When global food prices spiked dramatically in late 2007 and into 2008, the costs of many basic dietary staples doubled or even tripled around the world, sparking protests and riots. Panicked governments stopped exporting food, aggravating the crisis.
Naga Manohar Velpuri, works with the USGS Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). The project has recently initiated a large-scale project to monitor surface water bodies in the pastoral regions of Africa using multi-source satellite data and hydrologic modeling techniques. Currently, a total of 293 water points are being monitored in 10 countries. Velpuri shared some of the projects findings he presented at #AGU15.
Justin Roberts-Pierel from the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, uses Landsat 8 to detect landslides in the Himalayas. He provided information about his studies at #AGU15. We talked with him about his work.
At #AGU15 Yurika Kato, a Geosciences graduate student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, presented his research about how the 2010 Haitian earthquake and resulting human migration affected landslide occurrences in the Port-au-Prince province. We spoke with Kato about his research.
Elodie Robert from the French National Center for Scientific Research presented preliminary results of her research at #AGU15 that aims to track microbiological heath hazards based on surface water turbidity in West Africa.
For those who live along its shores, Lake Tanganyika in east Africa is the backbone of local transportation and serves as an essential source of household water and protein. Every night, fishers lure nocturnal, sardine-like fish called dagaa with compression lamps that are strung between their boats. From the shore, the lake sparkles with the lights of miniature moons as people gather the treasured catch.
Turkana County in northwest Kenya has been reeling from several years of crippling drought. As a consequence, the nomadic peoples in the region have suffered. Livestock such as goats and cattle, the sole source of income for these pastoralists, have perished by the droves from starvation, and the resulting economic hardship has left many children malnourished. Many have also died from violent clashes over increasingly scarce resources.
If you start feeling better as spring begins pushing up its tender shoots, you might be living proof of a trend discovered in data from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin: The more green space in the neighborhood, the happier people reported feeling.
Over 2500 villages were destroyed during six years of conflict in Darfur between 2002 and 2008. Dr. Andrew Marx, a 2013 fellow at the Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has found that this type of destruction—associated with human rights violations—can be detected using freely available Landsat data.
Large underground water reserves have been found in Turkana, one of Kenya’s driest and poorest regions. The discoveries were made by the natural resources exploration firm, Radar Technologies International, during the course of a survey of groundwater conducted for the Kenyan Government on behalf of the UN. The aquifers were detected with the WATEX System, RTI’s state-of-the-art, space-based exploration technology.
Source: Charles L. Walthall, USDA Agricultural Research Service Forum It’s ironic that just when Earth-monitoring satellites are needed more than ever to address the food and
Contact: Gretchen Cook-Anderson, NASA/GSFC When two catastrophic natural disasters struck within days of each other in May 2008, disaster relief, humanitarian aid, and health officials, as
Remote sensing is a critical tool for agriculture, land use worldwide Source: Cheryl Pellerin, America.gov, U.S. Department of State Over the 35 years that U.S. Landsat
