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