A series of video lectures by Prof Iain Woodhouse on understanding and using SAR data.
Image source: mikeyharper.uk I rebuilt my personal website from scratch using a static site generator, first, because I wanted a cleaner and streamlined site with an easy upkeep, plus I was motivated to learn the new tools, and more importantly, to move away from hosting on Wordpress due to the really annoying ads. The process was on and off during the past months, and although I found tips online that you can indeed complete it in a day or less, I only found time to work on it very intermittently, mostly while in transit at airport terminals and during flights and over weekends, which was why it took about three months to finally deploy the site in early February!
I have been sharing the coding materials and resources related to my research on my GitHub page but I have not had the chance to blog about these here at all, even briefly. And so, let me make this short introduction on my activities on GitHub, which does seem to show (and share) more of my research activity than in this blog. It’s just been about time too that I updated the ‘mugshot’ on my GitHub page, which used to show an old (younger) photo of me, and now, more appropriately, shows a recent photo of me taken during the wedding of a dear colleague.
Here’s another suite of software tools that land change scientists and geospatial analysts should have in their toolbox: Open Foris.
Open Foris is a set of free and open-source software tools designed to facilitate flexible and efficient data collection, analysis, and reporting for environmental monitoring such as forest inventories, climate change reporting, socio-economic surveys, biodiversity assessments, land use/cover change assessments, among others [1]. This initiative, resulting from the collaborative efforts of numerous public and private institutions, is hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.
A fantastic opportunity for land change science studies in the near immediate future is the growing utility of cloud computing geospatial analysis platforms such as Google Earth Engine. Combined with the ever-increasing availability of earth observation datasets, these kinds of technologies are expected to facilitate more regional- to global-scale analyses, as well as in-depth local-scale investigations, of land system changes.
Since the latter part of last year, I have been using Earth Engine first hand for my land change analyses.
A recent study mapped the distribution and drivers of global mangrove forest change from 1996 to 2010 [1]. The study, published in PLoS ONE by members of the ALOS Kyoto & Carbon Initiative led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, investigated the drivers of mangrove land use and land cover change across the tropics using time-series L-band synthetic aperture radar sensors, particularly JER-1 SAR and ALOS/PALSAR mosaic data.
One of the major findings showed that Southeast Asia contained the largest proportion of mangrove forests globally (33.
A few days ago, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency finally released the long-awaited global mosaics from the ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 satellite, which was launched in 24 May 2014.
[release] Data Release of Global Forest/Non-forest Map by DAICHI-2 -Contributing to measures to tackle global… https://t.co/9PHuGoLB7f
— JAXA(Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) (@JAXA_en) January 28, 2016 The 2015 data consists of the 25m mosaic data (at HH and HV polarisations) and the forest/non-forest map product, both at global coverage and free of charge for public use.
Geospatial technology refers to equipment used in visualisation, measurement, and analysis of the earth’s features, typically involving such systems as remote sensing, global positioning systems for tracking and navigation, and geographic information systems to put spatial data together for analysis and decision support. Remote sensing technologies, in its broadest sense, involve data acquisition by hand-held and fixed ground-based sensors such as camera traps and acoustic recorders, and sensors on airplanes and satellites [1].