by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
Stanford land-use expert brings satellite data down to Earth
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]
By integrating remote satellite imagery with revelations from door-to-door interviews, Stanford University geographer Eric Lambin and his colleagues are exploring the complex conditions that give rise to a broad range of land-use challenges – from the reforestation of Vietnam to the spread of Lyme disease in Belgium. For decades, orbiting satellites have peered downward to gather information about the surface of the Earth, giving scientists an unprecedented view of the planet. Using this data, researchers have created maps of deforestation and other land-use changes over time.
Satellites are precise tools, able to measure the rate of photosynthesis in a tiny clump of trees in the heart of the Amazon Basin. But satellite technology reveals little about the people living beneath the canopy who decide the fate of the trees around them. For a deeper understanding of how and why humans alter their environment, researchers need to talk face-to-face with the people who live there.
“We really need a meeting between land-use studies and these new sources of information, like digital satellites,” said Lambin, a professor of environmental Earth system science and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
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Satellite images provide all sorts of very reliable data but often do not explain at all the reasons for changes. Here, parts of Vietnam have been reforested but the reasons are much more complex than environmental conservation
There are all sorts of economic and social reasons for rebuilding the forests that Lambin found by actually looking at t=what the people living there were doing.
So, for instance,he was able to uncover why Vietnam, whose forests are growing was able to increase its furniture exports 4-fold – people were illegally importing wood from surrounding countries. The people did not ant to reduce their own forests as they knew the problems from deforestation. So they got the wood from elsewhere.
He makes a great point reggarding the fact that these are complex issues and that what works in one location is not applicable to another:
“Policymakers like simple, neat solutions,” he said. “They tend to assume that one issue is caused by one set of factors, and, therefore, you need to apply the same remedies in all situations.”
He and his colleagues may have an explanation for why malaria is disappearing in Thailand but dengue fever is rising. By cutting down forests, the puddles that sustain the malaria-causing mosquitoes disappear. Then, when the forest is replaced by fruit trees, a different mosquito finds a niche, one that carries dengue fever.
The complexities of land use will not permit one size fits all solutions. And the behavior of people is a large reason it is so complex. But good data and insight can provide a path for finding solutions.
