Environment

Protecting uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest with Google Earth

July 15, 2014

Scientists from the University of Missouri and the University of New Mexico have been using Google Earth imagery to track an uncontacted tribe in Amazon rainforest in Brazil. While Google Earth adds a level of convenience for the researchers, tracking the tribe from afar can be essential to their survival. From Mongabay.com:

Small populations like these risk imminent extinction due to various threats. But contacting these tribes may prove even more disastrous. Diseases commonplace in our society, like the common cold, can wipe out large portions of such tribes in a matter of days. Therefore, using satellite images to regularly and remotely survey their populations, and track their movements could prove a good non-invasive way of keeping a close eye on the tribes and protecting them from afar.

The researchers have had difficulty finding the tribe in more recent satellite imagery, possible due to the tribe’s movement to escape drug traffickers in the area, but they continue their search to regain information about their current location.

Be sure to check out the full article on the Mongabay website.

Exploring kudzu infestation in the US

June 20, 2014

Living in the southeast United States, I’m very familiar with the vine known as kudzu. Introduced to the US from Japan in 1876, kudzu is spreading at an amazing rate of 150,000 acres each year. Kyle Kusch at Google Sightseeing has taken advantage of Google Street View imagery to showcase some amazing examples of kudzu growth.

Thanks to Street View’s historical imagery feature, we can look back to 2007 and see the same building with virtually no growth on it.

Check out Kyle’s full post for many other amazing examples of kudzu growth. As always, Google Sightseeing provides a very helpful KMZ file so you can explore those locations for yourself.

You can also read the Wikipedia article about kudzu to learn more about it and how to combat its growth.

More underwater maps to explore in Street View

June 10, 2014

Back in 2012, Google released some amazing underwater Street View imagery from a few areas around the world. As part of World Oceans Day last Sunday, Google has released some additional underwater Street View imagery that is equally stunning. In partnership with the Catlin Seaview Survey, you can now dive and explore some additional locations in Belize and the Philippines including the Belize Barrier Reef and Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park.

From the Google Lat Long Blog:

The Catlin Seaview Survey team has documented many underwater locales around the world using their 360-degree panoramic SVII cameras, including a growing number of UNESCO Marine World Heritage Sites. We’ll continue to add this imagery to Street View in Google Maps as it’s collected. In the spirit of World Oceans Day, the goal of this project is to expose the world to the beauty of these marine habitats, and to create a scientific baseline record so that their changing health can be monitored over time.

To learn more about these new additions, check out the full article on the Lat Long Blog or explore Google’s entire collection of underwater Street View imagery at maps.google.com/ocean.

You can also check out this article from last year that discusses some of the technical hurdles that they face when working to capture this kind of imagery.

Terrestrial Biomes in Google Earth

May 21, 2014

George at MyReadingMapped is a hard-working guy. Just a few weeks ago he brought us the map of the El Nino Zone, and he’s previously created a variety of other excellent maps. Now he’s back with a map of Terrestrial Biomes around the world.

In his words:

This documentary, in the form of a Google Map, enables you to zoom in close on the various terrestrial biomes around the world. It is a companion piece to my Google Map of the Geography of the Köppen Climate Classification System, and unlike the Climate Classification map, this map is more of a photo collection of vegetation that survive in various climates. The placemarks within the boxed area have descriptions of the various categories that are then color and symbol coded to the actual locations of ice sheets and polar deserts, rainforests, tundra, taiga, temperate broadleaf forests, temperate steppes, dry stepppes, Mediterranean vegetation, tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests, arid and semiarid deserts, grass and tree savannas, subtropical dry forests, and montane forests.

Learn more on his site, or check out the full map or download the KML file to really dig in.

Great work, George!

The story of how Google Earth helped to find a long-lost forest

May 12, 2014

Back in 2005 Julian Bayliss, a biologist at London’s Kew Gardens, discovered a brand new rainforest that had previously never been studied — and he found it using Google Earth.

According to author Ken Jennings:

Julian Bayliss, a British scientist specializing in plant conservation, was browsing for possible African rainforest sites on Google Earth when he stumbled on aerial photographs of Mount Mabu, a lush peak rising above the savannah of central Mozambique. He was surprised to find 27 square miles of medium-altitude rainforest—the largest in Africa—that, to his knowledge, no one had ever studied.

How could a whole rainforest hide in plain sight for so long? Locals in the area knew about Mount Mabu, of course, but the combination of a lack of roads in the area and a long-running civil war had kept outsiders away. Mount Mabu—the “Google Forest,” as it came to be called—had never been logged. It had never even been mapped.

It’s a fascinating story, as we always tend to assume that the world has been fully explored and tools like Google Earth are simply a way to see it again, but that’s not always the case. I encourage you to read Ken’s fully story to learn more.