Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Global environmental priorities: making sense of remote sensing

2008; Elsevier BV; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tree.2008.01.001

1872-8383

Salit Kark, Noam Levin, Stuart Phinn,

Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping

In a recent letter, Loarie et al. [ 1 Loarie S.R. et al. Satellites miss environmental priorities. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2007; 22: 630-632 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (42) Google Scholar ] raise an important concern. They suggest that future collection of remote sensing data should be better coordinated, distributed and funded to enable us to better address environmental challenges. We agree with their call but would like to note that their paper focused on the American Landsat satellite series and on some of the recent American commercial high spatial resolution satellites. A key point missed by Loarie et al. [ 1 Loarie S.R. et al. Satellites miss environmental priorities. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2007; 22: 630-632 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (42) Google Scholar ] is the increasing participation of additional countries outside the USA in large-scale Earth observation projects aimed at human and environmental issues, and efforts being made to coordinate these globally [ 2 Group on Earth ObservationsThe First 100 Steps to GEOSS. GEO Secretariat Switzerland, 2007 Google Scholar , 3 Witze A. Not enough eyes on the prize. Nature. 2007; 450: 782-785 Crossref PubMed Scopus (2) Google Scholar ]. Substantial Earth observation programs outside the USA include those of the European Union (led by France and Germany), Canada, China, India, Japan and Russia. Recently, other countries such as Brazil, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan have developed civilian space programs with significant Earth resource-monitoring components, and with their own satellite imaging sensors [ 4 Baker J.C. et al. Commercial Observation Satellites – At the Leading Edge of Global Transparency. RAND and American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), 2001 Google Scholar ]. These programs include both moderate spatial resolution (10–100 m pixels) and high spatial resolution (1–5 m pixels) multi-spectral imaging sensors.