[Ict4devwg] Feature: Using the Internet and Google Earth As Conservation Tools

[Vern Weitzel]

Subject: 	Feature: Using the Internet and Google Earth As Conservation Tools
Date: 	Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:06:38 -0700
From: 	Yahoo Group <ashwani.vasishth at gmail.com>
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http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2134

26 Mar 2009: Report
*Satellites and Google Earth Prove Potent Conservation Tool
*     Armed with vivid images from space and remote sensing data,
scientists, environmentalists, and armchair conservationists are now
tracking threats to the planet and making the information available to
anyone with an Internet connection.

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 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.

Illustration Omitted:
          A Google Earth map showing deforestation, in red, in Sumatra.

"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 systems

     Now 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

Illustration Omitted:
          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 Society

     In 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."

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