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The User Working Group (UWG) of SEDAC, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center operated by CIESIN, met June 15-16 at the Lamont Campus in Palisades and at Columbia University’s Morningside Campus. The UWG is tasked with guiding SEDAC on user needs and overall strategies regarding socioeconomic data and services complementary to remote sensing data. Leading experts from the social, natural, health, and information sciences make up the group, with representation from the academic, governmental, and nongovernmental sectors. The new UWG chair is Molly Macauley, an economist who serves as a research director and senior fellow at Resources for the Future. She replaces the outgoing chair, Harlan Onsrud of the University of Maine, who will remain a member of the group until the end of the year.

The UWG meeting reviewed SEDAC’s plans to improve its data resources in support of operational disaster mitigation, response, recovery, and reconstruction activities, drawing on lessons from the Haiti earthquake and other major disasters of the past decade. UWG members also discussed how SEDAC could better assist the research and applications communities concerned with climate change impacts, vulnerability, adaptation, and mitigation. Invited guests included award-winning journalist and the New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin, who spoke about communicating science in the post-media world as well as his frequent use of SEDAC’s data. Eric Sanderson, senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, reflected on his collaboration with CIESIN in the development of the Human Footprint and Last of the Wild datasets available from SEDAC, in the context of his recent book, Mannahatta, a natural history of the island of Manhattan.

The logo of the Polar Information Commons (PIC), an initiative launched in Oslo June 8. The PIC is envisoned by the scientific and data community as an open, virtual repository for vital scientific polar data and information.

In response to the pressing need to preserve polar data and ensure their long-term accessibility, an international team of scientists and data managers has established the Polar Information Commons (PIC), an information resource about the Earth’s polar regions that will be managed by the polar science and data community and freely accessible to all. The launch of the PIC is being celebrated in Oslo June 8 at the International Polar Year (IPY) Oslo Science Conference, a gathering of several thousand scientists involved in the IPY 2007–08.

CIESIN director Robert Chen is chairing the launch event in his capacity as secretary general of CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology of the International Council for Science (ICSU), and as lead of the ICSU grant that supported planning of the PIC. The PIC aims to provide a long-term open access framework for polar science data through the IPY and other programs. It includes a method for “badging” data as part of the PIC and a set of community “norms” to encourage appropriate use and acknowledgement of PIC data. A key element of the PIC is the PIC cloud, a repository developed by the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) in collaboration with the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).

Other PIC partners include the International Arctic Science Council (IASC), the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the IPY International Program Office (IPY IPO), the ICSU World Data System Scientific Committee (WDS-SC), Science Commons, the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

The Summer Institute for Climate Information on Public Health, now in its third year, provides hands-on training for health-care decision makers from developing countries around the world. Held at Columbia’s Lamont Campus in Palisades, New York, the two week session this year ran from May 17 to May 28. It was organized by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) in partnership with CIESIN and the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Summer Institute is also conducted under the auspices of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

This year’s group of students numbered 13 professionals from 10 countries. They attended lectures and participated in interactive exercises, with an emphasis on tools that facilitate the integration of climate, public health, and population data. CIESIN’s associate director of geospatial applications, Mark Becker, addressed the spatial components of attendees’ work by teaching the use of Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Google Maps for Public Health.

Managers and staff from more than a dozen NASA-supported Earth Science Data Centers gathered in Virginia Beach, Virginia May 4–6 to discuss opportunities for infusing new technologies and standards and for promoting coordination and collaboration both between NASA centers and with external groups. CIESIN director Robert Chen, associate director for Information Technology Sri Vinay, and senior staff associate Alex de Sherbinin participated in the meeting, representing the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. Alex de Sherbinin introduced the workshop’s keynote speaker, Rob Covey of National Geographic, who described how the organization has developed and implemented a coherent Web presence for a diverse set of National Geographic units and partners including its magazine, television channel, and online resources. In addition, de Sherbinin presented a poster paper co-authored with Chen and CIESIN senior digital archivist Robert Downs on SEDAC’s implementation of a digital asset management system to support long-term data stewardship. Vinay gave a presentation on SEDAC’s ongoing Web site redesign process and the Web development framework technologies that were evaluated. Chen serves as SEDAC’s manager, de Sherbinin as its deputy manager, and Vinay as its systems engineer.

The NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), a world leader in the provision of Earth observations and environmental data for research, education, and decision making, supports a range of discipline-focused data centers around the United States, including SEDAC. SEDAC provides data that complements remote sensing data primarily addressing human-environment interactions.

The Population-Environment Research Network (PERN) will hold a cyberseminar from May 10 to 21, “What Are the Remote Sensing Data Needs of the Population-Environment Research Community?” The goal of this online seminar is to identify the past use of remote sensing data products in population-environment research, to explore challenges of integrating remote sensing data, and to begin to think about the specifications of future remote sensing data products that would meet the needs of the research community. Another goal is to consider a process for greater social science input into the design of future satellite sensors.

The cyberseminar is co-sponsored by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN, which supports the PERN Web site, and by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). SEDAC has been tasked by NASA and its User Working Group to think specifically about how to increase the input of social scientists in designing future missions, and GEO has expressed a similar interest in engaging the social sciences as it builds a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) to address nine societal benefit areas.

Climate change, innovation in geographic information science (GIS), and the intersection of geography and human rights were some of the conference themes explored by CIESIN participants of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) held in Washington, D.C., April 14−18. Deputy director Marc Levy presented a paper, “Population Change in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1990-2000: A Spatial Time Series,” which he co-authored with CIESIN colleagues Maria Muñiz, Susana Adamo, Gregory Yetman, Maria Elisa Lukang, Tricia Chai-Onn, and Sandra Baptista, and with colleagues from University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, T. Mitchell Aide and María José Andrade Núñez. At the session, Greening the City: Environment, Economy, and Urbanization, Baptista presented her paper “Adapting to Urban Climate Risk in Coastal Brazil.” A paper co-authored by CIESIN director Robert Chen with Mark Parsons of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, “Creating an Information Commons for the Earth’s Polar Regions,” was presented by Parsons at the session, Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience. Senior information specialist Joe Schumacher staffed the NASA Earth Sciences, Data, and Services exhibit booth on behalf of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN.

The largest, most comprehensive global information service on environmental law, ECOLEX, combines the environmental law information holdings of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) into an accessible and easy-to-use online service. CIESIN is supporting ECOLEX through a search service that enables users to easily search for and obtain Conference of Party (COP) decisions for ten major treaties. The tool was initially developed as part of the Environmental Treaty and Resource Indicators (ENTRI) service of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). The COP decision search tool indexes thousands of decision documents using a Google Search Appliance and has recently been updated with new COP decisions as of April 2, 2010.

Over the past few decades coastal waters throughout the world have received an increased influx of nutrients from land-based sources. The resulting change in water quality has many possible implications for coastal and marine ecosystems. In extreme cases eutrophication results, where excess nutrients in the water stimulate excessive plant growth. This can lead to hypoxia—oxygen-depleted “dead zones”—and harmful algal blooms.

Coastal water quality over time may be assessed by measuring chlorophyll concentrations as an indicator of algae biomass. A new global data set, Indicators of Coastal Water Quality, aims to identify near-coastal areas that have improving, declining, and stable chlorophyll concentrations in order to help identify areas that may need management intervention. The data set uses chlorophyll-a concentrations derived from NASA’s sea-viewing wide field-of-view sensor (SeaWiFS) to analyze trends over a ten year period (1998–2007). This data set is a result of a pilot effort, and the methodology will be further refined as part of a NASA Decisions feasibility project.

Linking Earth observations and other spatial data from many different systems is a goal of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), an intergovernmental initiative aimed at developing the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). CIESIN associate director for Information Technology, Sri Vinay, is representing CIESIN at an international workshop in Frascati, Italy on March 10-12, helping to kick off the third phase of the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP-3). CIESIN plans to contribute to AIP-3 by enhancing a new Population Estimation Service. The service, which was developed as part of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), supports spatial queries about population distribution using open interoperability standards. CIESIN is also working to develop user interfaces that recognize open access licenses such as those developed by Creative Commons. Vinay is co-leading a session on data sharing approaches at the workshop and is helping to develop specific scenarios of interoperable data services in several different application areas, which will be demonstrated at the next GEO Ministerial meeting in Beijing in November 2010.

In just a bit more than five years, the world has experienced an unprecedented string of “megadisasters.” These events were the result not only of the awesome power of earthquakes and cyclones but were also due to the high exposure and extreme vulnerability of populations around the world to a range of hazards. At the end of 2004, the South Asian tsunami shocked the world with its sudden devastation of many densely settled and poorly protected coastal areas. In 2005 and 2008, we witnessed the suffering of hundreds of thousands affected by major earthquakes in Pakistan and China, compounded by poorly constructed schools, dams, and other structures. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 gave us an object lesson about the potential for disaster even in a highly developed country, if governments and citizens fail to prepare for hazards and fail to respond effectively to them. Then Cyclone Nargis in 2008 provided an even more devastating example of the vulnerability of disenfranchised populations worsened by a rogue government. And now we have begun the year 2010 with damaging earthquakes in both Haiti and Chile—the first inflicting much more death and destruction than it should have and leaving a massive and continuing humanitarian crisis in its wake.

These disasters underscore the important roles population location and physical and social vulnerability play in amplifying the risks of natural hazards around the world. We know that population has been growing much faster in coastal areas than elsewhere, often accompanied by accelerated stress on coastal ecosystems and marine resources. Rapid urbanization is occurring in many areas prone to earthquakes, landslides, and/or floods with little or no attention to building codes, protective works, land degradation, or land use restrictions. Poverty continues to force millions to live in substandard housing in environmentally marginal areas with few resources to draw upon when drought, floods, and other hazards strike. Full story

The Web site for CIESIN’s flagship data product—Gridded Population of the World (GPW), now in its third version—has been enhanced with three new services and tools: the Population Estimation Service, a Web-based service for estimating population totals and related statistics within a user-defined region; and two mapping tools.

Because the Population Estimate Service is accessible through three standard protocols (the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web processing service (WPS) standard, a representational state transfer (REST) interface, and a simple object access protocol (SOAP) interface), it can accommodate a wide variety of map clients and tools and users can quickly obtain population estimates for specific areas without having to download and analyze large amounts of spatial data. Users submit polygons that define an area, then the service returns measures of population, land area, quality measures, and basic parametric statistics. These estimates are based on the gridded population data for 2005 from the GPW v3 data set developed by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN.

One of the new mapping tools also released, based on the technology used by Google Maps, demonstrates the Population Estimation Service. It lets users select an area of interest by drawing a polygon on the map and submit the request to the service, and it displays the results. The other tool is a basic mapper that provides previews of the GPW v3 data sets with an overlay of national boundaries, and lets users pan and zoom to an area of interest before downloading the data sets. For more complex visualization and overlay of other data sets, the stand-alone SEDAC Map Client is recommended.

An interactive mapper has been released as part of the Last of the Wild Web site. This new mapper provides previews of the Last of the Wild, Version Two data sets. Using the mapper, users are now able to visualize the human influence index and the human footprint data sets, overlay national boundaries, or pan and zoom to an area of interest to gain a preliminary understanding about the data sets before downloading them. The mapper was developed using the open source Open Layers client technology with Geoserver backend.

For more advanced visualization and overlay with other related data sets, users may turn to the stand-alone SEDAC Map Client, which is offered via CIESIN’s World Data Center for Human Interactions in the Environment Web site. The Last of The Wild, Version Two data sets depict the extent of human influence on terrestrial ecosystems, using data sets compiled on or around the year 2000.

The 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which ranks 163 countries on environmental performance, has been released at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos, Switzerland. The Index, produced every two years since 2006 by researchers at CIESIN and Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy, is based on twenty-five indicators grouped within ten core policy categories—including environmental health, air quality, water resource management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry, fisheries, agriculture, and climate change—in the context of two objectives: environmental health and ecosystem vitality. The EPI’s proximity-to-target approach, in which each country’s performance is measured against clearly defined targets, enables comparisons among countries with very different characteristics.

Although some rankings have changed dramatically—the U.S. dropped from 39^th to 61^st place since the 2008 index, for example—so too have the methodologies and data. “A better focus is the comprehensive country profiles, which present a measurement across the different environmental indicators,” says CIESIN senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin, a co-author on the report. These profiles, designed by CIESIN research associate Valentina Mara in conjunction with the Yale team, show a country’s scores for the indicators, policy categories, and objectives. Drilling down here, de Sherbinin points out, can help decision makers identify the needed focus of attention for a particular country. Geographic information specialist Malanding Jaiteh, CIESIN deputy director and EPI project leader Marc Levy, and senior research staff assistant Paola Kim were also part of the CIESIN team.

Analysis shows that income is a major factor in high environmental performance, but that policy choices may trump economic capacities. For example, the differences between neighboring countries Chile (ranked 16^th) and Argentina (70^th), or between Malaysia (55^th) and Thailand (68^th), have a lot to do with different approaches to environmental policy and governance. The biggest changes this year were seen in the scores for air pollution and effects on ecosystems, and a new indicator, water scarcity, was added. The indicators were drawn from international organizations such as the World Bank, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Some of the data sets are drawn from government reporting that is not subject to external validation, and incomplete data have resulted in incomplete representation of countries. The report calls for greater investment by the world community in environmental monitoring, and for data sharing and transparency on the part of national governments.

CIESIN staff members were awarded third place in a juried paper competition at the Map India 2010 conference held January 19–21 in Gurgaon, India. The paper, “Choosing the Right GIS Framework for an Informed Enterprise Web GIS Solution,” written by geospatial application specialist Sneha Rao and associate director of Information Technology, Sri Vinay, won in the technical session category and was presented by Rao at the Web GIS technical session on Jan 20. The paper evaluates various architectural and system components using factors such as workflow, performance, scalability, interoperability, total cost of ownership, and others in designing an enterprise Web GIS solution, and discusses specific usability issues that can help optimize the responsiveness of a particular client when rendering large data sets. It draws from CIESIN’s rich expertise in the design and implementation of Web GIS in providing suggestions on an enterprise solution.

Map India 2010 is a global conference whose theme this year was “geospatial vision for India.” ERDAS, ESRI, OGC, and other international institutions involved in organizing and sponsoring the event were present. An online version of the paper and abstract will be available soon on the Web site of GIS Development, a geospatial resource portal.

TerraViva! SEDAC Viewer is a map viewer and standalone software application that uses a powerful data-viewing engine and tools to enable the visualization and integration of hundreds of socioeconomic and environmental variables and layers, including a range of satellite-based data. A three-part tutorial that explains how to use TerraViva! is now available through the YouTube Web site. The tutorial was produced by senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin and senior media designer Al Pinto, under the auspices of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN.

CIESIN’s role in making climate change data freely available to the public is noted in an article in the NASA Earth Science Research Features 2009 volume of Sensing Our Planet. The article, “A Catalog of Change,” looks at an unprecedented database designed for use by international agencies and government leaders, as well as scientists, to further research and understanding of current and future global climate change impacts. A team of researchers, led by NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, has compiled information on the effects of climate change into a comprehensive database of more than 600 studies on organisms and physical systems around the world. The development of the database—the Observed Climate Change Impacts Database—grew out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007. The data are freely available to the public through the IPCC Data Distribution Center, a joint service of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN, the British Atmospheric Data Centre, and Germany’s High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum). Sensing Our Planet, published annually, is a collection of articles about how scientists use earth science data to learn about the planet.

The NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN has released the 2009 National Resource Management Index (NRMI). This version of the NRMI has updated data and improved methodology for the eco-region protection indicator, one of the four indicators that make up the NRMI. The improvements included the exclusion of international protected areas, many of which lack effective protection (the ones that do already have a national designation), and improved coastal boundary matching between biomes and national boundaries using the highest resolution coastal data available.

The NRMI is a composite index of four measures. In addition to the eco-region protection indicator, the indicators include: access to improved sanitation, access to improved water, and child mortality. In response to the search for a natural resources management indicator initiated by the the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the NRMI was first developed in May 2005 by a consortium led by CIESIN and including the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), the University of New Hampshire Water Systems Analysis Group, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Columbia University Tropical Agriculture Program. The MCC uses the NRMI as as one of its performance indicators to help determine country eligibility for its foreign aid programs.

The Gridded Population of the World (GPW) version 3 data set available through the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Application Center operated by CIESIN is the basis for a new set of grid-based population cartograms for most countries of the world recently released on the interactive Worldmapper Web site. Worldmapper is a collection of cartograms in which a particular thematic variable is substituted for the land area of a map, effectively re-sizing the map. In the case of the population grids, each cartogram provides a distinctive visualization of the internal population variations within a country or region. More-populated areas appear inflated whereas less-populated areas are less prominent. The cartograms have been made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

Anthropogenic biomes, also known as “anthromes” or “human biomes,” describe the terrestrial biosphere in its contemporary, human-altered form using global ecosystem units defined by patterns of sustained direct human interaction. In a paper presented in the journal, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Ellis and Ramankutty (2008) delineate 21 anthropogenic biomes based on population density, land use, biota, climate, terrain and geology. The anthropogenic biomes are further grouped into six major categories: dense settlements, villages, croplands, rangeland, forested, and wildlands. A new Web site, “Anthropogenic Biomes (version one),” provides access to the spatial data sets described in the paper. Available in raster GeoTiff and GRID formats, the data may be downloaded as one global grid or a grid for each of the six populated continents. The methodology involves a multi-stage procedure where “anthropogenic” cells are first separated from “wild” cells based on presence of population, crops, or pastures. A detailed description of the methods utilized to produce the data, as well as research results, may be downloaded from the Web site.

In a video interview for the September 24 posting of the blog, “The New Security Beat,” which is hosted by Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, CIESIN deputy director Marc Levy talks about using CIESIN’s gridded population data product, Gridded Population of the World (GPW), to more easily combine population and geographic data. “If you want to ask questions about how people are located with respect to drought hazards, for example, you can take your map of the location of droughts, overlay it with our map of population, and then get a sense of how many people are located in these drought zones,” said Levy. ECSP director Geoff Dabelko is the interviewer.