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Land Use Science in Action

Analyzing the Land-Use Change Impacts of Oil and Gas Exploration Related Infrastructure Changes on Arctic Communities

Analyzing the Land-Use Change Impacts of Oil and Gas Exploration Related Infrastructure Changes on Arctic Communities

Remote sensing based mixture modeling to study land and permafrost disturbances

  • Rapidly changing environmental conditions in the Arctic, driven by amplified global warming, are impacting communities and ecosystems, particularly due to added anthropogenic impacts from energy exploration and development.
  • Analysis integrating remote sensing and socioeconomic data can quantify the land disturbances and help understand societal vulnerabilities of Arctic communities.
  • Critical need to quantify impacts resulting from expanding drilling in the region.
  • Changes to the Arctic ecosystem provide crucial links to the global climate and biogeochemical cycles.
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The global wildland-urban interface

A systematic assessment of global areas of potential direct human-environmental conflict

  • The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is where houses and wildland vegetation meet.
  • The WUI is an area of human-environmental conflict such as wildfire.
  • Our new analysis mapped the WUI globally at 10-m resolution from satellite data.
  • The WUI covers 4.7% of the global land and is home to half the global population.
  • WUI hotspots on all continents in including the US, Eastern Africa, and South-East Asia.
Field boundary and field size data provide unique measures for agrarian-transition research in smallholder regions in Asia

Field boundary and field size data provide unique measures for agrarian-transition research in smallholder regions in Asia

COMMERCIAL SATELLITE MADE IT POSSILE TO EXTRACT FIELDS IN SMALLHOLDER REGIONS

  • Crop field boundary is an essential agricultural variable, and crop field sizes are indicative of the degree of agricultural capital investment, mechanization, and labor intensity.
  • Information on delineated field boundaries and field sizes are needed for land use planning, allocation of resources, and agricultural modeling.
  • Field extraction is extremely challenging in smallholder regions in Asia and Africa due to small field sizes, irregularly-shaped boundaries, narrow margins, and heterogeneities within and across fields.
  • With commercial high-resolution images provided by NASA and new computer-vision algorithms, crop field boundaries are produced in smallholder regions in multiple countries in Asia.
  • Agrarian transitions are studied based on characterization of field/farm size changes in multiple Asian countries.
Peru’s National-Level armed forces intervention on illegal mining yields positive effects on tropical forest conservation and water quality, but remediation and sustained efforts are needed.

Peru’s National-Level armed forces intervention on illegal mining yields positive effects on tropical forest conservation and water quality, but remediation and sustained efforts are needed.

OPERATION MERCURY CURTAILS ILLEGAL MINING IN PROTECTED AREAS TEMPORARILY

  • Alluvial gold mining threatens protected conservation and indigenous lands in the tropical Amazon, particularly in Southeastern Peru.
  • Federal Military Intervention Actions by the Peruvian government attempted to minimize these activities and move miners to sanctioned mining zones.
  • Analyses using remote sensing data can help assess the results of this major policy action.
  • NASA’s archival and ongoing data are essential for these conservation policy analyses.
  • Peru’s federal policy actions reduced mining in protected areas, shifted mining into buffer unprotected zones, but there is evidence of re-mining activity as enforcement waned.
New Evidence of Global Carbon Sequestration in Trees Outside of Forests Supports Nature-Based Solutions for Meeting Net Zero Goals.

New Evidence of Global Carbon Sequestration in Trees Outside of Forests Supports Nature-Based Solutions for Meeting Net Zero Goals.

CRUCIAL ECOSYSTEM SERVICE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AT THE SAME TIME.

  • Tree-based sinks are the only actions that remove excess carbon now. 
  • TOF at the scale of individual trees underpin livelihoods of billions of people and lead to more stable incomes under climate-stress conditions. 
  • NASA earth observations make individual tree carbon measurement counting part of Nature-Based Climate Solutions (NBS); this project mapped every tree in Africa.
  • TOF NBS support most international programs, and White House U.S. Net Zero goals.
  • Large capital investments are being made in NBS, and TOF solutions increase the relevancy and effectiveness for people’s well being and poverty alleviation.