Geologic parent materials of soils and their geographic distributions can have profound effects on plant ecology and evolution. The widespread yet disjunct distribution of soils derived from gypsum (CaSO4•2H2O) often leads to restricted regions of edaphic endemic floras. Most pre-diagnostic methods of determining the spatial extent and composition of gypsum soils for field sampling can be imprecise, laborious, and costly, involving the reliance on soil surveys, georeferenced gypsophilic specimens, and ground-truthing via reconnaissance visits for classification. Dependence on these tactics for research planning is especially risky for botanically unexplored gypsum outcrops. We employed remote sensing technology and extrapolated data from thoroughly examined gypsum outcrops of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, to reveal the previously undefined gypsum outcrops of the Mojave Desert, U.S. The Mojave Desert is a region where we will be conducting exploratory bryological and floristic surveys in the summer of 2023, but for which there is no available comprehensive spatial assessment of the distribution and composition of gypsum soils. We ultimately aim to (1) produce a map identifying Mojave Desert gypsum outcrops and (2) use the satellite and edaphic data from Spain to test whether remotely sensed data can predict percent gypsum content in Spain and the Mojave Desert. In contrast to the band combination utilized by prior gypsum remote sensing studies, we found that compositing Landsat-8 bands 7, 6, and 2 is more discriminatory for detecting the presence of gypsum, which appeared turquoise in color in both Spain and the Mojave Desert. Our preliminary results suggest that remote sensing technology is an effective method for identifying gypsum soils from freely available satellite imagery and aids in determining potential study sites for botanical gypsum research. Future research will validate the predicted gypsum composition of the Mojave Desert gypsum outcrops via soil sampling and chemical analyses. Additionally, we seek to use this technique to map gypsum soil distributions worldwide and further advance this methodology to build a global gypsum distribution model.