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ENVIRONMENTAL REMOTE SENSING ANALYSIS USING OPEN SOURCE VIRTUAL EARTHS AND PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGERY
Citation:
PILANT, A. N. AND L. D. WORTHY. ENVIRONMENTAL REMOTE SENSING ANALYSIS USING OPEN SOURCE VIRTUAL EARTHS AND PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGERY. Presented at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 15, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation
Description:
Human activities increasingly impact natural environments. Globally, many ecosystems are stressed to unhealthy limits, leading to loss of valuable ecosystem services- economic, ecologic and intrinsic. Virtual earths (virtual globes) (-e.g., NASA World Wind, ossimPlanet, ArcGIS Explorer, Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth) are geospatial data integration tools that can aid our efforts to understand and protect the environment. Virtual earths provide unprecedented desktop views of our planet, not only to professional scientists, but also to citizen scientists, students, environmental stewards, decision makers, urban developers and planners. Anyone with a broadband internet connection can freely explore the planet. This has at least two important potential benefits. One, individuals can study the planet from the visually intuitive perspective of the synoptic aerial view, promoting environmental stewardship. Two, it opens up the possibility of harnessing the in situ knowledge and observations of citizen scientists familiar with landscape conditions in their locales. Could this collective knowledge be harnessed ( crowd sourcing) to validate and quality assure land cover and other maps? In this presentation we present examples using public domain imagery and two open source virtual earths to highlight some of the functionalities currently available. OssimPlanet is used to view aerial data from the USDA Geospatial Data Gateway. NASA World Wind is used to extract georeferenced high resolution USGS urban area orthoimagery. ArcGIS Explorer is used to demonstrate an example of image processing using web processing services. The research presented here was conducted under the Environmental Feature Finder project of Environmental Protection Agency's Advanced Monitoring Initiative.