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