Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is Climate Change and the role of forests. I came across two reports, one about Europe and the other China, which examined how forests can help regulate the environment. Both studies used a wide variety of remote-sensing data as well as ground-based accounts.
The European Environment Agency report identifies habitat loss and degradation, the risk poised by invasive species, pollution, and climate change as the top challenges to forests, which act as carbon sinks, clean the air we breathe, and help preserve and protect biodiversity.
And although good news was mixed with bad, both reports noted an increase in forest land. European forests have increased by 10 percent since 1990, while in China, after many years of government conservation programs to replace huge areas of earlier deforestation, four times as large an area experienced significant gain in tree cover compared to areas experiencing significant loss.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this interview clip of Trimble’s Eric McCuaig at the ILMF 2016 event.
The U.S. Geological Survey, The Nature Conservancy and The Wildlife Conservation Society are launching the Ecological Drought Working Group as part of the Science for Nature and People Partnership. The scientists will assess the ecological impacts of drought on ecosystems, wildlife and people as well as propose methods to lessen such impacts ecologically and economically.
Scientists used observations from NOAA’s North American air-sampling network to track surprisingly high levels of carbon tetrachloride, a banned chemical known to deplete the ozone layer.
And a new NASA study used remote-sensing and tree-ring data to conclude that the recent drought that began in 1998 in the eastern Mediterranean Levant region (including Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey) is likely the worst drought of the last nine centuries.
In industry headlines, TerraGo released TerraGo Edge 3.9.2, which features the new TerraGo QuickNote! as well as other new features and enhancements.
Mapillary, a community-based photomapping platform, announced an $8 million dollar Series A funding round.
And Esri published Getting to Know ArcGIS Pro, which teaches the fundamentals of making 2D and 3D maps, and analyzing geospatial data, using the ArcGIS Pro application.
For today’s Final Thought, let’s go back to forests with highlights from this NASA video on one of its own projects.
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
