What do conservation practitioners want from remote sensing?

Global map of increase in mobile phones and masts (could be a proxy for rapid development in
an area)
Maps/ evidence of artisanal industry/activities – e.g. mining, fishery/ agriculture. Mapping areas
of biodiversity and different extractive industries. Probably possible at large industry level but
what about artisanal level?
Oil spills
Carbon value of land (FFI encouraging their corporate partners to know this to help with
alternative land use values and looking for relevant data at the moment)
Urbanisation trends- is there an urbanisation data set and has this been projected forward
(something similar to European artificial land cover using CORINE?)
Some groups are doing ‘global’ cities analyses but these aren’t actually global- they are
choosing largest cities in world and doing these but we need truly global data sets to help see
where biggest expansions have been and where there might be biggest ones in the future
Species distributions
Spatial distribution of alien species- spreads of certain kinds of spatially distinctive invasive
species and locations of other distinctive habitats e.g. bamboo forests
Ability to map species ranges against data we have on their preferences (habitat types etc.) at
global scale
4. Other data/model needs
Climate change risk – cc risk index that can be associated with habitats and biodiversity. IUCN
project on this recently found climate change data sets were extremely variable and they did not
have time and expertise to bring models down to one format. It would be useful if a technical
expert could get all the relevant cc models into one system for analysis against biodiversity data
sets.
Global projections of sea level rise. [This is controversial because of the political implications of
having these maps or of them being wrong but some people e.g. Mark Mulligan at Kings, are
doing something on this].
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