the Program Booklet - IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology ...

Panel: Societal Impacts and Benefits
Monday, October 22, 2012 (4:00pm – 5:00pm)
East Room, 3 rd Floor
Presentation Abstracts:
Estimating the value of earth observation information for monitoring
agricultural land use activities and the geographically variable impacts of
nitrates on groundwater quality
- Richard Bernknopf
Does remote sensing information provide economic benefits to society and can
those benefits be valued? Can resource management and policy be better
informed by coupling past and present earth observations with groundwater
nitrate measurements?
Earth observation in the form moderate-resolution land imagery (MRLI) is
crucial to a more complete assessment of the cumulative, landscape-level effect
of agricultural land use and land cover on environmental quality. A general
framework is presented for bringing together earth science and economics
processes at meaningful scales to interpret the environmental implications of
MRLI applications. Earth observations identify crop planting patterns and
surface management activities that influence groundwater resources over a
regional landscape. The application is focused on maximizing the value of
agricultural production while avoiding nonpoint source groundwater pollution
hazards. The value of information for the MRLI for 35 counties in eastern Iowa
has a present value $38.1B ± $8.8B (2010 $) in perpetuity ($858M ± $197M
annualized).
Impacts of Earth Observations Serving Society – SERVIR As A Case Study
- Nancy Searby
SERVIR is a collaborative venture among the NASA Earth Science Division
Applied Sciences program, USAID, and worldwide partner institutions.
SERVIR, to serve in Spanish, is a regional visualization and monitoring system
that improves environmental management and climate change response by
helping governments and other stakeholders integrate Earth observation and
geospatial technologies into decision-making. SERVIR helps nations in
Mesoamerica, East Africa, and the Himalayan regions improve their ability to
monitor air quality, extreme weather, biodiversity, and changes in land cover,
and the system has been used over 50 times to respond to environmental threats
such as wildfires, floods, landslides, and harmful algal blooms.
To measure impact, the SERVIR team has developed a results framework,
identifying the goal, objective, intermediate results, and sub-intermediate results.
2012 GHTC Page 46