Policy Development – Integra LLC

Agriculture, Climate Change, Environment, Forestry, Land Management, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development

ICT and Citizen Science

Maryland Science Center – Citizen Science – C3.

The Maryland Science Center is developing a smartphone application to allow users to measure and monitor the urban heat island effect. “UNI provides a glimpse” according to their website, “at what the world may look like with warmer temperatures.” This will help urban planners and inhabitants to develop strategies to cope, e.g., planting more shade trees and choosing varieties and species that are well adapted to the climate of the urban environment.

This is a good example of how ICT can enhance citizen science, a particularly promising flavor of public participation consistent with good government principles. Smartphones, while sometimes available, are not widely affordable in developing countries, and in many places, the data networks to support them are not in place. There are however ways to use SMS, which is widely available, for citizen observations. Any good examples of environmental monitoring using SMS would be welcome!

March 10, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Biodiversity, Cross Cutting, Environment, Environment, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development

Informatics, intellectual property and indigenous communities

One barrier to the use of all-important traditional ecological knowledge in the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity is differing understanding of intellectual property. Just as people from the western legal tradition often make the mistake of interpreting apparently untenured land as terra nullius and available for appropriation (a justification for land claims by colonial powers), so too, patent laws have been used to lay claim to private rights on what had previously been a public good – a US patent on turmeric as a medicine for example. The differing approaches engender distrust, and impair cooperation on globally important issues.

I’m posting about this issue both as a cautionary tale about indigenous knowledge and informatics, and as one example of how ICT can be used to overcome barriers and promote cooperation.

A recent development aims to provide an interface between “source communities” and institutions that collect and manage data that can smooth the way towards the exchange and use of data. Mukurtu is an open source community archive platform that allows indigenous communities to manage their information and tag it. It began as a project of the Warumungu Aborigional community in central Australia. The platform is now being expanded to meet the needs of indigenous communities everywhere. As the Mukurtu archive explains:

Mukurtu is the Warumungu word for ‘dilly bag.’ Warumungu elders used to keep sacred items in dilly bags to ensure that they were kept safe. The elders were responsible for the safe keeping of the items as well as the knowledge that accompanied those items. Elders taught younger generations and opened the dilly bag when it was proper.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a ‘safe keeping place.’ The archive uses the cultural protocols of the Warumungu people to arrange, sort, and present content. Any piece of content that is not marked “open” (and thus viewable by the general public) is tagged with a set of restrictions. For example, Warumungu men and women can not view the same ritual materials. So any item restricted to women only would not be viewable by a male member of the community.

Mukurtu is potentially hugely important in protecting the integrity of sacred indigenous knowledge, making it available in appropriate ways while tagging it, in a way roughly analogous to a Creative Commons license, so that it can’t as easily be misappropriated. Mukurtu can help to improve ecoinformatics by making it more inclusive of cultural protocols. It also has potential as a tool for participatory planning by indigenous communities – especially those in a race for cultural preservation, like many Pacific island communities.

BBC interviewed Mukurtu founder Kimberly Christen in a podcast available here:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20110222-1032a.mp3.

The interview begins around the 7:45 mark.

February 23, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Health, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development, Water

Use of neural net classifiers to map invasive plants using remote sensing data

Over the past year, I’ve been working with a Cook Islands NGO, Te Rito Enua, with funding from the Asian Development Bank, to develop a pilot project on participatory GIS as a tool to assist island communities to develop climate adaptation strategies. While there, Mona Matepi, president of TRE, called my attention to the problem of invasive vines on the island. Three species of woody vines* are colonizing the island forests, causing massive deforestation. They overtop and kill trees, replacing the forest with a solid jungle of vines. Since Rarotonga is dependent upon surface water for its entire supply, and since vines were killing the trees in its forested watershed, it seems like a non-trivial issue. Nobody knows how the vines will affect water supply. Will they reduce surface water supply through evapotranspiration? Will they hold the soils as well as the trees they are replacing? How will they respond to the more frequent cyclones and droughts that climate models predict? And, if they are a problem, how can they be controlled? Many questions to answer – our challenge right now is to find support for research into the issues and the options available. If no one does anything, there’s a chance, and its not a tiny one, that there could someday be a humanitarian crisis that would have severe implications for one of the dwindling number of robust Polynesian cultures remaining.

I asked University of Maryland doctoral candidate Benjamin White, a remote sensing specialist, for advice on how to illustrate the extent of the vine infestation. The island is rugged and steep, difficult to map on foot. But I was able to take some measurements using a handheld GPS unit. Ben offered to have a go at classifying the vines using my field observations as training data. Commercial remote sensing imagery provider GeoEye donated high-resolution (4m and 1m) satellite images. Ben developed a sophisticated neural net classifier, and processed the images as R/G/IR reflectance, reflectance-based NDVI, principal components, mean texture and a quick reflectance to “dense vegetation” classification. The final result was uploaded to Google Earth for visualization purposes; Google Earth data is not useful for this kind of application, but overlaying the classification results on a Google Earth image gives a context in terms of location and topography. Additional satellite imagery could provide complete ground coverage and (subject to availability) time series to measure change in land cover.

I’m hoping that the image will drive home how bad the problem is, and mobilize some support for Te Rito Enua and the Cook Islands government to get a handle on the vine problem.

Heartfelt thanks go to Ben White and the University of Maryland Geography Department, GeoEye, and the Asian Development Bank for support.

* the vines are Cardiospermum grandiflorum, Mikania micrantha, and Merremia peltata.

via GREEN HAND.

February 13, 2011/by actualize