Terra-i presented at two international events
Terra-i was presented at the Colombian Association of Researchers in Switzerland (ACIS) Symposium by Andres Perez Uribe and at the Whale of a Time festival by Mark Mulligan this past week.
Héctor Satizábal (left) and Andres Perez Uribe (right) at the ACIS Symposium, where Terra-i was introduced as a powerful tool for environmental monitoring.
Andres Perez Uribe, professor at the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland (HEIG-VD), showed the power of Terra-i and its potential applications during the Colombian Association of Researchers in Switzerland (ACIS) Symposium “Science and Development, Swiss-Colombian Bilateral Relations about Scientific Exchange,” held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) on the 2nd and 3rd of November 2012.
Mark Mulligan, senior fellow at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), Geographer, King’s College London, presented Terra-i and its findings in the Amazon basin during the Whale of a Time festival, held at the Birkbeck University of London on the 3rd and 4th of November 2012.
During both events Terra-i received a favorable response from the audience, and the attendees established the possibility for much fruitful collaboration in the future.
The Terra-i team together with CRS El Salvador under the Raices project carried out a virtual workshop through the teams platform to technicians from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, CARITAS, Universidad El Salvador, CENTA, about the Mapping of land cover using remote sensors and open source tools such as GEE, SEPAL and QGIS- Plugin Semi Automatic Classification.
Near real-time vegetation loss detection in Southwestern Ethiopia: calibration, validation, and implementation of the Terra-i system
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (the Alliance) conducted a training for local stakeholders on the use of Terra-i as part of the collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organisation – SNV in the Coffee Agroforestry and Forest Enhancement for REDD+ (CAFÉ-REDD) Project.
From May 8-12, 2017, the Terra-i team, together with staff from the DGOTA of Peru's Ministry of Environment, carried out the first field validation of vegetative land cover changes detected during Terra-i monitoring for 2016 and 2017, using the technology UAV. This work was carried out under the framework of the project “Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes”. The team carried out over-flights with a Phantom 3 advanced rotor drone and a fixed-wing Ebee drone in seven townships of Yurimaguas. The objective of this work was to recognize the dynamics of land cover and land use changes in the region while at the same time to validate the accuracy of the detections of forest loss being monitored by Terra-i in Yurimaguas.
The Terra-i team has worked hard on renovating Terra-i’s website since early this year. A set of new features on the website provides interactive contents and facilitates adaptation to the mobile devices of our users. The fresh website was developed using the latest update of an open-source, Java-based web system, Magnolia CMS 5.4.4. This update was customized to add different categories of interaction such as news, vegetation cover changes, and information, among others.
Globally more than 1 billion people depend on forests for their livelihoods. Forests play a crucial role in climate regulation, ecosystem services provision and regulation, water supply, carbon storage and many other functions that support biodiversity. Currently the global rate of deforestation is substantial, and there is a growing need for timely, spatially explicit data that flag natural vegetation changes due to human activities.
The latest update of Terra-i has been used with the Co$ting Nature ecosystem services assessment tool to understand the impacts of recent forest loss in Colombia on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
During the 1st and 12th of June 2015, the Terra-i team, together with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP) and the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina (VLIR-UNALM), conducted the second field validation of the data produced by the Terra-I system. This time, the study area was the Yurimaguas district, Alto Amazonas province, Loreto region (Peru). We used information on populated places, main roads, rivers and information on land cover changes detected for 2013, 2014 and 2015 to define the 65 sampling points (or Terra-I pixels) for the validation process (Figure 1).