The Canadian Airborne Biodiversity Observatory is a collaboration between five Canadian researchers in biodiversity and remote sensing science. Its main objective will be to study and understand the changes in plant biodiversity at a Canada wide scale using the emerging spectranomics approach. CABO will use high precision spectranomics to measure the spectral signatures of Canadian plants at several spatial scale and coming from different ecosystems, while using standardized protocols. This way, CABO will build a large spectral database of Canadian plants and thus revolutionize the way biodiversity data are acquired in Canada and throughout the world. CABO will reinforce other international initiatives in spectranomics and will position Canada as the world leader in biodiversity science and conservation. The funding for CABO is NSERC’s fourth Discovery Frontiers award, valued at $4 million over 4 years.