Spying On Central America

Through a coordinated effort between the seven countries of Central America, NASA, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and others, SIAM-SERVIR is creating an easy-to-use Web portal to environmental data for the entire region. The portal (http://servir.nsstc.nasa.gov/) is online now, though it is still incomplete. The importance of having daily wildfire data available during the spring fire season convinced them to pre-release the site, Irwin says. It will be finished later this year.

Daily, near real-time updates to the portal are based on NASA satellite data, acquired and processed automatically. Web surfers - whether students, scientists, or Central American politicians - can view the information in a variety of ways: interactive 2-dimensional maps, "fly throughs" of a 3D virtual landscape, or they can download a specific slice of the raw data to do their own analysis.

"This project will be ending a distinctive feature of Central America, where environmental information has always been jealously guarded by institutions or people. Now instead we hope that the information will flow freely," says Rafael Guillen, Irwin's primary technical collaborator in Central America and an expert in Geographic Information Systems mapping software (GIS).

This perspective view was created using software from Skyline Software Systems A scene from the flyby. False colors in this satellite image of Lake Nicaragua represent types of land cover: green is forest, while purple, red, and pink represent specific combinations of agriculture, bare soil, and urban areas.

Anything that can be plotted on a map can be integrated into the master database: historic geographic records, modern road maps, satellite spectral data from Landsat and MODIS (MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), or wildlife habitat data from traditional fieldwork. Irwin, Guillen and colleagues hope that all this information, freely available and easy to understand, will help Central Americans make better decisions about the region's beleaguered natural resources.