Environment – Page 6

Woven Garments Harvest Energy, Provide Light

Huichol women sewing and using portable light unit

Photo Credit: Portable Light

Maria Carillo sits at a table weaving a beautiful Huichol textile and talking to her mother who threads a needle to work on her intricately beaded piece of artwork. The sun is beginning to lower in the Mexico’s western sky and the looming darkness threatens their ability to work. These pieces must completed and sold tomorrow in the market nearby so the family can pay for Maria’s school.

Maria set down her needles, picks up her nearby woven handbag, and hangs it high above the table where her and her mother sit. After being switched on, the handbag produces a warm glow of light in the darkened hut, and work resumes.

She is using the Portable Light Unit, a simple, versatile textile with tiny solar nano-technology cells that can be woven into energy harvesting bags, or other textiles, using local materials and traditional weaving and sewing techniques.

One of the Huichol textiles

Maria is Huichol or Wixáritari, a semi-nomadic indigenous group located in western central Mexico living in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range, internationally recognized for their production of intricate and colorful textiles.

Similar to the two billion other people who live without access to electricity, the Huichol people live in rugged terrain, where the centralized electrical distribution is costly to implement and maintain. Building the infrastructure often causes irreparable cultural and social damage for indigenous peoples as well as environmental damage to their lands. The combined lack of resources, and damage to their homes, leaves them inadequately prepared and economically displaced.

The Portable Light Project, a non-profit initiative led by Kennedy & Violich Architecture and Global Solar Energy, aims to combine clean energy and lighting with local indigenous textile production. This helps local communities adopt the new technology, adds value to it by including their own work, and heightens economic production; all without removing the Huichol from their traditional way of life.

Miquel Carillo, Huichol Community Leader in Santa Catarina describes the frustration of their hardships without a light source:

We don’t have light. We can only work during the day. Nobody can do anything. We just wait for the sun to come up again

The Portable Light project provides kits containing a flexible, two-watt solar film, rechargeable battery, USB port, and an LED light and training on how to weave them into garments.

Bags can be worn during the day to recharge

By integrating the solar panels with the woven textiles, electronic devices can be easily charged while people go on with their everyday work; and fully charged LED lights allow four hours of visibility, enabling communities to work and study after dark.

The integral USB port is used to charge cell phones, which connects Huichol artisans with art dealers and stores in urban areas without removing them from their homes.

The Huichol people and indigenous weaving projects are not the only way Portable Light Units are being utilized to better the livelihoods of communities in developing regions.

Nicaraguan girls using the bags for Paso Pacifico Photo Credit: Sheila Kennedy

A environmental education program in Paso del Istmo Biological Corridor in Nicaragua uses the bags to help protect endangered sea turtle nests. Villagers work as rangers to prevent turtle poaching at night. They use the Light Units to charge cell phones so they can communicate the location of nests, and women use them to build eco-tourism businesses at night.

In rural Haiti, the bags are being used to support the NGO Maison De Naissance, a network of traveling health workers who provide prenatal and basic medical care. Health workers and midwives use the Portable Light Units as a renewable light and power source for house visits and night procedures. The USB port is used to charge cell phones and medical devices, connecting them with physicians at the clinics who have better intel to help make accurate diagnoses.

Health worker in Haiti using Portable Light Photo Credit: Lee Cohen

The Portable Light Project is a promising example of how to combine economic productivity with environmental conservation in remote areas, but some critics remain skeptical.

Few argue that there is not an economic model to produce mass amounts of the Portable Light Units to supply the huge demand for electricity in rural areas. Others contend that the garments will not be able to withstand rugged conditions common in developing regions.

Frederic Krebs of the Rios National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark who designed a low cost, plastic solar lamp for Africa, expressed his hesitancy. He maintains through his research that a high degree of ruggedness is required before portable solar lights can help people developing regions. It was in Krebs opinion that such textiles are, “simply not wearable enough yet.”

These are components of the Portable Light Project that need to be addressed before it can be used all throughout developing regions. However, the Portable Light Project holds promise for bringing a renewable source of light into communities who otherwise have been sitting in the dark.

PHoto of studying using the portable light

Photo Credit: Sheila Kennedy

April 28, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Environment, Forestry, Land Management, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development

ICT and Citizen Science

Maryland Science Center – Citizen Science – C3.

The Maryland Science Center is developing a smartphone application to allow users to measure and monitor the urban heat island effect. “UNI provides a glimpse” according to their website, “at what the world may look like with warmer temperatures.” This will help urban planners and inhabitants to develop strategies to cope, e.g., planting more shade trees and choosing varieties and species that are well adapted to the climate of the urban environment.

This is a good example of how ICT can enhance citizen science, a particularly promising flavor of public participation consistent with good government principles. Smartphones, while sometimes available, are not widely affordable in developing countries, and in many places, the data networks to support them are not in place. There are however ways to use SMS, which is widely available, for citizen observations. Any good examples of environmental monitoring using SMS would be welcome!

March 10, 2011/by actualize

Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Empowering Women through ICT in Reef Conservation and Management

Three Indian fisherwomen sit with their nets

Photo credit: SPIDER

Women play a vital role in the operation of the fisheries in India, and their contributions penetrate every aspect of the industry from postharvest handling, preservation, processing and marketing. In the southern maritime states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, women dominate the retail fish trade. According to the Global Aquaculture Alliance, between 50-70% of fisherwomen and their families are dependent on fresh fish marketing or traditional fish processing for their livelihoods.

However, fisherwomen in the region want to advance their socioeconomic status beyond sustainability levels. One project, conducted by Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO) sought to help them do just that while simultaneously protecting the coral reefs on which these women and their families depend.

Coral reefs in the Gulf of Mannar are facing several threats, but in Tuticorin, several villages are solely dependent on fish resources obtained from these coral reefs. Fisherwomen face uncertain catches of varying quality, difficult post harvesting techniques and increasing demand. Crowded fishing grounds, and this increase in demand often cause fishermen to adopt destructive fishing methods.

To reduce the pressure on coral reef resources and economic vulnerability of coastal communities, local fisherwomen self help groups were trained on ICTs and other methods of adult education. The aim of introducing adult education and ICT trainings was:

to empower local fisherwomen self help groups
enhance literacy and livelihood
reduce pressure on coral reef resources through greater awareness and education about marine environment and resources
minimize overall economic vulnerability of coastal communities

Two coordinators from each of 5 villages were selected and trained in adult education and ICTs. Then each village was given a computer, printer, mobile phone and access to the internet. Almost 150 women were trained in adult and environmental education, computer education and hygienic fish drying.

The results were impressive – reef damaged was “considerably” reduced – shore seine operations, mining and anchoring near reefs declines, new coral recruits were observed and live coral area began increasing. These training opportunities also helped fisherwomen earn additional income for their families.

For more information, you can read the case study here in our Project Database.

March 8, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture, Food Security & Rural Development, Areas of Expertise, Biodiversity, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Next Task Order: Flying Robots

Or more precisely, swarming micro air vehicles, to create a communications cloud where infrastructure is destroyed during an emergency like an earthquake. SciDev reports on a Swiss innovation that hovers at the extreme end of ICT4D – at least for now. Flying robots could help in disaster rescue – SciDev.Net.

But the same team also produced the awesome SenseFly drone, which costs around 9K and fits in a briefcase. The possibilities for monitoring and mapping for biodiversity and agriculture appear to be endless. Check out the video.

Lest you think I’m a shill for the Lausanne techies, let me take the opportunity to draw your attention to some homebrew options. These won’t create the swarming communications cloud suitable for a major disaster, but a lot can happen.

Grassroots Mapping is a network of technology hackers that use balloon and kite mounted digital cameras in mapping, to serve as “community satellites” – a low cost remote sensing alternative to satellite imagery that can get surprisingly good results. Significantly, the technology is affordable and can be put in the hands of communities for participatory planning, independent monitoring, and access to information – key aspects of our quest for good governance. The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science is a sister initiative working to develop new technologies for grassroots mappers.

I’ve mentioned Participatory GIS – the use of GIS in community mapping – in earlier posts. PPGIS is a virtual network online consisting of resources and a very active email list to support a peer-to-peer learning network spanning the globe.

So there you have it – we started with a drone swarm and ended up with a kite. The needs of tomorrow (and today) will be well served by one or the other.

As the wise one said, knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

March 2, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Cross Cutting, Democracy & Governance, Economic Growth & Trade, Education, Environment, Environment, Health, Humanitarian Assistance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Apps for Development

Apps for Development.

Voting is open for the World Bank’s apps for development competition.

“The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data.”

I like the idea. But many of the apps appear to be solutions looking for a problem, probably due to the requirements that entries use World Bank data and address the Millennium Development Goals. Many entries were not meant to address field-level development needs, which is disappointing. But it is a great initiative, which can be adjusted in future efforts.

The Microsoft sponsored ImagineCup 2011 student IT competition is under way too. Its theme is imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems, also based on the Millennium Development Goals. Deadlines loom so pass the word to interested students.

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of these contests, and if someone can analyze them, see what we can learn about ramping up efforts to develop technologies to solve real-world problems.

Personally, I would like to see the GBI portal become a clearinghouse for practical apps for development – an app store for development, if you will.

March 1, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Biodiversity, Cross Cutting, Environment, Environment, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development

Informatics, intellectual property and indigenous communities

One barrier to the use of all-important traditional ecological knowledge in the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity is differing understanding of intellectual property. Just as people from the western legal tradition often make the mistake of interpreting apparently untenured land as terra nullius and available for appropriation (a justification for land claims by colonial powers), so too, patent laws have been used to lay claim to private rights on what had previously been a public good – a US patent on turmeric as a medicine for example. The differing approaches engender distrust, and impair cooperation on globally important issues.

I’m posting about this issue both as a cautionary tale about indigenous knowledge and informatics, and as one example of how ICT can be used to overcome barriers and promote cooperation.

A recent development aims to provide an interface between “source communities” and institutions that collect and manage data that can smooth the way towards the exchange and use of data. Mukurtu is an open source community archive platform that allows indigenous communities to manage their information and tag it. It began as a project of the Warumungu Aborigional community in central Australia. The platform is now being expanded to meet the needs of indigenous communities everywhere. As the Mukurtu archive explains:

Mukurtu is the Warumungu word for ‘dilly bag.’ Warumungu elders used to keep sacred items in dilly bags to ensure that they were kept safe. The elders were responsible for the safe keeping of the items as well as the knowledge that accompanied those items. Elders taught younger generations and opened the dilly bag when it was proper.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a ‘safe keeping place.’ The archive uses the cultural protocols of the Warumungu people to arrange, sort, and present content. Any piece of content that is not marked “open” (and thus viewable by the general public) is tagged with a set of restrictions. For example, Warumungu men and women can not view the same ritual materials. So any item restricted to women only would not be viewable by a male member of the community.

Mukurtu is potentially hugely important in protecting the integrity of sacred indigenous knowledge, making it available in appropriate ways while tagging it, in a way roughly analogous to a Creative Commons license, so that it can’t as easily be misappropriated. Mukurtu can help to improve ecoinformatics by making it more inclusive of cultural protocols. It also has potential as a tool for participatory planning by indigenous communities – especially those in a race for cultural preservation, like many Pacific island communities.

BBC interviewed Mukurtu founder Kimberly Christen in a podcast available here:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20110222-1032a.mp3.

The interview begins around the 7:45 mark.

February 23, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Environment, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Forestry, Land Management, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Water

A review of ICT for development: environment and natural resource management applications

Information and communications technology has a growing role in international development. Global connectivity through the Internet and through mobile phone technology is bringing people closer together to trade, share, and learn in a wide range of sectors, from agriculture, to manufacturing, financial services to water supply.

4In coming weeks and months, we will feature innovations in ICT for environmental protection and the sustainable use of natural resources in these pages. Today we will begin with an overview of some of the different ways in which ICT can be used, and give a few examples of innovative products that we think can make a difference. Someday, we would like to have an exhaustive survey of tools. Those of you who are reading this are almost certainly already familiar with the topic. If that’s the case, you’ll know the power of social networking. Let’s do a little social networking of our own and share ideas about ICT for natural resources – either innovations that you feel the world should know more about, or ideas that you have for innovations that should be brought to the attention of technology community.

ICT can make a difference in natural resource management in several ways. A major contribution the improvement of information used for decision making and access to that information. The science of data management is called informatics, and sometimes when the term is used for environmental sciences, it is called ecoinformatics. A key to good data management is interoperability. To better understand trends and causal relationships, it is necessary to combine data from different sources. Doing this requires the development of standards and protocols for describing phenomena, as well as quality control to ensure that the knowledge that results is based on facts. We will review ecoinformatics in more detail in later posts; for now, have a look at Data Basin, a fantastic tool for curating data that can be located in space and time using maps. Data Basin provides a way to host and manipulate data sets to create knowledge – to tell a story based upon observations. But it goes further – it includes a reputation system for ranking data sets, and social networking tools to bring data users together to interpret, critique, and collaborate in the development of knowledge products.

Of course, information is not very useful if it is not accessible. And access to reliable information has long been a barrier to effective decision-making in many parts of the world. This is changing. Not only is direct access to the Internet expanding, but mobile smartphones can be used in many parts of the world to send and receive data. An exciting development is the use of mobile applications, or “apps”, to address specific needs. For example, the World Bank DataFinder app can be used to quickly access economic data from the World Bank’s own data servers. (Unfortunately, the first version is exclusively written for the iPhone, a device not readily available in much of the developing world.) Mapping apps are proliferating, allowing access to topographic and thematic maps. And farmers can use apps to learn the price of, and even sell, their commodities. The World Bank is also sponsoring an Apps for Development competition to find new uses for World Bank data recently made publicly available. Unfortunately, many of the submissions deal with global policy issues and there are few practical tools for natural resource management, agriculture, health, and other pressing development issues on the ground. This will change once a demand from the field emerges, and we find better ways to link application developers with development and natural resource management practitioners. In 2009 USAID sponsored a competition, Development 2.0 through NetSquared, a technology service for social benefit organizations sponsored by Techsoup Global, a non-profit organization that helps NGOs to access donations of hardware, software, and training from the ICT industry. Innovative partnerships such as USAID’s collaborations with NetSquared and NetHope. NetHope is a partnership of technology providers and humanitarian organizations working to solve technology challenges. NetHope is a Global Broadband Innovations Initiative partner.

The ability to remotely sense and monitor natural resources is an important new tool for scientists and managers. In future weeks we will explore how ICT is being used to monitor global change, monitor biodiversity in the tropical forest canopy, monitor coral reefs, track the chain of custody of logs harvested in West African rainforests, and detect forest fires in Central America. ICT has the potential to help identify potential links between a changing climate and disease outbreaks, forest and agricultural pests and food prices.

ICT can have significant affects where time lags are a barrier to achieving goals. For example, early responses to emergencies such as forest fires or pest/disease/invasive species outbreaks are much more cost effective and more likely to be successful than late responses. It can also make a difference when markets are involved. For example, carbon credit monitoring can be made much for efficient, and importantly, the confidence in the effectiveness of the investment can increase when time lags concerning data about the status and extent of the resource can be eliminated. Note how the artificial boundaries created by thinking in terms of “sectors” such as agriculture, environment, and health, can blur when using data in innovative ways made possible through ICT tools.

ICT can also empower communities by enabling them to collect their own data, making it possible to overcome barriers to effective participation due to nonexistent or inaccessible information, and lessen their dependence upon often inaccessible outside experts. Using ICT communities can monitor resource use, integrate traditional ecological knowledge with scientific data, and participate as full partners in decision-making processes. A participatory Geographic Information Systems (computer mapping) community already exists, and an international grassroots mapping network is sharing progress using low-cost tools such as digital cameras and kites or helium balloons to create highly detailed area maps.

We will also review some yet unmet needs that ICT can fulfill, such as:

Real-time access to information to help port inspectors to identify pests while performing their duties (e.g., warehouses, docks)
Access to keys to help parataxonomists working to identify specimens of rare or harmful species
Remote upload of information from field observations and query of decision support tools that can be used in a dynamic situation like a disaster response.
Information on spot markets for natural resource products and for reservations and logistics for remote tourism facilities such as ecotourism operations, often associated with parks and protected areas.

Some additional considerations involve the possibility of social barriers to the use of ICT. For example, women and men may have different access to ICT, as well as different needs and different ways of approaching its use. Frequently, access to tools and equipment by women remains problematic even when ICT is available to the community. We will look for examples of how use patterns, specific needs, and cultural contexts are being used to maximize women’s participation in technology transfer. More technology-savvy youth may dominate ICT, limiting its use by elders and thereby failing to access important historical knowledge and perspectives. As with gender, care should be taken in introducing technologies to ensure that its use doesn’t promote inequality or skew the generation of knowledge.

Here are some tools for natural resource management that we will look at in more depth.

1) GPS. Global Positioning System. Used for recording location, useful for georeferencing data entry and producing maps. Often integrated into cameras and smartphones. Geotagging photographs links a visual record to an observation.

2) GIS. Geographic Information System. Manipulates georeferenced data in “map layers” to permit overlaying and comparing different types of information. GIS can integrate georeferenced field observations (e.g., from GPS) with remotely sensed images from satellites and aircraft, and digitized maps of terrain, landcover, infrastructure, demography, etc. Extremely complex to use and expensive in commercial versions; open source GIS is growing rapidly to overcome barriers to entry by communities, small businesses and local government. The discipline of participatory GIS (PGIS) focuses on making tools and techniques available to communities for natural resource planning. The PGIS community provides peer to peer technical assistance through a web site and email list.

3. Telecommunications. Voice, text (SMS) messaging, and other data transmitted over handheld devices used in natural resource management for managing, monitoring and reporting.

4. Remote sensing. Some satellite remote sensing data has been made freely available and is accessible providing the technology is in place to receive and process it. Other data, primarily from high resolution commercial instruments, can be extremely expensive. Efforts to overcome these barriers include:

Terralook, a service developed by NASA and provided by USGS includes georectified LANDSAT and ASTER images as high resolution JPEG compressed images. Terralook provides a free opensource viewer that allows users to do basic measurements, annotations, and classifications of the images.

Several projects have supported the development of a hybrid GPS and camera system that can be mounted on fixed and rotary winged aircraft for mapping along transects, with software to connect tiles to provide a large-scale georeferenced image that can be used with GIS systems (high resolution cameras have been able to capture images as small as 5 cm at 1500′ elevation).

Automated remote monitoring. An early example of the use of ICT for natural resource management was the US Forest Service’s Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) deployed throughout western forests in the US to monitor fire weather. Advances in technology now make it possible to create environmental sensor networks using high-tech miniature robots to record minute changes in the environment and transmitting the data to computers through telecommunications networks or satellite uplinks. In the USA, a consortium of research institutions has created a National Ecological Observatory Network to monitor environmental impacts and changes. With the costs declining, these tools will soon be within reach of developing countries, to monitor critical watersheds, environmental impacts of extractive industries, and the habitats of rare and endangered species.

Technology transfer is an important tool for achieving global goals for economic development, biodiversity conservation, and the protection of ecosystem services. It can help to advance effective governance and rule of law through a more informed, mobilized public and better monitoring of resource use to ensure that it is lawful as well as sustainable. As a package, better governance and better information will provide an improved chance to lift the rural poor of the world out of poverty.

February 13, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Health, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Pollution Prevention, Water

Open source software and participatory GIS

I work with a small NGO in the Cook Islands called Te Rito Enua. We recently concluded a pilot project funded by the Asian Development Bank to test the use of participatory GIS techniques to help develop community-scale climate adaptation strategies. Some of our key findings echo those Oregon State University scientists Sally Duncan and Denise Lach. As reported in the People and Place blog, they observe that

“Exchange of ideas and knowledge with the assistance of a technology that is both analytical and visual draws participants into new kinds of inquiry, calling upon broader kinds and definitions of knowledge and experience. In such a setting, GIS technology lends itself to the mapping of ideas as well as landscapes.” (emphasis is mine)

In our own work, we found that that the approach provides communities with the tools to assess climate risk according to their own frames of reference. Linking models with personal experience and traditional ecological knowledge gave the communities tangible evidence of climate risk that empowers them to own the problem and develop personal and collective responses based on their own needs and priorities. The participatory GIS process highlights behavioral and development issues that affect the vulnerability of individual households and the community at large. There was a discernable sense of empowerment by participating communities in developing vulnerability maps and planning on the basis of the spatially organized information.

Replicating the process is problematic though. We opted to use expensive high-end commercial GIS software to match the system used by the government. All the GIS expertise in the country (basically 2 people at the start of the project) were schooled in the use government system. We needed to work with those people. But the high end systems are a formidable barrier to entry; acquiring the software, hardware, and training costs thousands of dollars. Communities and NGOs lack those resources, and the emerging, computer-savvy generation lacks learning opportunities. In our final report, we recommended the use of open source software and support for regional training to build up the GIS community.

Fortunately the support for open-source GIS is growing fast. Some resources for beginners include:

The Participatory GIS Forum (www.ppgis.net) (and be sure to see the very helpful email list for PPGIS, links on the site).

Mapping Across Borders/Digital Distractions blog ( http://mikedotonline.wordpress.com/ )

Quantum GIS open source software (www.qgis.org)

And a new site, Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communications (http://pgis-tk-en.cta.int/)

Don’t forget that good data layers can often be found at Data Basin, and you can upload and share your files there. (www.databasin.org)

I’ve experienced significant resistance to participatory mapping in the past from the GIS technical community. It is true that you can produce complete garbage in GIS. And garbage, in planning, can be dangerous. But the answer doesn’t lie in treating geospatial planning as an esoteric art and shunning the novices. The answer lies in widening the pool of experts and providing support for grassroots initiatives. Duncan and Lech observe:

“The frequent repetition of the phrase “re-framing the debate” during focus-group discussions highlighted the progression from the one-way communication model, in which scientists impart their findings, to the dynamic process of engaging GIS technology as a tool of inquiry, mediation, and communication. Ideas suggested for a broader debate included making assumptions explicit on GIS maps, using the power of GIS to examine new questions, and sharing responsibility for new kinds of learning. …”

Duncan, S. and Lech, D. 2006. GIS Technology in Natural Resource Management: Process as a Tool of Change. Cartographica 41:3, 201-205. DOI: 10.3138/3571-88W4-77H2-3617.

Sounds like development to me.

[The Te Rito Enua project report can be downloaded at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1735507/ADB%20SGI%20report/Final%20Report-web.pdf]

February 13, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Health, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development, Water

Use of neural net classifiers to map invasive plants using remote sensing data

Over the past year, I’ve been working with a Cook Islands NGO, Te Rito Enua, with funding from the Asian Development Bank, to develop a pilot project on participatory GIS as a tool to assist island communities to develop climate adaptation strategies. While there, Mona Matepi, president of TRE, called my attention to the problem of invasive vines on the island. Three species of woody vines* are colonizing the island forests, causing massive deforestation. They overtop and kill trees, replacing the forest with a solid jungle of vines. Since Rarotonga is dependent upon surface water for its entire supply, and since vines were killing the trees in its forested watershed, it seems like a non-trivial issue. Nobody knows how the vines will affect water supply. Will they reduce surface water supply through evapotranspiration? Will they hold the soils as well as the trees they are replacing? How will they respond to the more frequent cyclones and droughts that climate models predict? And, if they are a problem, how can they be controlled? Many questions to answer – our challenge right now is to find support for research into the issues and the options available. If no one does anything, there’s a chance, and its not a tiny one, that there could someday be a humanitarian crisis that would have severe implications for one of the dwindling number of robust Polynesian cultures remaining.

I asked University of Maryland doctoral candidate Benjamin White, a remote sensing specialist, for advice on how to illustrate the extent of the vine infestation. The island is rugged and steep, difficult to map on foot. But I was able to take some measurements using a handheld GPS unit. Ben offered to have a go at classifying the vines using my field observations as training data. Commercial remote sensing imagery provider GeoEye donated high-resolution (4m and 1m) satellite images. Ben developed a sophisticated neural net classifier, and processed the images as R/G/IR reflectance, reflectance-based NDVI, principal components, mean texture and a quick reflectance to “dense vegetation” classification. The final result was uploaded to Google Earth for visualization purposes; Google Earth data is not useful for this kind of application, but overlaying the classification results on a Google Earth image gives a context in terms of location and topography. Additional satellite imagery could provide complete ground coverage and (subject to availability) time series to measure change in land cover.

I’m hoping that the image will drive home how bad the problem is, and mobilize some support for Te Rito Enua and the Cook Islands government to get a handle on the vine problem.

Heartfelt thanks go to Ben White and the University of Maryland Geography Department, GeoEye, and the Asian Development Bank for support.

* the vines are Cardiospermum grandiflorum, Mikania micrantha, and Merremia peltata.

via GREEN HAND.

February 13, 2011/by actualize

Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Microchips Track Amazonian Trees to Support Sustainable Forestry Practices

A technician reads information, transmitted from a microchip attached to a tree, with his GPS device during a presentation of the Monitoring System Electronic Tracking and Forestry project in Nova Mutum in Mato Grosso state, August 28, 2010.

The identifiable roar of a chainsaw brings a gigantic Amazonian tree in Nova Mutum, Brazil to the forest floor.

This could be any other other day in the South American country where trees fall frequently each year in Brazil’s portion of the world’s largest forest. There is only one small detail that makes this one a little different: it is a “smart” tree; a microchip is attached to its base and contains data about its location, size and who cut it down. Each microchip tells the story of the individual tree’s life, from the point that it landed on the ground to the sawmill that processed and sold the wood, it has key information for buyers who want to know where it came from.

Though it is only a small pilot project, its leaders say the microchip system has the potential to be a big step forward in the battle to protect the Amazon. The chips allow land owners using sustainable forestry practices to distinguish their wood from that acquired through illegal logging that destroys swathes of the forest each year. Forestry engineer Paulo Borges from the organization Acao Verde, or Green action, which manages the project on a large farm, remarks:

People talk a lot these days about wood coming from sustainable forestry practices — this is a system that can prove it…

Brazil is under international pressure to reduce deforestation that destroys thousands of square miles of the Amazon each year, making the country one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gasses. The project is part of a growing trend toward lumber certification that gives buyers a guarantee the wood was produced without damaging the forest it came from. Acao Verde says widespread use of chips in trees would help eliminate corruption that allows illegally harvested wood to be “cleaned up” through bogus certification papers, and aid in spurring Brazil’s sustainable forestry movement. Similar projects in Bolivia and Nigeria use technology such as bar codes readers or satellite tracking to help crack down on illegal logging and preserve delicate ecosystems. Acao Verde collected data on trees in 100 hectares (247 acres) of forest on the Caranda farm, which produces soy and corn but maintains native vegetation on a third of the land as required by law.

Forestry engineers attach chips contained in white plastic squares similar to office I.D. cards to each tree.

Landowners who adopt the system could cut down on time-consuming paperwork and reduce the need for inspections by environmental authorities, which for years have had tense relations with agribusiness in the region. Patrik Lunardi, 26, whose family allowed the project to be carried out on their farm see the chips as a transparent way to show their sustainable farming techniques: