U.S. Urban Tree Cover Down and other Remote Sensing News

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.

- Environmental Protection

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.

- News Medical

The Department of Homeland Security plans to award up to $50 million in contracts for aerial remote sensing services to support incident management.

- GovConWire

NIghttime Light Maps Predict Epidemics and other Heath GIS News

Princeton University-led researchers report in the journal Science (9 December) that nighttime-lights imagery presents a new tool for pinpointing disease hotspots in developing nations by revealing the population boom that typically coincides with seasonal epidemics. In urban areas with migratory populations, the images can indicate where people are clustering by capturing the expansion and increasing brightness of lighted areas. The researchers found the technique accurately indicates fluctuations in population density - and thus the risk of epidemic - that can elude current methods of monitoring outbreaks.

- BizCommunity.com

A group of Penn Medicine researchers is set to save lives with cell phone cameras -- and they're challenging the public to help. The MyHeartMap Challenge, a month-long contest slated to take place beginning in mid January, will send thousands of Philadelphians to the streets and to social media sites to locate as many automated external defibrillators (AEDs) as they can. The contest is just a first step in what the Penn team hopes will grow to become a nationwide, crowd-sourced AED registry project that will put the lifesaving devices in the hands of anyone, anywhere, anytime.Armed with a free app installed on their mobile phones, contest participants will snap pictures of the lifesaving devices -- which are used to restore cardiac arrest victims' hearts to their normal rhythm – wherever they find them in public places around the city.

- press release via AnyGeo

The NHS Atlas of Variation 2011, published by the Department of Health (DH) this month, highlights the amount each Primary Care Trust (PCT) spends on clinical services and links this with health outcomes.

Consisting of 71 maps, the Atlas is aimed at helping commissioners learn from one other, consider the appropriateness of a service, and investigate when clinical health outcomes are not reflecting the financial investment that has been made. 

This is the second year the Atlas has been produced.

- British Journal of Healthcare Computing

Long Provides Blueprint for NGA Modernization #geoint2011

Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, provided a four-point plan for making her vision a reality. Last year at the GEOINT conference she emphasized that she wanted to put the power of geospatial intelligence in the hands of more users. This year she updated the GEOINT Symposium audience with the progress that the agency has made. The four elements of the plan are:

CONTENT - The goal is to expose 100% of the content within the agency and make it discoverable. Any source material,  commercial and NRO imagery; foundation data, whether it is spatial or aspatial in nature ... Whatever is in the analyst's shoebox and especially finished product she wants posted on NGA website.

OPEN IT ENVIRONMENT - Long wants an environment that is two way where users can contribute to the CONTENT environment as well.

CUSTOMER SERVICE - Long emphasized that it is all about the user experience.  "We are a full service organizations; we understand the user's footprint and can anticipate the needs of our customers; we need an open IT environment to expose all that content," she said. "We will always be embedded with our mission partner; but increasingly our mission partners are GIS-savvy. We encourage it. For users needing assisted service they can enter into a chat with an analyst that helps the mobile force in certain challenges, what Long calls proactive assisted service.

ANALYTICS DEPTH - Long emphasized that when content is easily accessible and the user is being served, then the NGA can get to the deeper analytics. Long said that over 100 applications for mobile use were being developed and she demonstrated an iPad app developed by NGA to help disaster response team.

Clapper Pushes Integration While Asserting Realistic View of IC Budget Situation #geoint2011

During his years at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and later at the Pentagon, Jim Clapper,  currently the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), admitted his organizations were lucky to be awash with money earmarked for the intelligence-gathering technology and replete with the personnel to carry out the mission.  Times have changed but the mission still grows and demands on geospatial intelligence are still exploding.

"What I'm pushing…it's integration," said Clapper. "GEOINT provides foundational the base over which all other intelligence can be overlaid...It makes for a better product for decision makers whether they are sitting in a fox hole or in the White House."

Clapper laid out his strategy that includes integration in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Horizontal in that information must flow across the intelligence communities (IC); and vertical in the sense that integration must be about engaging with state, local, private, and tribal sectors, and it must also apply to those in the allied forces.

But the IC faces the reality of bulging national debt which itself threatens national security. "We are all going to have to give at the office," said Clapper. Clapper said that, coincidentally, today his budget was submitted to the Office of Management and Budget. It includes double digits cuts in the billions over the next 10 yrs. "We are going to have to reduce our contractor profile...We're all going to have to share in the pain," he said.

In a frank discussion with President Obama, Clapper told Obama that this is a litmus test for the Office of the DNI indicating that these budget cuts might signal that the office was in jeopardy of surviving. But it appears that Clapper wants to fulfill the mission of the Office of the DNI.

An area where there is huge potential in getting savings is integrating IT. "If there is an area where we can bring about efficiencies and savings, that's it," he said. He mentioned that while cloud computing is certainly one solution, "an enabler" it's not a panacea. Clapper is focusing on eliminating redundancies within IT and said he will deliver his implementation plan this December. Paraphrasing New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford Clapper said, "We are running out of money so now we must begin to think."

"Yes, we have a challenge but we'll get through this one too. I'm very proud of what geospatial intelligence has done or is doing," said Clapper.

But sounding a note of caution he said that "Contractors will contribute in the future but at the same time we have been luxuriously funded over the last 10 years. When I was at NGA in those dark days after 9/11, we rapidly expanded the workforce by brining on contractors; perhaps we didn't do that as efficiently as we could have."

National Reconnaissance Office Wants to Push More Imagery to Warfighter #geoint2011

Bruce Carlson,  director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), is a serious manager on a mission to drive down costs and push intelligence to the warfighter.  The NRO is celebrating its 50th year as an agency, a strange anniversary since the agency only became to be known publicly just a few years ago. The NRO is one of the U.S.'s most secretive agencies and deploys the nation's spy satellites.

The agency has launched six satellites in seven months, a feat unmatched before in the agency's history and intends launching four more soon. But Carlson said at the outset of his presentation how important he feels his responsibility to use taxpayer money wisely. In an era of increasing budget cuts, the NRO is watching its dollars. The NRO, despite its size, was one of the largest donors to the last budget cut said Carlson. He explained that he attributes the efficiencies to the way his agency manufacturers satellites. "Though we cut a great deal of money (in the latest round of U.S. budget cuts), we didn't have to sacrifice any of our core capabilities," said Carlson.

But the theme of this year's GEOINT is "integrated intelligence" and Carlson wanted to make sure that he is doing his part to put information in the hands of more people. Carlson said that he has several integrated intelligence programs in development and that these "joint collaboration cells" have been certified by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Carlson believes that his agency can move the delivery of intelligence far from the point of acquisition all the way to the warfighter. He said that 95% of the geointelligence produced produce for NGA is classified at the "secret" level. That is, the bulk of information collected is not hard to deliver; and yet only 5% of soldiers have direct access to these data and Carlson wants to change this situation.

One solution is moving to a cloud environment but there are challenges. "The biggest impediment to moving to cloud is the legacy equipment that was built in a stovepipe; they were designed that way; but over time, when you go to many different systems, you've created a mound of people and systems that are hard to maintain…but I think it's doable," said Carlson.

In summary, Carlson said that the gap between the technological advantage that the U.S. has with other nations is huge. "What I am worried about is other countries going  after us and ... people exploiting this as one  of our Achilles heels," he said.