[photo credit: CALTECH]
Phil Brodrick is a data scientist, software systems engineer, and research technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. That year, he was part of a team that flew NASA aircraft over South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region — one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth — in what became the agency’s first-ever attempt to survey biodiversity from the air. The experiment was called BioSCape: the Biodiversity Survey of the Cape. On Earth Day, April 22, a 36-minute documentary about what they found screens free at Caltech. Brodrick will be there to answer questions.
“It was a test case to say, ‘Can we actually measure biodiversity in this really complex system? Can we figure something out about it?'” Brodrick said in a 2025 NASA Earthdata interview. “If we can’t do it with a group of airborne sensors operating together with people on the ground, we can’t do it from orbit.”
That last sentence is the stakes. BioSCape was not merely about South Africa. It was about whether airborne technology — and eventually satellite technology — could one day give scientists a continuous, global picture of what ecosystems look like and how they are changing. The Greater Cape Floristic Region, covering roughly 2.5 million acres at the southwestern tip of South Africa, offered the hardest possible test: two of the world’s most concentrated biodiversity hotspots, packed with species found nowhere else.
The campaign brought approximately 150 scientists from U.S. and South African institutions together for six weeks. NASA flew four instruments on two aircraft, collecting spectroscopic and lidar data across roughly 45,000 square kilometers of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. The published account of the effort in npj Biodiversity describes the goal as testing whether remote sensing could reliably map the structure, function, and composition of an ecosystem as complex as this one.
The answer, so far: the work continues. Since the campaign concluded, the team has published more than 40 studies and scientific presentations. All of its airborne data is publicly available on the NASA website. In 2025, the BioSCape team received a Group Achievement Award as part of the NASA Honor Awards, cited for outstanding achievements in advancing understanding of ecosystem structure, function, and composition.
The Spectrum of Life, the documentary coming to Caltech, was directed by South African ecologists and filmmakers Otto Whitehead and Jeremy Shelton, the founders of Fishwater Films. It premiered at the 2025 Buffalo International Film Festival. The Caltech screening is part of the institute’s Movies That Matter series, a collaboration between Caltech Public Events and Caltech’s Sustainability Project that grew out of the pandemic years, when live events were suspended. The series has previously screened films on nuclear energy, coral bleaching, and space-based solar power, each followed by a live conversation with scientists.
Following the April 22 screening, Brodrick and other researchers connected to the documentary’s subject matter will take questions from the audience.
If You Go: Movies That Matter: Earth Day Screening — The Spectrum of Life | Wednesday, April 22, 2026 | 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. | Chen 100, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Neuroscience Research Building, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena | Free admission; reservations strongly encouraged at https://ci.ovationtix.com/36761/production/1267149 | Information: Michael Alexander, 626-395-4652, events@caltech.edu
Brodrick’s test case question — can we figure something out about it? — is still being answered, study by study, from data collected over a landscape halfway around the world. On Earth Day, a scientist from the lab that built the instruments comes to his own neighborhood to talk about what it looked like from above.
MOVIES THAT MATTER: EARTH DAY SCREENING — SPECTRUM OF LIFE Date & Time: Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. | Venue: Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium 332 S. Michigan Ave. Pasadena , CA 91106 | Phone Number: 626-395-4652 | Website: https://events.caltech.edu/calendar/movies-that-matter-spectrum-of-life-1
