[Ict4devwg] Satellites and Google Earth Prove Potent Conservation Tool

[Vern Weitzel]

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2134

26 MAR 2009: REPORT

Satellites and Google Earth Prove Potent Conservation Tool

Armed with detailed images from space and remote sensing data, scientists, 
environmentalists, and armchair conservationists are now tracking threats to the 
planet and communicating them vividly to the public.
by rhett butler

In October 2008, scientists with the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew discovered a 
rich pocket of biodiversity, including several notable new species, in a remote 
highland forest in Mozambique. Trekking into the inaccessible, 17,000-acre 
region, botanists and biologists found 200 types of butterflies, hundreds of 
plant species, and numerous animals and insects, including three new species of 
Lepidoptera butterfly and a new member of the poisonous Gaboon viper family.

What’s significant about this find is that it was initiated not by some intrepid 
adventurer, but rather by a scientist sitting behind his computer. Three years 
prior, conservationist Julian Bayliss identified the site — Mount Mabu — using 
Google Earth. Bayliss, a Tanzanian ecologist, then helped plan and lead the 
expedition.

The use of Google Earth to make a virtual discovery, which then led to an actual 
one, is just the latest example of how the spread of satellite technology — and 
related computer applications such as Google Earth — are changing the way 
scientists, conservationists, and ordinary citizens are monitoring the 
environment and communicating their findings to the public.

Once the exclusive domain of the military, government officials, and specialized 
scientists, satellite technology is being democratized and is fast becoming an 
indispensable tool for researchers across a wide spectrum of environmental 
fields. In the past several years, one of the chief uses for satellite imagery 
has been to accurately quantify the loss of tropical forests from the Amazon, to 
the Congo, to Indonesia. In Brazil, scientists and state environmental 
protection officials can now monitor fires and forest clearing almost in 
real-time and take action to combat the deforestation.

But perhaps the most revolutionary advance in using satellites to monitor the 
planet has been the ever-widening use of remote sensing technology by
Image Gallery


Google Earth
A Google Earth map showing deforestation, in red, in Sumatra.
ordinary citizens. Google Earth has been instrumental in this development and 
represents a critical point in its evolution, allowing anyone with an Internet 
connection to attach data to a geographic representation of Earth. Citizens and 
environmental groups are now using Google Earth to tracks threats to pristine 
rivers from hydroelectric projects, catalogue endangered species, help 
indigenous people in the Amazon protect their land, and alert citizens and 
government officials that boats are illegally fishing off the Canary Islands.

"A decade ago, high-resolution satellite imagery for the whole planet would have 
been accessible only to a handful of people working in government agencies, 
resource extraction, or as scientists,” said David Tryse, an Internet technology 
specialist — and ordinary citizen — who has developed numerous Google Earth 
applications now being used by scientists and conservation groups. “Today it is 
in the hands of millions of people. It's impossible to care about something if 
you don't know it exists, but now people can fly across the planet and zoom in 
to see for themselves the huge fires from Shell's gas-flaring operations in the 
Nigerian delta or follow the discolored toxic runoff along a hundred kilometers 
of rain forest river downstream from a goldmine in Peru or Indonesian Papua."

The first launch of a non-weather satellite for civilian use occurred in 1972, 
when NASA put Landsat into orbit to monitor the planet’s landmasses, tracking 
everything from desertification to changes in agriculture. Since then, ever-more 
sophisticated satellites have used cameras and a variety of sensors — including 
passive microwave, which can penetrate clouds to image the earth’s surface, and 
infrared sensors that can measure temperatures — to monitor a host of physical 
processes. One of the key functions has been the use of passive microwave 
technology to chronicle the steady decline of Arctic sea ice over the past 30 years.

Today, many countries use satellites to monitor their environment, including 
Brazil, which has one of the world’s most sophisticated systemsNow people can 
fly across the planet and zoom in to see for themselves. for tracking 
deforestation. Brazil uses two systems that can rapidly identify where forest 
loss is occurring, giving the country’s environmental protection agency the 
technical capacity — although not necessarily the political will — to combat 
deforestation as it happens. Those systems rely on optical sensors and thus 
cannot see through clouds, but Brazil will soon launch its own earth observation 
satellite with cloud-penetrating technology, known as LIDAR.

Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at 
Stanford University has used advanced LIDAR technology to scan a Hawaiian forest 
and identify alien plant species by their canopies and the amount of ground 
plants that grow under them.

A new frontier for remote sensing is the emergence of REDD (Reducing Emissions 
from Deforestation and Degradation), a mechanism for compensating tropical 
countries for conserving their forests. To date, one of the biggest hurdles for 
the concept has been establishing credible national baselines for deforestation 
rates — in order to compensate countries for "avoided deforestation," officials 
must first know how much forest the country has been clearing on a historical 
basis. For the remote sensing community, REDD presents an opportunity to 
showcase the power of remote sensing and generate a source of funding for 
countries to improve their sensing capabilities.

Introduced in 2005, Google Earth — which can be downloaded for free — aggregates 
and organizes satellite imagery, aerial photography, and three-D global 
information system data from a range of sources and presents it in a format that 
is easily accessible to the general public. Through KML, Google Earth's 
programming language, users “interact” with the planet, attaching images and 
other information to geospatial data. This makes Google Earth an ideal tool for 
conservationists, such as the group Save the Elephants, which tracks the 
movement of elephants across Africa to see where they come into conflict with 
humans and where they forage. To further such conservation goals, Google has 
developed its Outreach program, an initiative that works with nonprofits to 
develop tools using Google Earth.

Part of the inspiration for Google Earth Outreach came from within the company 
itself. Rebecca Moore, a programmer at Google, used Google
Image Gallery


Google Earth
EDGE — Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered — takes viewers to the 
locations of 100 of the worlds most endangered mammal species.
Earth to document a planned logging project near her home in Santa Cruz County, 
Calif. Working with members from her community, Moore created a virtual map of 
the area that would be affected. Her subsequent data animation, which took users 
on a virtual flyover across the proposed logging zone, generated a firestorm of 
protest and led to the cancellation of the project. Google Outreach was 
established shortly thereafter, in June 2007, with Moore in charge.

“Because Google Earth provides, for many areas, such a realistic model of the 
real earth, you almost feel as if you are on that mountaintop or looking over 
that valley,” said Moore. “This immersive experience enables conservation 
organizations to convey complex environmental issues more quickly and 
persuasively to busy decision-makers, the media and the general public.”

Many scientists have begun to adapt Google Earth technology to their research 
and their communications with the public. The technology also has emerged as an 
effective way to publish scientific results in an accessible and meaningful 
format. While Google Earth is not going to replace scientific journals, it 
offers a concise, visual format for presenting research that can be more 
compelling than data points on a chart, rows in a spreadsheet, or a 4-color map.

Mark Mulligan of the Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Group at King’s 
College London has capitalized on the power of Google Earth to create 
HealthyPlanet.org, an initiative that allows people to virtually see,Google 
Earth allows these conservation organizations to look at their projects from 
space. and sponsor, a specific piece of many of the planet’s 77,000 protected 
areas. His group also worked on an application, Costing Nature, that allows 
users to trace stream flow in an urban area back to the protected area where it 
fell as rainfall, providing a potent example of the value of ecosystem services. 
In addition, Mulligan's team has developed Google Earth applications examining 
the impact of oil production in the Ecuadorean Amazon and the distribution of 
tropical cloud forests.

“Traditionally remote sensing data have been difficult to get hold of, difficult 
to process, and beyond the means of many of the smaller conservation 
organizations,” said Mulligan. “Google Earth allows these organizations to look 
at their projects from space and draw upon a wealth of environmental data, in 
addition to the imagery. Clearly, conservation needs good professionals working 
with communities on the ground, but it also needs to harness the significant 
body of interested citizens who can do their bit.”

Google Earth is also being used for original research. One study, published in 
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science last year, was based on an 
analysis of 8,510 cattle spotted in Google Earth images of 308 pastures and 
plains around the world. Surprisingly, two-thirds of the cattle — as well as a 
majority of 3,000 grazing deer monitored in satellite photos from the Czech 
Republic — tended to align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field lines, in 
a north-south direction. The research employed satellite technology to spot a 
phenomenon that literally had been hiding in plain sight for millennia: that 
large, non-migratory land animals were affected by the earth’s magnetism. 
(Earlier studies had established that magnetism guided the long-distance 
migrations of birds, fish, butterflies, and animals.)

Among the ordinary citizens who have been most active in marshaling the power of 
Google Earth for environmental work is David Tryse. His interest in conservation 
led him to develop an application for the Zoological SocietyIn the Amazon, 
Indians log onto Google Earth to see where new gold mines are popping up. of 
London's “EDGE of Existence” program, an initiative to promote awareness of — 
and generate funding for — 100 of the world’s rarest species. His application 
allows people to surf the planet to see photos of endangered species, 
information about their habitat, and the threats they face. Tryse also has used 
Google Earth to track deforestation worldwide, highlight hydroelectric threats 
to Borneo’s rivers, map global biodiversity hot spots, and monitor encroachment 
on the lands of isolated, indigenous tribes around the world.

The Jane Goodall Foundation, a partner in a project known as Google Earth 
Outreach, uses Google Earth three-dimensional images to show Tanzanian villagers 
that forests are the source of their water and to enlist the villagers in 
identifying chimpanzee habitat and elephant paths.

One of the first Google Earth Outreach projects involved indigenous tribes in 
the Amazon rain forest. Facing an onslaught of threats to their lands and 
culture, the tribes have embraced advanced technology as a means of protecting 
and better managing their homeland. The tribes — including the Surui in western 
Brazil and the Wayana and Trio in Suriname — are using GPS to map their lands, 
plot rivers, sites of spiritual significance, and their resources, including 
medicinal plants and rich hunting grounds. The Rainforest Foundation UK and the 
Global Canopy Program are taking a similar approach in Congo and Cameroon, 
respectively, helping communities map their lands to protect against illegal 
logging and other forms of encroachment.

"Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance," said Vasco van Roosmalen, Brazil 
program director for the Amazon Conservation Team, an organization that has 
coordinated the Google Earth project with the tribes. "Indians log on to Google 
Earth and study images, inch by inch, looking to see where new gold mines are 
popping up or where invasions are occurring. They can see river discoloration, 
which could be the product of sedimentation and pollution from a nearby mine. 
They are able to use these images to find the smallest gold mine."

As Chief Almir Surui of the Suri tribe put it, "The Surui know little about the 
Internet, but Google knows little about the forest, so working together we will 
be stronger."

POSTED ON 26 MAR 2009 IN BIODIVERSITY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY