Category Archives: Tools

Visualization

Agricultural involution in the IJsselmeer, Netherlands

Leave a comment

NASA Earth Observatory shows agricultural development and divisions on reclaimed land in the man-made IJsselmeer in the Netherlands. Over time the heterogenity of the newly created land shown in the image as fields are divided and land uses have diversified.

NASA image of land reclamation in NL

NASA Earth Observatory explains:

NASA’s Landsat satellites captured repeated images of IJsselmeer, and recorded changes on one such polder, shown in the top-middle part of each image. Landsat 2 took the top picture on September 8, 1980. Landsat 5 took the middle picture on May 23, 1989. Landsat 7 captured the bottom image on July 1, 2006. In these false-color images, red indicates vegetation, and the brighter the red, the more robust the plant life. Water appears navy blue. Pavement and bare soil range in color from pale blue to gray-green.

Visualization

Archetypical landscape of the USA

2 Comments

Jeff Cardille at the University of Montreal has a project METALAND that is eveloping more sophiticated ways of characterizing landscapes.  He presented some of his work on archetypical landscapes of the USA at the current Ecological Society of America meeting.

Jeff Cardille 17 archetypical landscapes of USA

On Nature’s blog Emma Morris report’s on his talk From the bright green soy field to the rolling blacktop…this land was made for you and me:

What is the typical landscape of the United States? Jeffrey Cardille, of the University of Montreal wondered the same thing. He may be in Montreal now, but he’s from the US of A, and a big Woody Guthrie fan. Guthrie, in his alternative national anthem “This Land is Your Land” invoked the “redwood forests,” the “gulf stream waters” and so on. But could it be that the archetypal US landscape these days is rather a cornfield or a brand new subdivision?

To find out, Cardille used an algorithm called “affinity propagation”, made famous in this Science paper by Frey and Dueck. As Cardille explains, the algorithm is “a way to find representative samples in complex datasets.” In the Science paper, it was used to create clusters of faces the same people out of a sea of photographs. Each cluster was organized around a central exemplar photo.

Cardille used the same method on landscape data from the National Land Cover Data Set, and metrics extracted from the dataset with a program called fragstats. He gridded the lower 48 off into 6 km by 6 km squares and then let the algorithm rip on the data—5% at a time due to computing power limitations.

What emerges on any one of the runs are something like 17 exemplar squares, real chunks of the landscape that best represent the totality of the landscape. Predictably, of the 17 in the run he presented, 13 are human dominated—row crops, clear cuts, urbanizing suburban land, and the like. Two are carefully managed national parks. Just two are more or less running themselves. One of these is a square of the vast shrub-lands of Texas.

Ecosystem services, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Crop per Drop vs. Water for Ecosystem Services

Leave a comment

Colin Chartres the International Water Management Institute‘s director general writes Invest in water for farming, or the world will go hungry.  In SciDev.net he writes:

The world’s population is projected to grow from 6 billion to 8.5 billion by 2030 and unless we change the way we use water and increase water productivity — ie. produce more ‘crop per drop’ — we will not be able to feed them. That is the conclusion of the IWMI’s recent Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture and its book, Water for Food, Water for Life, which drew on the work of 700 scientists.

While I agree that increasing agricultural water productivity is important, I think an underappreciated message of the CA (which is available online) is that globally we need to increase ecological water productivity.

A focus solely on agricultural production is likely to continue to cause declines in other valuable ecosystem services, sometimes to the extent that they outweigh any benefits gained from increases in agricultural production (See Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for many examples).  Agriculture provides benefits, but it also imposes costs.  Agriculture that ignores its ecological context has lead to coastal hypoxia, dryland salinization, and land degradation.  These problems reduce other ecosystems services, such as fisheries, while also decreasing the ecosystem support for agriculture.  These problems are increasing and overall are expected to worsen due to climate and other human caused global environmental change.

The quality, quantity and reliability of water flows connect agricultural and non-agricultural ecosystems. Water is also essential to the production of agricultural and most non-agricultural ecosystem services. Where these connections are strong requires an integrated approach to the management of water across landscapes and regions to ensure the reliable production of multiple ecosystem services.  However, in many cases we currently lack the practical knowledge to effectively manage agricultural and non-agricultural ecosystems for the multiple ecosystem services that depend upon water.  This research area is relatively underdeveloped and it is critical for ensuring human well-being in an increasingly unpredictable and resource intensive world.

Visualization

Using the web to track disease outbreaks

Leave a comment

HealthMap an interesting global health alert system that was recently accounted in a PLoS Medicine article Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project (Brownstein et al 2008).  They explain the motivation for the project:

As developed nations continue to strengthen their electronic disease surveillance capacities [1], the parts of the world that are most vulnerable to emerging disease threats still lack essential public health information infrastructure [2,3]. The existing network of traditional surveillance efforts managed by health ministries, public health institutes, multinational agencies, and laboratory and institutional networks has wide gaps in geographic coverage and often suffers from poor and sometimes suppressed information flow across national borders [4]. At the same time, an enormous amount of valuable information about infectious diseases is found in Web-accessible information sources such as discussion sites, disease reporting networks, and news outlets [5,6,7]. These resources can support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts [8]. These data are plagued by a number of potential hazards that must be studied in depth, including false reports (mis- or disinformation) and reporting bias. Yet these data hold tremendous potential to initiate epidemiologic follow-up studies and provide complementary epidemic intelligence context to traditional surveillance sources. This potential is already being realized, as a majority of outbreak verifications currently conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network are triggered by reports from these nontraditional sources [5,6]. Summary Points

In one of the most frequently cited examples [9], early indications of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Guangdong Province, China, came in November 2002 from a Chinese article that alluded to an unusual increase in emergency department visits with acute respiratory illness [9,10]. This was followed by media reports of a respiratory disease among health care workers in February 2003, all captured by the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) [10,11,12]. In parallel, online discussions on the ProMED-mail system referred to an outbreak in Guangzhou, well before official government reports were issued [13].

These Web-based data sources not only facilitate early outbreak detection, but also support increasing public awareness of disease outbreaks prior to their formal recognition. Through low-cost and real-time Internet data-mining, combined with openly available and user-friendly technologies, both participation in and access to global disease surveillance are no longer limited to the public health community [14,15]. The availability of Web-based news media provides an alternative public health information source in under-resourced areas. However, the myriad diverse sources of infectious disease information across the Web are not structured or organized; public health officials, nongovernmental organizations, and concerned citizens must routinely search and synthesize a continually growing number of disparate sources in order to use this information. With the aim of creating an integrated global view of emerging infections based not only on traditional public health datasets but rather on all available information sources, we developed HealthMap, a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for organizing data on outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent [16].

Wired news writes:

HealthMap … creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions.

While aimed at public health workers, HealthMap is also usable by the general public. It locates the outbreaks on a world map and creates a color-coding system that indicates the severity of an outbreak on the basis of news reportage about it. Users of the site can then analyze and visualize the data, gaining unprecedented views of disease outbreaks.

By doing it all with publicly available news sources and low operating costs, the service itself remains free. After a small-scale launch in 2006, the site’s model and potential attracted a $450,000 grant last year from Google.org’s Predict and Prevent Initiative, which is focused on emerging infectious diseases.

It would be great if a similar systems could be used to map and monitor environmental change.

Regime Shifts, Visualization

Algal Bloom along the Coast of China

Leave a comment

There has been a lot of news coverage of the large coastal algal bloom at China’s Olympic sailing site in Qingdao. The Chinese government claims the bloom is now under control.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has published some remote sensed images of the bloom from MODIS:
MODIS comparison of algal bloom

On June 28, 2008, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of Qingdao and the bay of Jiaozhou Wan. The top image is a natural-color image similar to what a digital camera would photograph. The bottom image is a false-color image made from a combination of light visible to human eyes and infrared light our eyes cannot see. In this image, vegetation appears vibrant green, including the strips of algae floating in the bay and in the nearby coastal waters.

These images show the bay at the beginning of a local cleanup effort. (Daily images of the area are available from the MODIS Rapid Response Team.)

Ecological Management, General

Environmental Cooperation and Resource Degradation

Leave a comment

People commonly assume that environmental degradation and resource depletion will lead to conflict, however  ecological problems can also lead to cooperation.

Earthtrends reviews some recent research in this area in Using Environmental Negotiations Toward Peace:

Ecological resources have factored into many national conflicts–either through competition for scarce resources or greed to exploit plentiful ones. But some scholars see another role for the environment: fostering peace. Resources managed jointly can quell regional hostilities, or better, keep lines of communication open so that a conflict never starts, these scholars say, and it seems the idea is gaining traction.

Networks

Connecting the world

Leave a comment

The Economist reviews Mobility and digital media – Nomads at last:

mobile vs internet users…these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.