Happy New Year 2020

Dear LCLUCers, friends of LCLUC, international colleagues,

Greetings for the New Year 2020. I would like to convey my best wishes to the whole LCLUC family and our friends around the world. 

During the past 5 years, the geographic focus of the program has been on Asia with socio-economic aspects of land use as an integral part of the program. However, the most recent solicitation has opened the geographic interests of the program to other regions. Our program, along with many colleagues over the world, is investing in developing multi-source methods in studying LCLUC using all available mid-resolution resources, Landsat and Sentinel-1,2 being the primary assets as they freely and easily available. 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 past year the program has had another aspect that may push the envelope further in our monitoring capabilities. Several of the ongoing projects were requested to participate in a pilot study to assess the value to NASA of commercial 0.3 - 3 meter-resolution data from Planet Lab and Digital Globe companies. The data purchased during this pilot project are available for the use by NASA-affiliate scientists and there is a good chance that new data for the projects selected for funding under the ROSES-2020 solicitations will be purchased by NASA and become available free of charge. The results of the pilot studies are encouraging, the use of very-high resolution data enhances our abilities in LCLUC monitoring in many ways with some caveats. The plan is to summarize those findings in a special issue that I will try to put together for a peer reviewed journal.

We selected 9 out of 22 submitted LCLUC-2018 proposals on Asia, with several new PIs to the program – who are very welcome! The focus of this solicitation was on Asia so that SARI got some new additions, but also there are three selected proposals on Central Asia. ROSES-2019 full proposals will be submitted by Mar 1, 2020 (all 28 step-1 short proposals were encouraged to submit full proposals). The proposals include studies on Western and Central Asia, Eastern Mediterranean and Latin America. Since this solicitation is directed at early career scientists (within 6 years of their Ph.D.), the program will be getting new blood and bright younger minds. ROSES-2020 will be announced as usual by the Valentine Day (mid Feb). The LCLUC-2020 call will be the third MuSLI round and is similar to the previous ones in developing innovative methods to use synergistically mid-resolution data from various sources. However, this time the use of VHR data is a requirement that has not been in the previous calls. The interest is in “hot spot regions” where the LCLUC have been rapid during the last several years with considerable impacts on the society. As with previous MuSLI, the socio-economic component is not required. There will be no step-1 proposal, just NOI (which is for NASA information only) – please watch the website and the announcement of ROSES-2020 for the due dates.

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 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 last spring Science Team meeting was focused on the projects on land use in Southeast Asia; some synthesis projects were also presented. The meeting included a session on MuSLI results from the previous MuSLI rounds and rapid presentations of the newly selected projects. The next spring Science Team meeting will be held Mar 31-Apr 2, 2020 in Bethesda, Maryland (see the website for details). The first two days will be totally devoted to the SARI projects – this will be an All-Hands SARI meeting with considerable participation by the regional partners and will include presentations from all SARI projects. The third day will be based on MuSLI projects and will include reporting of the work with the very high resolution data.

The regional international LCLUC Science Team meeting was held last July in Johor Bahru, Malaysia (see details http://lcluc.umd.edu/meetings/sari-searrin-meeting-and-training-malaysia-2019?page=). Thanks to the local host at University of Technology of Malaysia Dr. Kasturi Kanniah,xs the SARI lead Krishna (MSFC), and our co-sponsors at NIES (Japan), the meeting was very smooth and productive. Here, I’d like to commend Dr. 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) 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.

I am always grateful to PI's who keep us posted on their achievements concerning published results in peer-reviewed journals and press releases. Those should be submitted not only to me but to our website curator Meghavi. 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. 

The LCLUC program puts much emphasis on its educational component. All of our international Science Team meetings include training sessions for building capacity in regions. Additionally, LCLUC supports the NASA-ESA Trans-Atlantic Training (TAT) initiative in conjunction with SCERIN workshops organized by Premek Stych (Charles U. in Prague), Francesco Sarti (ESA) and myself. SARI has had additional trainings in India, Malaysia and Thailand organized by Krishna (MSFC) in coordination with GISTDA, SERVIR and CEOS WGCapD. The help of our regional partners in Thailand Tanita Suepa (GISTDA) and Perry V. (KMUTT U.) is greatly appreciated. 

We continuously improve the program website, maintained by the LCLUC Program Support Team at U. Maryland.  Webinars continue and can be listened to as recordings on the LCLUC website. If you haven’t looked carefully at the LCLUC website please do so at your leisure – you’ll find very interesting things if you scroll to the bottom, 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. We need each PI to verify the content of these maps as far as their projects are concerned. We also need input from you on the metadata and links to the datasets from the 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’d like to emphasize the support I get from Krishna and Chris in running the program. I even can’t imagine how the program would function without their diligent support.

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 2020.

 - Garik