Show-Me State Times

Saint Louis University’s Remote Sensing Lab has joined Climate TRACE, a global coalition focused on tracking greenhouse gas emissions. As part of this membership, the lab has received $409,649 in annual research funding for its first year.

Climate TRACE is a non-profit group that brings together organizations to build an open and accessible inventory of greenhouse gas emissions using satellite imagery, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and data science. The coalition aims to provide comprehensive and transparent data on where emissions are coming from worldwide.

The Remote Sensing Lab at SLU is led by Vasit Sagan, Ph.D., professor of geospatial science. With the new grant, the lab will serve as the sector lead for Climate TRACE’s work on pastures and support mapping of cattle operations globally. According to Sagan, “SLU’s membership in the Climate TRACE coalition positions the University at the forefront of global greenhouse gas monitoring by leveraging its expertise in remote sensing and GeoAI. Through this partnership, SLU joins a worldwide network of universities, scientists, and AI practitioners while contributing its unique strengths in mapping cattle operations, manure management, and facility-level methane and nitrous oxide emissions. This collaboration enhances the transparency and accuracy of emissions reporting, expands SLU’s influence on climate policy and accountability, and ensures its research delivers actionable insights for targeted mitigation strategies at local, national, and global scales.”

The lab’s responsibilities include improving global mapping of pasture areas that support cattle as well as detecting large-scale feedlot operations in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa—regions with significant gaps in national reporting.

Climate TRACE focuses on identifying gaps in current greenhouse gas inventories and developing models to estimate those missing figures. Data is produced sector-by-sector by relevant leads such as SLU.

Sagan noted specific challenges: “Manure ponds are a critical blind spot in global greenhouse gas accounting. These large anaerobic waste lagoons are persistent sources of methane (CH₄) and episodic emitters of nitrous oxide (N₂O), yet they remain largely undetected and under-reported in national and international inventories,” he said. “Current systems rely on livestock population counts and country-level emission factors, which mask facility-scale hot spots and management practices. By advancing spatially explicit detection of manure ponds, SLU’s researchers aim to improve transparency, enable accurate attribution of emissions, and support more effective mitigation strategies in livestock management.”

The Remote Sensing Lab applies machine learning techniques to analyze multi-scale remote sensing data for issues related to food security, environmental change, agriculture monitoring, carbon accounting, permafrost chemistry studies, precision agriculture applications such as nitrogen prescriptions for crops or early plant disease detection.

SLU's involvement with Climate TRACE began in Fall 2024 when Sagan and Derek Tesser traveled to New York City for the coalition's annual meeting led by former Vice President Al Gore. Their participation led to formal membership for Saint Louis University.

For its first-year project with Climate TRACE, the lab will develop a GeoAI framework integrating remote sensing technology with knowledge graphs to map cattle operations worldwide—including estimates for methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions from these facilities.

The team includes 12 staff members from SLU’s School of Science & Engineering along with 10 graduate students. Other coalition members include Carbon Yield; Duke University; Earth Genome; Johns Hopkins APL; among others.