LIZA GOLDBERG: I kind of ask myself,
what am I doing to make a difference in the world?
And I decided I wanted to stop climate change singlehandedly.
And I knew mangroves were threatened,
but I didn't know the extent of the loss that we're seeing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My name is Liza Goldberg.
I live in a suburban community close to DC.
I'm a junior at Atholton High School.
It's an academic and inspiring and passionate environment.
LYNETTE BURNS: Students at Atholton High School
are identified as gifted early on
in their educational experiences,
and that holds true for Liza.
She pursues a great deal of knowledge on her own.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I grew up reading everything.
Eventually, I discovered that the way
I wanted to make a difference in the world was through science.
When I was in sixth grade, we had a mandatory science
project.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: And she planted six trees
in our backyard.
LIZA GOLDBERG: Then I put open-top experimental field
warming chambers around them.
I was trying to simulate climate change.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: How she was going about
it was pretty highly technical, and she presented it
at the Baltimore Science Fair.
LIZA GOLDBERG: It's the biggest science
fair for high schoolers.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: In hindsight, that
was probably one of the best days of her life.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I thought maybe I would win an award
or something like that.
What it turned into was something a lot more than that.
Basically, what happened was there's
this one judge who happened to work at NASA Goddard.
And he came up to me.
I explained my project.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: And that conversation
then led into the internship when
she was 14 years old at NASA.
LIZA GOLDBERG: When the scientists offered me
this amazing opportunity, I could suddenly kind of see
where I was going to be in five, 10, 20 years,
and that was the jumping-off point.
That was when all of this started.
It started from one conversation with one judge
at a science fair.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: We were first introduced to Liza
through an email.
This email came from the education office.
There was a really excited new high school student
that was interested in working with some of the scientists
here.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I never pictured myself actually
getting the chance to work in a professional environment.
I was 14.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: We brought her on the campus
and got her to work a little bit, got her kind of familiar
with remote sensing, looking at satellite imagery,
and just kind of showed her, and every day she still came in.
We were excited to see that.
We gave her some assignments, and she did it in a week.
And another intern would have spent a month on it.
LYNETTE BURNS: Liza's work ethic is like nothing I've ever seen.
LIZA GOLDBERG: My daily schedule is
pretty intense and challenging.
I began at 4 o'clock in the morning
when I go to swim practice.
Swimming has always been a constant in my life.
I've done it for eight years, and so it's all
very routine at this point.
And there's, I think, a certain comfort in that.
And yes, I sometimes solve codes in my head while I'm swimming,
but it's the one place where I'm actually
able to just be a completely different person.
Swimming is difficult, especially now,
because of everything else that I'm trying to balance,
but I think what has kept me swimming
is just the fact that I'm able to let everything go.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: She then goes to high school.
LYNETTE BURNS: And she's often here before I am.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I go to school until 12:30.
After school, I drive directly to NASA
and I spend the rest of my day there.
I then return home, eat dinner, do homework, and go to bed.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: After homework, I
end up seeing her at the kitchen table pulling out her computer
and working on maps.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I have no free time,
but I'm also doing this global research
with mangroves, which I think is an OK trade-off to make.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: She came in.
She learned about it.
She started reading scientific articles.
And so we're like, well, we have to give her something--
more of her own ideas to start to work on and let that grow
and so that's where this idea of Eco Map came out of.
LIZA GOLDBERG: Eco Map is the Electronic Coastal Monitoring
and Assessment Program, and I made this program
to map all past drivers of mangrove loss.
Over the past 50 years, we've lost about half
of all world mangroves.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: Mangrove forests, in particular,
are this thin buffer along these coastal regions.
Many communities rely on the fisheries
that come out of this.
They use it for fuel.
And these can help stop hurricanes.
STEPHEN DAVIS: They help to stabilize the shoreline,
particularly with respect to hurricanes and storm surges
that are quite frequent down here.
My name is Steve Davis, and I'm senior ecologist
with the Everglades Foundation.
LIZA GOLDBERG: Stephen and other colleagues
in Everglades National Park are using
Eco Map to diagnose the specific loss drivers
in these different regions.
STEPHEN DAVIS: The mangrove coast of South Florida
is vulnerable to sea level rise, and if mangroves
can't keep pace, then we could potentially lose these areas.
This forest, like most down here in South Florida,
have seen quite a few storms.
Protecting and restoring mangroves now is essential.
LIZA GOLDBERG: Here, we're looking
at an image of mangroves and Everglades National
Park in Florida, and we're seeing really large diebacks
after Hurricane Irma.
We really need to start looking at why the mangroves were
lost in the first place.
STEPHEN DAVIS: And the Eco Maps work allows us to do that.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: So Liza really created this Eco Map program
through Google Earth Engine to really visualize
loss on a large scale.
LIZA GOLDBERG: In Indonesia, we have
these really dramatic aquaculture hotspots
where it's just very prominent.
My research would not be possible without Google Earth
Engine because we're able to take advantage of so
many different sources of data.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: She's doing it at a much higher resolution
and with a much more dense data set that we haven't had before.
LIZA GOLDBERG: We're able to compute these statistics
on the 30-meter resolution, which
has never been done before.
STEPHEN DAVIS: Now, with these tools that are available,
and the kind of work that's being generated from them--
especially Liza's being probably the best and most relevant
example--
I can see that the work that she's been able to produce
is going to be applicable and utilized at a global scale.
LIZA GOLDBERG: I would like people
to see this project as something that's viable and usable.
And yes, I'm 16 and I made this program.
But yes, I also did use legitimate methods
and science to create it.
Just because I am 16, it doesn't mean
that the science behind the program isn't sound.
STEPHEN DAVIS: I had no idea that she was a high school
student working at this level.
I hope she continues in this field,
because we need more scientists like her.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: Seeing some of the work
that she's doing at such a young age makes me very hopeful.
Saving the world is kind of some of the things
that we joke around, but in this case,
it's really going toward that.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: She teaches me.
She's taught me since the day she was born,
and she teaches me every single day.
DAVID LAGOMASINO: We see her as an amazing scientist that is
going to be breaking barriers.
STEPHANIE GOLDBERG: So when I think about her in the future,
it's tied to that.
It's tied to how can she best adapt her tools to helping
the world, to giving back?
LIZA GOLDBERG: I'm not sure, ultimately,
whether I'll end up in the government, academic,
or private sectors, but what I do know
is I want to continue pursuing this field.
I'm really excited to see where this can go.
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