Remote Sensing

The mission of NASA’s DEVELOP program is to unite NASA Earth observations with society to foster future innovation and cultivate the professionals of tomorrow by addressing diverse environmental issues today. Over 300 interns, high school through graduate school, participate in DEVELOP each year and are afforded an opportunity to refine their research skills using NASA science and technology products. This article provides a brief introduction to the internships, research and end-user partnerships.

When natural disasters strike, geospatial information technology can effectively support relief efforts. However, the impacts of these events could be minimized and considerable losses of life and property could be avoided with improved risk assessment, early warning and disaster monitoring. This article by a team of United Nations and university scholars provides a methodology for best practices.

The Spatial Computing-2020 workshop was organized to address the current scattering of research in spatial computing across many sub-disciplines. The organizing committee behind the event shares the big takeaways from the September meeting held in Washington DC.

The Data Fusion Contest is organized by the Data Fusion Technical Committee of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). The Committee serves as a global, multi-disciplinary, network for geospatial data fusion, with the aim of connecting people and resources, educating students and professionals, and promoting the best practices in data fusion applications. Here are the results of this year's contest.

Will the skies soon be congested with low-flying drones taking unwarranted photos of you or your neighbors? While the prospect for unmanned aerial vehicles in use by your local government is high, many political as well as technical challenges remain. Contributing Editor Hal Reid provides an update on the current status of issues surrounding drone usage.

This project was commissioned by the Transfrontier Conservation Areas Unit of Ministry of Tourism in Mozambique to conduct change detection analyses to identify areas of land use change from 2005 and 2008 using DigitalGlobe's Quick Bird imagery of Chimanimani National Reserve.

As flood waters rose on the Missouri River in July 2011, emergency management officials needed to quickly access images for monitoring flood stages and for search and recovery. But how to do it fast and on a miniscule budget? Jeff Herzer, a GIS graduate student and former assistant chief telecom engineer at Missouri State Highway Patrol, gives us his method for geotagging photographs and assigning lat-long coordinates to each image … all for $5.00!

In a July 31st conference call with financial analysts, DigitalGlobe’s CEO Jeffrey Tarr promised the merger with GeoEye would create the potential for a "high growth, recurring revenue geospatial information business.” With that, Tarr signaled to stockholders that more stability and less risk is a key objective for DigitalGlobe in the future. Editor in Chief Joe Francica explains why we’re hearing a change in tone from the company.

The GISCorps undertook an ambitious project to employ historical orthophoto image mosaic of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge (WMWR) and turn it into a reliable reference source for digitizing features with a reasonable level of accuracy. The project involved digitizing features, tree canopy classification and a host of other environmental analyses to provide land management information.

Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg boils down at this year’s Esri International User Conference into just a few takeaways.