Margaret Corbit - CTC
(Excerpted from the Cornell Theory Center)
Although the problem is global in scale, it makes sense to begin by addressing these problems locally. In New York State, the program is led by Cornell biologist Charles Smith, with Steve DeGloria of the Cornell Laboratory for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CLEARS), and Milo Richmond of the N.Y. Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (Natural Resources, Cornell). The research team uses workstations and supercomputers, such as the IBM RS/6000 POWERparallel SP system at the Cornell Theory Center, to relate images taken from space to details at ground level. For example, when the information is available, they can relate the types of crops being grown on a particular farm to the number of breeding pairs of red-tailed hawks in the nearby forest.
GAP is a product of the information age. Based on digital technology, teams across the country are literally identifying gaps in the protection of biodiversity at state, regional, and national scales. All of the information gathered in the process goes into a computer-based geographic information system or GIS. The beauty of GIS is that the output is map-based, a format that is easily and intuitively understood.
Coordinated through the Cornell Laboratory for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CLEARS) and the Cornell Center for the Environment (CfE), New York GAP scientists gather information that ranges from remotely sensed satellite images of vegetation to maps of the boundaries of public lands and hard copy lists of the species living on them. All of this and more goes into the GIS databases, which are maintained in related layers (coverages) within the system.
By applying a series of sophisticated statistical techniques, GAP researchers have developed a model for deriving the distribution of vegetation types (forest, cropland, etc.) from satellite imagery, which they have, in turn, refined as a result of ground truthing. Confirmation of the accuracy of the model done is by biologists in the field.
The initial goal of the GAP project is to identify literal gaps in current management programs based on these vegetation types. For example, conservation biologists have been using GIS already to identify critical situations in the protection of endangered species by comparing the extent of existing reserves with the range of the species of interest. However, GAP is not limited by political boundaries within the country and, in some cases, can work at a much broader scale to assess the pressures affecting entire ecosystems.
GAP is an innovative and coordinated effort to combine existing information with new data. This publicly accessible resource will serve not only as a database for land managers and researchers, but also as an analytical tool for policy makers and an educational medium for schools and colleges. "The point is to encourage the preservation of biodiversity for future generations through presentation and communication of the pertinent facts today," says Smith. "Only if we make a meaningful linkage between identifying ground-level phenomena and tracking their behaviors from space will we be able to monitor large-scale environmental changes in the future."