NASA holds meeting on land cover and land use change

THE PHILIPPINES recently hosted its first-ever NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Land Cover/Land Use Changes (LC/LUC) and Impacts on Environment in South and Southeast Asia International Regional Science Meeting of the South/Southeast Asia Research Initiative (SARI), which was held at Richmonde Hotel, Libis, and the University of the Philippines Diliman, both in Quezon City. The meeting, which opened on May 28, lasted six days, with three days devoted to seminars and the remaining three days to the training of young scientists in the use of remote-sensing methods.

It was attended by hundreds of scientists and environmental experts, mostly from the Southeast and South Asian regions, who discussed issues like the rapid depletion of natural land into converted agricultural and urban zones, including its implications and profound effects on the ecosystem, but most especially the different advanced tools in monitoring these changes, such as satellites for land or water changes, drones for crop and farmland conditions, environmental mapping, and remote air quality monitoring.

SARI is under NASA’s Earth Sciences division. The six-day meeting was organized by Krishna Vadrevu from NASA, with local organizers Mylene G. Cayetano and Gay Jane Perez of the Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology of the University of the Philippines Diliman. While the Philippines is just starting to nurture its remote sensing capabilities, the pinnacle of which is the Diwata-1 microsatellite, it has no shortage of homegrown environmental scientists and experts.

According to Chris Justice, chairman of the department of geographical sciences of the University of Maryland and one of the presenters at the meeting, there is a need to unify scientists from South and Southeast Asia and their data and researches into one repository to develop each country’s capability. “The idea of LC/ LUC and SARI as a whole is to bring scientists from the region[s] who are working on the same problems and to share their methods and experiences, that way we can help each other,” Mr. Justice said.

For her part, Ms. Vadrevu said, “[W]hat we need to achieve is to highlight the issues that policies [on land use and land use change] revolve [around] and involve the policymakers so that they may have a better understanding of them.”