Results indicate that tree cover in urban areas of the United States is declining at a rate of about four million trees per year, according to a U.S. Forest Service study of 20 U.S. cities published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.
Forest researchers David Nowak and Eric Greenfield of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station used satellite imagery to find that tree cover is decreasing at a rate of about 0.27 percent of land area per year in U.S. cities, which is equivalent to about 0.9 percent of existing urban tree cover being lost annually.
Conservationists are using UAVs to gather data to protect land, plants and animals.
Using seed funding from the National Geographic Society, The Orangutan Conservancy, and the Denver Zoo, Lian Pin Koh, an ecologist at the ETH Zürich, and Serge Wich, a biologist at the University of Zürich and PanEco, have developed a conservation drone equipped with cameras, sensors and GPS. So far they have used the remote-controlled aircraft to map deforestation, count orangutans and other endangered species, and get a bird's eye view of hard-to-access forest areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia.
- MongoBay
Scientists from the University of Maryland and Beijing Normal University are partnering to track and predict the impact of climate change internationally. ...
At the University of Maryland today, officials from both institutions and representatives from the Chinese government officially launched the new Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science, which will conduct the research.
The key tool? A remote sensing database.
Creation of an international remote sensing database will be one of the new center's first projects, and the interdisciplinary work will take place in both countries. In addition to monitoring agriculture, it will also track land use and land cover.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to award up to $50 million in contracts for aerial remote sensing services to support incident management.
