Flying Blind
Posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
By ahedgehog
S. R. Loarie, L. N. Joppa, S. L. Pimm, Satellites miss environmental priorities, Trends Ecol. Evol. (2007)
The Pimm group reports that our ability to monitor the earth from space may be unraveling in an article published online in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Satellites are an increasingly important tool for monitoring environmental changes from shrinking tropical forests and species extinction to melting icecaps. On October 6th, the United States government’s Landsat satellite mission, which imaged the globe continuously for over 30 years, stopped functioning. The private sector is launching high resolution satellites and is doing an excellent job making images available to scientists. But these images under represent places most threatened by environmental changes. The scientific community must find ways to work with the government and the private sector to ensure that we monitor these processes.
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