A Classified Success – this article first appeared in The American Surveyor Magazine, Feb, 2013
Energized by the launch of the International Polar Year in 2007, two companies came together that same year to initiate their own commitment to the planet: Planet Action (PA). Co-founded by satellite data provider Spot Image (now Astrium GEO-Information Services) and GIS provider Esri, Planet Action provides geospatial technology and expertise to organizations working on climate change causes, impacts and solutions.
To understand the significantly challenging mission of Planet Action’s projects, consider the small sampling of some of the land issues before them.
• Mexico loses on average 350,000 hectares of forested land every year, an area about the size of Rhode Island.
• Colombia loses nearly 200,000 ha of forests every year–though the true figure may be higher since an estimated 100,000 ha of native forest are illegally cleared annually.
• France has a mountainous region in the Pyrenees with an uncertain environmental future. The abrupt abandonment of this formerly human-dominated land in the Pyrenees in the 20th century, coupled with natural afforestation, has produced an organically grown land-use conundrum–how to understand the impacts of this severe land-cover change and create a balanced ecosystem that supports both biodiversity and the return of human interest in the land.
These three examples are only a razor-thin slice of the environmental issues layering the globe. However, they do represent three successful beginnings on that elusive road to environmental sustainability, the ultimate goal for the hundreds of projects supported by Planet Action. And on a personal note for five students at the University of Vermont (UVM), these three projects seeded a unique work-study class and helped to launch five budding careers in the geospatial industry.
A Work-Study Debut
Since its launch in 2007, Planet Action has supported more than 600 nonprofit projects worldwide in various domains such as biodiversity, forestry and water resources. Through the donations of satellite images, GIS solutions and image processing systems by program partners, Planet Action supports both small, local agencies such as NGOs, universities and research centers as well as large agencies such as UNESCO, WWF, the Green Belt Movement and IMAZON. Planet Action donated more than 1,000 satellite images alone in 2011 and program partners such as Trimble have donated their eCognition® image analysis software licenses to aid users in their image processing tasks–to date, more than 100 eCognition Developer licenses have been donated to more than 50 projects in 43 countries.
Though Planet Action started small with a roster of 13 projects, by 2010 it had increased to 500, and has added more than 150 since. Three of the 2010 projects were those from Mexico, Colombia and France, all of which similarly required satellite imagery to classify and map the land cover, but for notably different environment types–mangroves, dense forests and an alpine ecosystem. As each of these environments present unique classification challenges, the project managers required an image-analysis system that could delve beyond traditional pixel colors and recognize contextual elements to clearly distinguish different vegetative types. To achieve that, each respective project manager wanted to produce their data layers with Trimble’s eCognition, an object-based image analysis (OBIA) software, but they didn’t have the in-house resources to take on the task.
Enter the UVM’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL). SAL’s personnel use eCognition extensively for their varied work that includes biodiversity analysis, land-cover mapping and urban tree-canopy assessments. Their work has been so successful, SAL’s Director Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne–who has been an eCognition user since 2002–was able to establish the university’s eCognition Center of Excellence in 2009 (now Trimble Imaging Innovation Program), which has helped to further augment SAL’s prestige and revenue.
With such a prominent profile, it did not take long for Trimble to connect O’Neil-Dunne with these Planet Action projects in need of image-analysis help–a connection that came at about the same time a group of five students involved with the lab were keenly interested in becoming more proficient in OBIA.
"This was an ideal need-need pairing," says O’Neil-Dunne. "Not only were the projects particularly well-suited for object-based image analysis, they would enable these students and the project managers to learn the capabilities of the software through hands-on, real-world projects with deadlines, specific deliverables and end users greatly invested in the outcomes."
And with that, a work-study class was born.
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