Environmental sensing has expanded rapidly for more than a decade. I will provide an overview of the dimensions of this data revolution within the ecological sciences. I will then describe a specific evaluation of the water-ecosystem service trade-offs for the use of urban vegetation to cool cities. Vegetation interacts strongly with urban water sustainability. Plants provide multiple health and well being ecosystem services but require ongoing water resources. I will show three recent results that look to: (1) develop new approaches to generate a top-down measurement of outdoor urban use, (2) address uncertainties in measurements of the urban cooling capacity of vegetation, and (3) more generally apply satellite data to reconciling interactions between water use and the provisioning of ecosystem services.

Prof. Darrel Jenerette