At this meeting, we talked about the big picture of our research together over the next few years, and made a few specific plans for Alexis, who will be starting on the project early this summer.
Our driving question can be phrased like this: Is there systematic clearance of land that is being replaced by oil palm? Is oil palm replacing (a) primary forest; (b) secondary forest (c) barren lands; or (d) other crops?
Our immediate questions focused on the remote sensing work that will be led by Alexis beginning this summer. In particular, we asked ourselves about the potential ability of the Landsat data to show the important types of land uses in Borneo. Among these were Oil Palm, Rubber, Rice, Timber Plantations, Mixed Agriculture 1 (Rubber in Forests), and Mixed Agriculture 2 (Peat and Mangroves).
Additionally, there are several questions that we can/should follow up on in the next few weeks:
1. The full repository of Landsat data will be released for free in the near future. (1) When will this be? (2) Is there likely to be useful data, or will we be limited by the spatial resolution? (3) are there smart algorithms for merging a large number of landsat scenes through time for a land use classification? (3) Can an object-oriented classifier be of use here? What program should we use for the classification? (4) should we create a public database of this work?
Jeff noted a few small items to remember for the future:
1. We might look at the concessions for oil palm listed in the WWF document, and contrast that with Google Earth data.
2. Where will we find ground-truthing info? This may be google earth or some other strategy.
3. We might find high-resolution data (through Virtual Earth, world Wind, for example).
4. Should we create a web mapping server of our data?
To do:
- S: readings to Alexis
- A: shop for computer,
- start a web site (maybe through Google for easy collaboration?),
- read introductory material,
- Begin working with Landsat data provided by Stephane.
Our next meeting together is May 21 at 14h00, in Jeff's lab.
No comments:
Post a Comment