Message from our Program Manager

Dear LCLUCers, friends of LCLUC, international colleagues,

 

Greetings for the New Year 2019. In keeping with the LCLUC tradition, I would like to summarize our past year achievements, mention some future plans and convey my best wishes to the whole LCLUC family and our friends around the world.

The geographic focus on Asia with socio-economic aspects of land use has remained an integral part of the program until recently. However, the new solicitation is expanding the geographic interests of the program as you will see below. Along with the continued observations from the LCLUC workhorse mission – the Landsat program –, we have experienced a tremendous increase in the number of observations at landscape scale owing to our partner agency ESA’s Sentinel program. Our program, along with many colleagues over the world, is investing in developing multi-source methods in studying LCLUC. I appreciate contributions from each and every one of you in keeping the LCLUC a global outreach, vibrant program at NASA’s Earth Science. This year the program has a new component: I was given a task to coordinate a pilot study to assess the value to NASA of commercial data from three private companies. Based on this assessment NASA will purchase a lot of commercial data in the year so that NASA-affiliate scientists will have access to these data free of charge. Seven LCLUCers are involved in this pilot and will report their preliminary results at the forthcoming Science Team meeting.

Below are some details concerning the past year progress in the LCLUC family.

Proposals 
We selected 8 out of 33 submitted LCLUC-2017 MuSLI proposals, with several newcomers to the program – who are very welcome! The LCLUC-2017 was the second Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI) round and was run with one step. Three projects are working on product generation (Type I) while five are developing prototype algorithms (Type II) that use multiple sources of data streams. We’d like to welcome the newcomers and their international collaborators to the LCLUC family. From the step-1 LCLUC-2018 proposals we selected 23 out of 51. They will submit full proposals (step-2) by Mar 1, 2019. The focus of this solicitation is Asia so that SARI will get some new additions, which may include not only South/SE Asia but also Central Asia. ROSES-2019 will be announced in less than a couple of months with the LCLUC due dates for step-1 Aug 1, 2019, and step-2 Mar 3, 2020. The geographic areas of interest include Western and Central Asia, Eastern Mediterranean and Latin America. Proposals should be focused on LCLUC but no specific topic is called for, so the solicitation is quite broad. The main restriction is that it is directed at early career scientists (within 6 years of their Ph.D.), so hopefully next year the LCLUC program will be enriched with bright young minds.

I usually remind and encourage LCLUCers to pay attention to non-LCLUC ROSES elements, such as the Carbon Cycle program, Interdisciplinary Science (IDS) Program, the Terrestrial Ecology and Terrestrial Hydrology programs, and others. Recall that the LCLUC Science Team includes not only projects that are funded through the LCLUC base funds but also those LCLUC-related projects that are funded through some of the above-mentioned Earth Science programs or some selections from those programs that are indeed supported by the LCLUC funds. This coming year, please watch for the IDS call – there must be at least a couple of LCLUC-relevant elements. Therefore, some of the IDS selections may become LCLUC ST members.

The Carbon Cycle projects (PI’s: Connghe Song and Jiquan Chen) supported by LCLUC are in the final stage. The IDS projects (PI’s: Jiaguo Qi and Charlie Vorosmarty) are in their mid-term and proceed in coordination with other relevant SARI LCLUC projects.

Science Team Meetings. 

The last spring Science Team meeting was focused on the projects on land use in South Asia; synthesis projects were also presented. The meeting included a session on MuSLI results from the previous (first) MuSLI round and rapid presentations of the newly selected (second round) MuSLI projects. It is clear that European participation at our spring meeting is weak, although the interactions between NASA LCLUCers and EU Sentinel program scientists are going on well at the individual project level. A possible solution for bringing together our folks with Europeans is to have a joint session at some big meeting in the US and/or Europe. This will be implemented at the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Milano in May, where we are organizing a special MuSLI session (convener Jeff Masek). – please watch the website. The session has been formed already and I encourage all MuSLIans as well as Landsat Science Team members to attend this session.  I’d like to express again my appreciation for the outstanding leadership in MuSLI activities by Project Scientist Jeff Masek (NASA GSFC) and thank his ESA counterpart Benjamin Koetz (ESA/ESRIN) too.

The next spring Science Team meeting will be held Apr 9-11, 2019 in Rockville, Maryland (Hilton Rockville hotel) and will include presentations from MuSLI. The general focus of the ST meeting will be Southeast Asian projects but will include also Caucasus projects (NEESPI/NEFI session) and synthesis projects. On the first day, we will hear from the seven PIs working on the one-year pilot study for NASA Data Buy (high-resolution commercial data) to assess the data value for NASA.

The regional international LCLUC Science Team meeting was held last July in Quezon City, Philippines (see details on http://lcluc.umd.edu/meetings/land-coverland-use-changes-lcluc-and-impacts-environment-southsoutheast-asia-international?page=).

I’d like to commend Krishna Vadrevu (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) who continues serving proactively and effectively as SARI Project Scientist. He enhanced LCLUC-SERVIR interactions (SERVIR is the NASA-USAID program directed at developing capacity building in remote sensing capabilities worldwide). We continue our attempt in coordinating activities in Asia with other programs, such as SERVIR, to leverage funding and exchange plans, develop a common pool of trainers, and avoid conflicting dates for events. Nancy Searby at NASA HQ has been also trying to bring SARI activities into SERVIR realm as well as the CEOS capacity building Working Group. More on the training activities below in this message. Also, see the LCLUC-related meetings on the LCLUC calendar on the website.

The next LCLUC-Atmosphere Interactions regional international Science Team meeting will be held in Malaysia, co-sponsored by Japanese NIES. Details will be available soon on the website.

Publication Products. 
The submission of the book on Drylands in Central Asia at Springer has been postponed until the end of January. The compiling and editing of this book is going full speed by Jiquan Chen, Michigan State U.), Geoff Henebry (South Dakota State U.), Martin Kappas (Inst. Geography, Goettingen, Germany) and myself. This book extends the series of the NEESPI LCLUC books published during the last several years (on the Arctic, Siberia, East Asian drylands and Eastern Europe). All contributions by LCLUC program members and our non-US LCLUC colleagues are appreciated.

I am always grateful to PI's who keep us posted on their achievements concerning published results in peer-reviewed journals and press releases. They should be submitted not only to me but to our new website curator Meghavi who replaced Kris Lasko (Kris moved on to greener pastures at US Army Corps of Engineers – congrats and best wishes to Kris). I know of some published results and I congratulate Dr. Chen, Dr. Fan, Dr. Groisman, Dr, Hansen, and many others for their peer-reviewed publications. Your updates on achievements provide the LCLUC leadership with material to showcase your projects on our website and in our quarterly e-newsletter, as well as facilitate promoting your projects to NASA upper management. 

Medium resolution and high-resolution constellations.

Research on monitoring land with moderate resolution has intensified worldwide owing to the freely accessible ESA Sentinel Program satellite data. Those data together with Landsat time series and current observations provided a serious breakthrough in studying changes in land cover/use. Two main factors contributed to this quantitative leap: first, the frequency of mid-resolution (Sentintel-2 and Landsat) observations increased, and second, the global continuous radar data from Sentinel-1 are becoming more and more utilized by researchers worldwide. The collaboration of NASA LCUCers with the ESA-affiliated European scientists working on remote sensing applications with Sentinel data has been accelerating specifically by the MuSLI projects, with the new MuSLI round and the USGS selections for the Landsat Science Team, with some of lucky PI’s selected by both NASA and USGS. With two Sentinel-2 spacecraft (a and b) the frequency of observing the same target on earth has increased even more. With Landsat-9 planned for launch in December of 2020 the mid-resolution virtual constellation for land monitoring will enhance our capabilities to observe each 20-30 m targets on the Earth’s land every 3 days (provided cloud-free skies).

The experience obtained during the past three years will play a critical role in implementing the virtual constellation concept. I still have hopes that eventually researchers will use satellite data other than those from Landsat and Sentinels. My hopes are that SARI activities will facilitate the use of Indian, Vietnamese and Thai satellite data, at least for SARI region.

As mentioned earlier, NASA is planning to have a massive Data Buy of commercial meter resolution data from Planet Lab and Digital Globe (also, atmospheric sounding data from Spire are on the list for purchase by NASA). This coming year 32 projects will be working on a pilot project to assess data value and quality for NASA, seven of them being LCLUC projects (some LCLUC-related projects managed by Applications program are in this pilot project too). The data from vendors will be open for access by the PIs in early January. Both Planet and DG data are from constellations of their satellites. In a year, we expect the purchased data become freely available to all NASA-affiliated scientists. Now, during the one-year period of assessment, the data are made available only for the pilot project PIs. However, the DG data that are being acquired through the NASA-NGA contract have been and will be available to NASA-affiliated scientists any time – please contact Compton Tucker or Chris Neigh at GSFC for details on the use, restriction, etc.

International Programs.
The NEFI (Northern Eurasia’s Future Initiative, formerly NEESPI), as parts of the Future Earth program, continues to be led by Pasha Groisman (NOAA), see http://neespi.org/NEFI-ExecutiveSummary.pdf). The LCLUC continues to support the NEFI/NEESPI through the selected projects in the area. The last selections for the Caucasus are part of NEFI, the forthcoming selections are expected to have some on Central Asia, which would feed in some projects to the NEFI program.

Last July we had the third joint LCLUC-EARSeL (European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories) workshop in Chania, Greece, in conjunction with the EARSeL symposium. Ioannis Manakos (EARSeL lead in LULC Special Interest Group) and myself with the help of the local host Chariton Kalaitzidis (MAICH, Greece) organized this workshop, focused on water, food and sustainability research supported by Earth Observations and derived remote sensing products. The LCLUC closely collaborates with the Global Land Program office (Executive Officer Ariane De Bremont at the University of Bern, Switzerland, part-time at U. Maryland). The GLP Open Science Meeting will be held next April at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

The status of NASA working with China has not changed.

Regional Networks.

One of the goals of the Global Observations of Forest Cover and Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) project, supported by the NASA LCLUC, is building regional networks. The SCERIN-6 meeting in Zagreb, Croatia, was one of the regular workshops of the South Central East European Regional Information Network (SCERIN) - the exemplary GOFC-GOLD network. The next network meeting (SCERIN-7) is planned for June in Novi Sad, Serbia.  I can’t help commending once again the SCERIN leaders (Petya Campbell, UMBC/NASA GSFC and Jana Albrechtova, Charles U., Prague, Czech Rep.) for their diligent, continuous coordination of the network activities. Networks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America play a crucial role in regional science coordination and provide an interface between GOFC-GOLD Implementation Teams and data users in the regions.

GOFC-GOLD is expanding with two emerging networks: in the Caucasus (CaucRIN) and the east Mediterranean regional (MedRIN) led by Mutlu Ozdogan (U. Wisconsin) and Vince Ambrozia (California State U.), respectively. There is a plan to revive the Central Asia regional network (CARIN) in the coming year with the help of Dr. Qi (Michigan State U.). The South American network REDLATIF had its meeting in Maryland, instead of Latin America, which made it possible for me personally to attend and meet the network members. The network, let by Wilfrid Schroeder (NOAA), has a new regional coordinator - Nicolas Mari from INTA/Argentina replaced Jesús Anaya who did a great job managing the network over the last three years.

Capacity Building.

The LCLUC program puts much emphasis on its educational component. All of our international Science Team meetings include training sessions for building capacity in the region. The NASA-ESA Trans-Atlantic Training (TAT) initiative has had six sessions by now. The next session is planned, as before, in conjunction with the next SCERIN meeting in Serbia, and is organized by Premek Stych (Charles U. in Prague), Francesco Sarti (ESA) and myself.

The coordination in capacity building activities between LCLUC and other organizations, such as SERVIR, have improved. There is a good prospect for coordinating LCLUC activities with FAO. However, there is still much room for improvement in coordinating timing, location, trainers and regional users between LCLUC and other interested parties.

The line of SARI training workshops continued last August in Vientiane, Laos and in November in Kathmandu, Nepal. The meeting in Laos had the overarching theme: Water-Energy-Food Nexus, the project led by Dr. Qi (Michigan State U.). The Nepal meeting was organized by Jeff Fox (East-West Center, Hawaii) as his Project Meeting together with Nepal organizations. For Thailand, NASA and Thai Space Agency GISTDA developed a joint plan for training activities for the next three years. The plan comprises two training sessions per year: one at GISTDA and one at a Thai university (on a rotating basis). The first session in the schedule is planned for early March at GISTDA facility in Sriracha, Thailand. The help of our regional partners Tanita Suepa (GISTDA) and Perry V. (KMUTT U.) is greatly appreciated.

Program Support. 

We continuously improve the program website, maintained by the LCLUC Program Support Team at U. Maryland: Catherine Nakalembe, Indrani Kommareddy, and a new website curator Meghavi Prashnani. Webinars continue and can be listened to as recordings on the LCLUC website. The IT support of LCLUC activities by Jack O’Bannon is appreciated. If you haven’t looked carefully at the LCLUC website please do so at your leisure – you’ll find very interesting things, like a map of projects locations, a map of team members and member pages, a map of research polygons, the calendar of LCLUC and LCLUC-related meetings and much more.

I’d like to reemphasize the needed input from LCLUCers on their metadata and links to their datasets from their projects. By the way, once LCLUCer is always an LCLUCer, implying that even when funding from the program is not currently available for someone, all LCLUC alumni are invited to keep in touch, attend LCLUC events and submit more proposals.

I repeat my appeal to all LCLUCers to help us produce statistics of achievements, such as high-visibility publications and books, as well as their student achievements (awards for papers, etc.).

I’d like to wish all LCLUC members, friends and international colleagues new exciting results and a fruitful New Year 2019.

Let’s all hope and pray for this coming year to be more peaceful than the last one.

Garik