An environmental planner tries to minimize the environmental impacts of housing, industrial, and transportation-related construction projects. Environmental planners help project managers navigate the environmental permitting process where they review a site to investigate potential environmental effects. This includes the effects of natural disasters.

Data scientists work with data captured by scientific instruments or generated by a simulator, as well as data that is processed by software and stored in computer systems. They work with scientists to analyze databases and files using data management techniques and statistics. From changes in sea level,  atmospheric composition, or land use, data scientists help make sense of the petabytes of data that NASA collects and stores.

Mechanical engineers design, develop, build, and test mechanical and thermal sensors and devices including tools, engines, and machines. These are essential systems in platforms in NASA's Earth Science missions, like satellite and airborne missions.  Mechanical engineers work mostly in engineering services, research and development, and manufacturing. 

Explore using units for calculations with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI is a ratio of different light wavelength reflectance which can be used to map the density of green vegetation.

Software engineers play an important role at NASA as this field supports the success of our missions on Earth and beyond.  This field will continue to grow as it helps NASA address the many challenges that our agency faces.

This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.