NASA says satellites can help track zebras migrating in the African nation of Botswana, one of the world's longest migrations of the striped creatures.

Predicting when and where zebras will move has not been possible until now, researchers said, but with rain and vegetation data from satellites they can track when and where arid lands begin to green, and for the first time anticipate if zebras will make the trek, the space agency reported Wednesday.

Predicting when the zebras will be on the move provides a powerful tool for conservation efforts, biologists said.

"We're getting close to the stage where for some organisms, we can use satellite data in management," Pieter Beck, a research associate with the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., said.

Earth-orbiting satellites that can capture images of the zebras' seasonal movements on their epic treks as well as the daily change in environmental conditions are an invaluable tool, researchers said.

"We need to know what the fate of those migrations is under climate change," Beck said.

"Understanding when animals might come through, what drives them, what they're looking for sometimes," is very useful information to managing those landscapes so that migratory animals and humans can coexist, he said.