Dear GLP community, Another year is finishing and with it we see the rise of great expectations for a new year that will be beginning soon. Looking back, 2012 was a year of big changes for the Global Land Project. New chair, new IPO staff and relocation to Brazil, new scientific steering committee members, 2 news nodal offices, the preparation for the 2014 Open Science Meeting, new strategies of communication and more. And the most important thing: the GLP community strengthened.

On Dec. 4, 2012, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a fueling exercise for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission's (LDCM) Atlas V 401 rocket took place.

In the spring of 2010, de Beurs and her colleagues were on a road trip of sorts through the Russian countryside, taking copious notes and photographs, and interviewing farmers and officials in farming regions around the country. De Beurs, a geographer at the University of Oklahoma, had come there to study how agriculture is changing.

Each summer, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Schloss Laxenburg near Vienna, Austria, hosts a selected group of graduate students from around the world in its Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP). These students work closely with an IIASA senior scientist mentor on a project proposed by the student, related to his or her graduate research, with the goal of a publishable paper.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Geo-referenced field photos, taken from GPS cameras and smartphones, are even better, as they document location-specific observations of croplands, forests, wetlands, lakes, flood, fire, insect outbreaks and so on. Many of those field photos can be used to assess the impacts of drought, flood, fire, and insect infestation, to evaluate water quality, and to support interpretation of airborne and satellite images.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Geo-referenced field photos, taken from GPS cameras and smartphones, are even better, as they document location-specific observations of croplands, forests, wetlands, lakes, flood, fire, insect outbreaks and so on. Many of those field photos can be used to assess the impacts of drought, flood, fire, and insect infestation, to evaluate water quality, and to support interpretation of airborne and satellite images.

The USGS Flagstaff, AZ office has an immediate opening for a post doctoral researcher where she/he will be working under guidance of the project PI. The post doctoral researcher responsibilities will be to develop and implement algorithms for image processing and remotely sensed global cropland identification, statistical analysis, and data and product synthesis dissemination. Position requires an individual familiar with multi-sensor remote sensing data, large data management, and software programming in parallel computing environments.

A new Fmask 2.0 standalone version for Landsat TM/ETM+ cloud, cloud shadow, and snow masking software available. This version supports both old and new metadata formats for Landsat products from USGS EROS (EROS changed their metadata format in August 2012). This release has the following Updates since the 1.6.3 version.

Demand for palm oil is driving deforestation in Borneo, as trees are cleared to make way for the planting of oil farm plantations, which will send carbon dioxide, a global-warming gas, into the atmosphere.