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TITLE: Honey Bees, Satellites and Climate Change
SPEAKER: Wayne Esaias
EVENT DATE: 04/03/2007
RUNNING TIME: 51 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
Life isn't what it used to be for honey bees in Maryland. The latest changes in their world were discussed by NASA scientist Wayne Esaias, a biological oceanographer with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in an illustrated lecture sponsored by the Library's Science, Technology and Business Division.
At Goddard, Esaias has examined the role of marine productivity in the global carbon cycle using visible satellite sensors. In his personal life, Esaias is a beekeeper. Lately, he has begun melding his interest in bees with his professional expertise in global climate change.
Esaias has observed that the period when nectar is available in central Maryland has shifted by one month due to local climate change. He is interested in bringing the power of global satellite observations and models to bear on the important but difficult question of how climate change will impact bees and pollination.
Speaker Biography: Wayne Esaias is a graduate of The John Hopkins University and received his master's and doctorate degrees in biological oceanography from Oregon State University. He is a Master Beekeeper (Eastern Apiculture Society) and an active member of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association. Since 1984, Esaias has been a research scientist at NASA Goddard, in the Ocean Sciences Branch, specializing in satellite observations of ocean optical properties (ocean color) to study phytoplankton distributions on regional and global scales. In 1994, he started leading the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Instrument (MODIS) Ocean Science Team. More recently he is involved with assessing the requirements and performance of the instruments (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) due to fly on the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite Series.