NASA Earth Science News

View of earth from space station : NASA/Mark Vande Hei.

On February 22nd, a 3 year agreement was signed between NASA and Conservation International (CI), to use global Earth observations from space to improve regional efforts that assess natural resources for conservation and sustainable management.  Some of the areas which benefit are seen here.

Sanje Waterfall in Udzungwa National Park, Tanzania, overlooks farmland that depends on its water. NASA and Conservation International are partnering to map and value ecosystems in Tanzania as well as other African countries that are members of the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa. 

( Conservation International/Benjamin Drummond)

Conservation International/Kristin Harrison and Jeremy Ginsberg

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A person fishing at sunset on Tonlé Sap Lake, near Akal village in Cambodia. Tonlé Sap, which feeds into the Mekong River, is an important food and economic resource for surrounding populations but is threatened by overpopulation, overfishing, dam development and more. 

NASA and Conservation International are partnering to map ecosystems connected to and including Mekong River to develop tools for evaluating the impacts of such threats as well as potential interventions on the entire Mekong Basin. 

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Woody Turner, NASA’s program manager for ecological forecasting in the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division. “With these initiatives, we aim to create and test standardized analysis approaches that can then be applied to ecosystems around the world, once again demonstrating the benefits to society of NASA’s satellite data and research.”
(See report by Samson  Reiny, NASA's Earth Science News Team)

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