The World Resources Institute (WRI) is a global research organization that spans more than 50 countries, with offices in the United States, China, India, Braxil, Indonesia and more. The organisation focuses on six critical issues at the intersection of environment and development: climate, energy, food, forests, water, and cities and transport.
Geo-Wiki is a project founded in 2009 by the project partners the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt and University of Freiburg. The Geo-Wiki Project is a global network of volunteers who wish to help improve the quality of global land cover maps. Volunteers are asked to review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has released a new dataset for land cover in Alaska; it is publicly available and covers ten years. Based on Landsat satellite imagery taken in 2011, the data describe the land cover of each 30-meter cell of land in Alaska and identifies which ones have changed since the year 2001.
Satellite-derived data relevant for disaster risk reduction and emergency response is available from many sources and providers. The UN-SPIDER database on satellite data and products offers links to datasets of satellite imagery, elevation models, land use and land cover maps as well as near real-time data products for different hazard types. But how can these datasets be used for particular hazards?
Land cover information is important for many applications like flood modeling, observation of agricultural drought, climate change modeling, and monitoring of environmental changes including vegetation phenology, flooding, fire occurrence, and monitoring of carbon emission due to deforestation and forest degradation.
The Global Land Component in the framework of GMES Initial Operations (GIO) is earmarked as a component of the Land service to operate “a multi-purpose service component” that will provide a series of bio-geophysical products on the status and evolution of land surface at global scale. Production and delivery of the parameters are to take place in a timely manner and are complemented by the constitution of long term time series.
This is event is available for participation on an ongoing basis
English
Course Objective: This course focuses on satellite image access and visualization. It does not cover the use of any image processing software for image analysis, which may be taught in future courses.
Week 1: Overview of NASA Remote Sensing and Earth systems modeling data for Land Management/Natural Resource Management
Course Introduction
Fundamentals of Remote Sensing
Examples of satellites, sensors for Natural Resource Management