Spying On Central America

NASA-supported researchers have developed software anyone can use to fly, video game-style, over Central America and survey its current environmental conditions.

Flying over the lush, mountainous landscape of Central America, a local environmental official points out plumes of smoke where "slash and burn" agriculture is destroying hundreds of acres of rain forest. In the distance, dark-tinted waters of a red tide nearing coastal fishing villages are clearly visible from this altitude. He points to a silt-filled river snaking through the forest below - a symptom of soil erosion caused by unsustainable farming practices upstream, he explains.

The view evokes a kind of intuitive understanding of these environmental concerns that words alone can not provide.

Juan Mario Dary, the environmental minister of Guatemala, gave such an aerial tour of Central America recently. Only he wasn't actually in a plane. In fact, he wasn't anywhere near Central America. He was in Tokyo, Japan, at the second annual Earth Observation Summit.

The tour Dary gave was a virtual flight over a computer-generated, 3-dimensional landscape - something like a "flight simulator" video game. The view through the window, though, is reality. It's based on real satellite and geographic data, offering a "big picture" view of how humans are affecting the rich diversity of wildlife in the region.

more A computer-generated, 3-dimensional landscape of the Caribbean coastal plain of Costa Rica based on satellite data.

"In some ways, it's better than the real thing," says Daniel Irwin, a research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "The user can choose which 'layers' of the data they want to see, some of which aren't obvious from a real plane: conservation park boundaries, small village locations, ecosystem types, and endangered species habitats, just to name a few."

This virtual landscape software is one of many new tools that Irwin and others are developing as part of an international project called SIAM-SERVIR, an acronym in Spanish meaning "Mesoamerican System of Environmental Information - Regional System of Monitoring and Visualization."