The highlight of day 4 of UGI2011 was supposed to be the Meeting of IGU Commission No.3: Biogeography and Biodiversity, but after waiting 30 minutes for the attendees to show up we (Dr. Yuri Tavares Rocha of the University of São Paulo and I) gave up and went on with our schedules. That was a disappointment as I had set aside part of the afternoon for this meeting and was looking forward to interacting with biogeographers and others who are working/interested in biodiversity conservation.
The first talk I attended today was entitled “Andean Lapwing and Landscape Transformation” by Dr. Fausto Sarmiento of the University of Georgia about how the presence of the Andean lapwing (Vanellus resplendens) demonstrates the intricate linkages between culture and nature in the Andean region. He highlighted a paradox of conservation, using the Andean lapwing as the avian indicator of global environmental change and as an example of the contest between landscape change, biodiversity, and ethnoecological insights.
The second talk on my agenda was “Vegetation Indices for Reducing Soil Reflectance in Southern Zagros Forests using ASTER” by Mozhgan Abbasi of Shahrekord University in Iran was a no-show, so I used the free time to attend ”The Relationship Between Deforestation and Climate Warming” by Dr. Jay Gao of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Gao’s study represented an effort to assess the relationship between forest cover, deforestation and climate warming at the local scale and attempted to quantify the relationship between deforestation and climate warming in subarctic China, a region that is sensitive to climate change.
“A New Set of Remote Sensing Indices for Identification of Land Degradation in Arid and Semiarid Regions” by Gregory Okin of the University of California-Los Angeles where a novel remote sensing method that quantifies changes in both green and nonphotosynthetic vegetation is introduced to identify the response of vegetation to drought, fire, and grazing in arid and semiarid environments. The technique employs a spectral mixture approach to analyze changing vegetation cover in MODIS data. By using a spectrum of green vegetation as well as a spectrum of nonphotosynthetic vegetation, the technique can separate the different responses of these types of vegetation in remote sensing images to climatic fluctuations. Towards to the end of the talk, Dr. Okin provided a URL (http://www.geog.ucla.edu/faculty/okin/Gregory_S_Okin/Software.html) where attendees could download and use his proposed technique.
Abdulhakim Abdi
