Sea Dragon good for satellite images

The microsoft programme Sea Dragon it is proving to be an unique tool for exploring satellite images. Web users can interact and explore the details of the image in 2D format as they do with Google Maps.

See this test I did with a image from Paraguai and Brazil

If this script does not work try to see this test I did at O Eco

The image was downloaded from the Modis Subsets, as soon as we know that there fires happening in Manaus.

I believe Sea Dragon will help quite a lot

Back to track

I have been away of using this platform for updating news on geojournalism. But here I am , back to the track. And the news are good enough to keep things going here. First, an invitation, if you reading this post, consider following geojournalism on twitter @geojournalism. Second is to say that projects that involve use of satellite image are becoming more frequent and that we, at O Eco website – http://www.oeco.com.br, are now involved on using ESA’s images. I tell you more details soon

Geonews released

I just launched a broader project of geojournalism at O Eco (http://www.oeco.com.br/geonoticias). It is called Geonotícia (Geonews, translanding from Portuguese). It is much more complete than the previous experience (http://www.oeco.com.br/monitor) because finaly I managed to use the Earth directly on the website. The idea is to produce a story over the Google Earth.

But also I will be exploring the satellite images in a simple way. Basicaly the idea is to bring ground information to what the pictures are showing from the sky.

Journalism and the democratization of satellites

My friend James Fahn, who is the mentor of the Earth Journalists Network (EJN), has sent me an interesting article published at e360. Written byRhett Butler, it tells how satellites images have been made acessible latetly for a wider audience and how this is helping to improve conservation. There is a lot of good information about the work that Mark Mulligan, professor at the King´s College London, is doing with the help of Google Earth. I myself have written a story for O Eco about his Healthy Planet.  Also, Butler has remembered how Brazil is leading the use of environmental satellites to track deforestation and how, with the advent of REDD,  this might be a good opportunity of improving forest surveillance.

However, I fell like doing a post-scriptum for e360 article by defending my team here. Journalists are doing good use of the satellites and the geoweb tolls. I have shown in some posts bellow how useful it might be to tell a story about deforestation just spotting fire pixels in a map. Also how powerful it is to grab a image from the Modis Subset website and interpret it by yourself. I think the  idea about having journalists doing this is having a complete different approach to these images, which use to be within a black box not long time ago.

Well, maybe I talked too much about what I have done by using these tools. So here is a tip for one the best geoweb stories done so far.  It tells about the shirinking of the Aral Sea. You can download it here. (open in the new version Google Earth 5.0 – click here to update)

If you want to have an idea of what you going to see. Just watch the video bellow

Climate Change Multimedia

If you are interested on how communicate climate change in a good and appealing way, it is worth have a look on the new web site launched by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As I said before, Nasa is doing good journalism and we have some stuff to learn with them.

Take a look – http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/

Fires in South East Asia

NASA Modis image of fire pixels all over Cambodia

This week NASA´s Earth Observatory used an shocking image of fire pixels in Southeast Asia. The image was captured by the Modis Sensor used both in Aqua and Terra satellites. I fowarded the image to some friends at Climate Change Media Partnership and got interesting feedbacks. Navin Khadka, from BBC Nepali Service, wants to see if such a thing was also happening at the Hindu Kush Himalayan range. I fowarded some images that I could find at the Modis Rapid Fire Subsets website.

Then Hilary Chiew, reporter from The Star, in Malaisya, decided to contact some sources in Cambodia to check if the information that honey gatherers were really responsible for fires as NASA has stated on their image explanation. But their sources, remembered that there is no evidence that honey collection could cause large forest fires.

Well, the thing I would like to highlight here is that joining the image with some good questions we can build some interesting stories.

Geojournalism and citizen journalism

The trends of geojournalism and citizen journalism are quite similar. Both are increasing and starting to involve more people. Here I give two examples.

First, it was really interesting the post by Andrew Revkin at his Dot Earth Blog about the launch of the Ocean`s layer on the Google Earth. Some of you might have seen that now it is possible to travel around the world’s marine environment. What Revkin is discussing its is whether or not this effort of bulding a virtual world is going to lead to more conservation.

Take a look on the article here.

The other thing that has impressed me a lot is the Ushahidi software. It is a kind of automatic mapping of facts reported by citizen. They have amazing experiences already completed on the Congo and the Gaza conflicts. It is worth having a look on it. Here

Using Modis Subsets

One of the best ways of doing geojournalism is to use the images of MODIS Subsets (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/). I know some people, with GIS background, might raise some caveats about the resolution of the images, but the information available is just amazing.

Distribution of NASA´s Modis subsets

By clicking in one of these red squares you can find almost everyday images of everysingle part of the planet. Even better you can ask to see the fire pixels on the image.

And more, as we journalists are not the experts in GIS, the Subsets images can be automaticaly overlayed on Google Earth. Just click on the “Download KMZ file to Google Earth” and you can place yourself on the map. I mean then you can find what the satellite image is telling us about.

This is specialy good for monitoring forest fires. On a previous http://geojournalism.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/monitoring-a-protected-area/ I have just show you how to find shapes of protected areas. If you cross this shapes and the Modis images, you can really built a new content for you readers. You do not even need to be a GIS expert!

Forestry transparency

After being in Poznan, during the 14th UN Climate Change Conference, I got even more aware of the importance of using geographical tools (and GIS in general) as a means to foster transparency.

I had the chance during two weeks to talk with different journalists from tropical countries and they told me how dificult it can be to find information about what is happening within their native forests.

I am happy to say that the Brazilian Spacy Instititute has been doing an incredible job for 20 years on providing information about deforestation in Amazon. This has been material of large interest in Brazil and the media has also played its role by monitoring and using the data for deep investigative stories.

Journalists from other countries also can bennefit from this information. And more important than that, they can call for more transparency on forestry data. This is essencial.

Monitoring a protected area.

Due to the incredible amount of data available in the internet, anyone can monitor protected areas around the globe. For journalists, looking closer to what is happening in parks and other kind of reserves can just give a lot of material for good stories. If you read the previous post, on “Tracking Forest Fires”, you saw how simple is to download updated fire pixels into Google Earth.

Now once you just have the firepixels on your computer, you can cross this information with the limits of national park for example. The best way of doing it is to go the World Database on Protected Areas. Overthere you go to the Advance Search Area and then just look for you country. After is just to search in one of the countries protected areas categories and finally they will open a page with the parks names. Once you click in one of their names you get a lot of good information. But the main thing is to download the Google Earth -KML file with the shape of the area. And well, one click is everything done. I used this resource a lot to illustred our O Eco Monitor on Fires at the Protected Areas (in Brazil).

I get pictures like this one, from the Bom Futuro National Forest. This is how it look like on last august.