The Log | School News
Flying Blind: Fewer Satellites Monitor Environmental Hotspots, Duke Researchers Find
Satellite images are an increasingly powerful tool for monitoring the health of the planet. Researchers use them to measure everything from deforestation in the Amazon to melting icecaps at the poles.
[for more]But a new paper by a trio of researchers at the Nicholas School is raising alarm that the network of satellites scientists rely on for these images is falling into disarray.
“This vital network of satellites is unraveling,” says Scott Loarie, a PhD student at the Nicholas School and lead author of the paper, which was published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in November.
“Never before have we had such an urgent need for environmental science and such powerful tools to make use of satellite images,” Loarie says. “But this year we lost both Landsats, two of our most important satellites. There is no replacement.”
Loarie’s co-authors on the paper are Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, and Lucas Joppa, a fellow PhD student at the school.
The recent demise of NASA’s Landsat satellites #7 and #5 has been a particularly hard loss for environmental scientists, they write. Because Landsat was a mid-range satellite that covered the entire globe every 14 days, researchers could use its detailed images to measure changes taking place in remote environmental hotspots anywhere on Earth over a period of several years or longer. In a pair of landmark studies recently published in Science, scientists at the Carnegie Institution used the satellite’s images to quantify deforestation in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon.
Rather than pointing the finger of blame, Loarie and his co-authors say the goal of their new paper is to urge the scientific community to work together with the government and the private sector to coordinate policies that will ensure that monitoring the Earth’s environmental priorities continues.
photo caption: Image to the left shows a satellite image of deforestation in the Amazon.