The Earth Story

Using Landsat to track fires

We’ve done a number of recent posts highlighting images taken of burning fires from orbiting spacecraft, including a few in the last few days (see links at the bottom). One post highlighted terrible breathing conditions in Singapore due to fires in Indonesia. Here I’d like to show how these satellite images aren’t just useful in showing where fires are burning, they also can be put to use to make the situation better.

The fires in Indonesia in June weren’t supposed to happen. There are a number of plantations established in the areas that burned, some of which you can see in this zoomed-in and edited image from the Operational Land Imager on the new Landsat 8 satellite. Areas of vegetation that burned in June are shown in violet and reddish colors, vegetation that didn’t burn remains green in these filters.

As you can see in this sample image, the locations and intensity of the fires do correlate with plantation ownership boundaries.

Using this type of Landsat orbital data, researchers investigating the fires have found a number of details which can help in setting policy to improve or even prevent outbreaks of fire like the one in June.

Many of the plantations in this area are producing palm oil and acacia wood. There are agreements established amongst international exporters requiring “no-burn” production of these products precisely to avoid these air pollution issues. But analysis of the Landsat data shows, about 25% of the areas that burned were on locations classified as industrial plantations, and most of the others were on smaller plantations nearby.

Despite no-burn agreements, fire still appears to be the quickest and cheapest way to clear the land for production.

Only 4% of the fires consumed fresh forest, while over 50% of the fires were on land that was forested in 2008. These fires were being used, mostly, to re-clear land that had been recently deforested for production.

These details from the new Landsat satellite clearly indicate that the fires are being set to clear land and can identify some of the worst violators right down to the plantation door. The fires literally cannot hide from Landsat.

The next step might well be identifying some of the worst violations and attempting to put a stop to it. One more step is necessary though; making sure that the records of plantation ownership are up to date. In Indonesia currently this isn’t the case; even though Landsat can take an image of a burned plantation, the image can only be used as evidence if there are solid records of landownership.

Consequently, the governments of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Brunei, locations impacted by the smoke clouds from Indonesia, are now pressing the Indonesian government to update their maps and ownership records rapidly so that fires next year can be tracked to the source.

Investigations on the ground will be necessary to determine exactly who on these plantations is setting the fires, what they’re trying to clear, and how to put a stop to it. Having data from Landsat, the world’s eye in the sky, available to both governments and researchers has already helped put together a large part of the story of this fire event and is leading to international pressure that could limit or even prevent future outbreaks such as this one.

-JBB

Image credit and full details/full maps of the area available here: http://blog.cifor.org/18218/research-nearly-a-quarter-of-june-fires-in-indonesia-occurred-in-industrial-plantations

Fire in Washington: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=547540721973643&set=a.352867368107647.80532.352857924775258&type=1

Fire in Russia: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=547968785264170

Smoke engulfs Singapore: https://www.facebook.com/TheEarthStory/posts/530276833700032

Walking Carpet Weevil

Does this weevil look like a fuzzball to you? It seems, after 10 days of searching through leaf litter in the pouring rain, that’s what this small beetle looked like to the researchers who found it, so they named it Trigonopterus chewbacca. Yes, that means they named a weevil after Chewbacca in Star Wars (remember Han Solo saying to him “Laugh it up, fuzzball”?).

T. chewbacca is found on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, the largest island of the Bismarck Archipelago. Like all members of the Trigonopterus genus, it’s a flightless weevil. Males are about 3.34 millimeters (0.13 inches) in length, with a black body and hair-like structures on its antennae and legs. It also has dense scales on its head and legs that reminded the scientists of Chewbacca’s fur, hence the name.

T. chewbacca is one of four new weevils found during the study; the others were named T. obsidianus, T. puncticollis, and T. silaliensis. Unfortunately, there are already concerns for the future well-being of all four newly described species; the beetles live in forested areas that are being cleared for palm oil plantations. In their paper, the researchers stress the importance of documenting the insects of New Britain “before the remaining forests are gone”.

Photo Credit: Matthew Van Dam, Alexander Riedel, Raymond Laufa http://bit.ly/26rNH1F

References: http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=7709 http://bit.ly/1W3jxhB http://usat.ly/1WUxLRl

“Person of the Forest”

The only one of the great apes found outside of Africa, orangutans are the largest arboreal (tree-dwelling) mammals in the world. Once ranging as far as northern India, southern China, and Java, orangutans are now found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. There are two recognized species: Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelii, with the Bornean apes, Pongo pygmaeus, being further classified into three subspecies. The gentle, intelligent creatures live 35-40 yrs. in the wild, reaching puberty at around the age of 8 yrs. Although technically ready to conceive at that age, young females typically don’t have their first baby until they reach their teens, spending the intervening time learning proper maternal behavior. Female orangutans generally only give birth to a single offspring every 8 yrs., the longest period of time between births found in any mammal on the planet. This slow rate of reproduction keeps the populations from being able to rebound after disasters.

Another behavioral record held by the orangutans is the amount of parental care given to their offspring, with mothers often nursing their young for 6-8 yrs. While the young females remain with the mother until their teens, males may stay only a few years after attaining puberty and thereafter become solitary when not seeking a mate. Primatologists believe that this long parent-child relationship, rivaled only by that of humans, is due to how much the young need to learn in order to survive on their own.

Historically, the indigenous populations of Indonesia and Malaysia did not hunt or kill orangutans, thinking they were just people who were trying to avoid being made slaves. This earned them their Malay name, “person of the forest,” or “orang hutan”.

Like many of the great apes, the orangutans are gradually being driven out of their natural habitats. The booming palm oil industry has spurred farmers to chop down and burn the native forest in order to plant illegal palm plantations. Currently, Borneo and Sumatra are riddled with thousands of forest fires that were intentionally set. Because the orangutans’ diet depends on ready sources of high calorie foods (bark, leaves, flowers, insects, and over 300 kinds of fruit), relocating to new areas is already problematic and now most of the alternative habitats are going up in smoke. Government officials in those countries have stated that the fires are unlikely to stop burning until the rainy season arrives.

Image by the author

Sources

https://orangutan.org/

http://www.orangutan.com/orangutans/orangutan-facts/