consistent somewhat unbiased look can be very beneficial when you're looking at these trends.

LEVISAY: 
Stefanie Kagone also sees a direct societal benefit from the work she has done at EROS since 2009 measuring evapotranspiration, or ET. ET is an important factor for the Famine Early Warning System Network, or FEWS NET, and predicting famine in Africa. Here, she describes how scientists use remote sensing to calculate ET.

STEFANIE KAGONE:
Evapotranspiration, or for short ET as we call it, since it's quite the word, is a combination of evaporation and transpiration. Evaporation is usually that comes from soil and transpiration comes from plants. It's an important part of the water cycle. About 60 to 70% of the water received by precipitation in that cycle is really recycled back into the atmosphere in that way. We know that if a plant is healthy, it produces a lot of ET. If it has enough water available from the soil, in form of soil moisture, and if there's enough energy through sunshine to convert that water back into water vapor, then ET therefore is also a measure of how healthy a vegetation is. Or you can see if the vegetation would be under stress by drought conditions or even a fire. ET can tell how much irrigation water is needed to keep, let's say, a field of crops healthy throughout the growing season. So we use the remote sensing data and from other sources like weather datasets like wind speed, etc., to estimate ET values at various scales. And that's from global extent for drought monitoring purposes. You can also do a field scale using Landsat imagery, for example, to determine the water used or the irrigation water need of a field. So ET is quite scalable from bigger basin wide applications down to a field scale application to actually look at really the plants itself and how healthy those are.

LAWSON:
Jenn Lacey came to EROS in 1994 and had held a variety of positions by the time she left in 2020 to begin filling regional leadership roles in the USGS. Now she is a regional director for the USGS, but she joins us today to talk about her EROS experience. Jenn, what led you to EROS, and what was your experience like starting here?

JENN LACEY:
Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Jane. It's interesting that you asked that question, because my first experience with EROS was actually when I was in school in the math club, and we came and did one of the school tours at EROS. And I was completely blown away by EROS, and it made me realize that I could actually use my mathematics in ways that I hadn't realized before. It was actually the only resume I sent out of college was to EROS, so it was my dream to work there, and I was very fortunate to have a career as long as I did at EROS. And I think that outreach piece is so important because it allows students to see fields that maybe they're not normally exposed to. And also with that, when I was at EROS, I participated in South Dakota State University events encouraging girls to go into STEM fields. And we specifically focused on girls in engineering, math and science at junior high level to encourage them to take classes in high school, and then again in a high school class to encourage them to take fields in college for study. I feel it's critical that we focus on these areas to get a diverse pool of candidates, because if we don't have a diverse pipeline that exists, we won't end up with that diverse workforce that I think is so critical.

LAWSON:
So did you have any female mentors or inspirations during your time here at EROS?

LACEY:
You know, I did have female mentors, the main one being June Thormodsgard. June was one of the leading pioneers at EROS - THE pioneer at EROS - for establishing women groups. But prior to me really getting to know June, I was starting as a contractor doing software development, and the deputy director at EROS, Jim Sturdevant, saw that there was a need for diversity and also to build a younger workforce. And he started an effort to really focus on early career and and diversity. And I was able at a young age to come in to the federal government, working across the computer services branch and the satellite services branch. And around that time is when I got to know June Thormodsgard. June was heading the Science and Applications branch, and she started an effort to bring women together across EROS, sort of a lunch and learn, so we could network, discuss various areas. And it was a great opportunity for me to not just see the work I was doing at EROS, but to see what everyone else was doing and understand the breadth of the science and applications that we had because I really hadn't been exposed to a lot of that, and it was a great opportunity.

LAWSON:
How important is it to have women in place in science and engineering roles, Jenn?

LACEY:
You know, I feel it's really important to ensure that when you are working projects that you have different viewpoints, different thoughts, different considerations, so you can see the entire picture. And in engineering, you know, when we were working on the satellite missions, it's really important to not have everyone come from the exact same school, exact same education, approach a problem in the exact same way. And so no matter what the level of diversity, you get those different aspects and considerations when you're formulating your decisions in your approach. And I think in general, women and men will approach situations differently. And so it's just really great to take all those perspectives into account.

LEVISAY:
It seems fitting to close out our podcast with some wisdom and encouragement from June Thormodsgard.

THORMODSGARD:
Well, I wanted to send a message to the current women of EROS and hopefully inspire them to focus on their individual science objectives. Look for partners out there in the federal community, and especially within the U.S. Geological Survey, to endorse and even fund the resource. They need to apply for more things like the science teams, get involved in the Landsat LTWG and Landsat science team. They need more women. When I was in Landsat 4 science team, there's the same number of women now as was back then. Look internationally. Put in proposals. Get involved in USGS activities. It's good for you, and it's good for EROS. Then the other advice that I had really goes to the management at EROS. They need to invite talented women to the table. When you're a minority, it's hard to have a voice. They need encouragement. The women at EROS need encouragement to provide as much input as they can to the future of EROS.

LAWSON:
We appreciate all of our guests for joining us for this episode of Eyes on Earth, where we have described some of the contributions women have made to science at EROS.

LEVISAY:
And thank you to the listeners. Check out our EROS social media accounts to watch for our newest episodes. You can also subscribe to us on Apple and YouTube podcasts. This podcast. This podcast.

VARIOUS VOICES:
This podcast. This podcast. This podcast is a product of the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Interior.