Dear
LCLUCers, friends of LCLUC, international colleagues and friends,
The past year has been marred by the gloomy war in Ukraine,
with the threat of an escalation to a global, nuclear conflict. The atrocities by
the aggressor towards the civilians and the current destruction of the civilian
infrastructure in the center of Europe is unimaginable for the 21th century. On
the other hand, it seemed that the world got accustomed living with the COVID virus.
They say, a bitter joke in Kiev, once the bombs and rockets started falling on
Ukrainian cities, was that to the question “What’s the situation with COVID at
your place?”, the answer would be “What is it?”.
We all became experts in virtual meetings and review panels. But
with time we gradually started socializing and attending in-person meetings. Although
the mask regimes have been until recently less strict almost everywhere, the statistics
show some increase in infections, and I see again more masks donned inside
shops in our area. The friendly Corona didn’t skip me either: the day after we
finish our first face-to-face Science Team meeting last October (Silver
Anniversary celebration) in Bethesda, Maryland, I felt something was going wrong
with me, not just tired after the meeting. The home COVID test showed negative
results. I still played tennis on the weekend as usual. But a couple of days
later the test result was positive and then got negative in about a week. The
circumstances couldn’t be better – light illness, at home, during the weekend,
AFTER the important meeting. And, honestly, I was happy it happened this way,
not on travel (I attended a conference in Valencia just one month before that),
not during the intense work week while teleworking or at a local meeting. Also,
now I’d have antibodies, so with all the vaccinations and booster shots - less
risk in the future...
In
keeping with the LCLUC tradition, I will herein summarize our program achievements
of the past year, list our plans and convey my best wishes to the whole LCLUC family
and our friends around the world. So, here we go.
Solicitations and Future Plans. LCLUC-22
selections brought more studies that further populated the hotspots map. I’d
like to reiterate that behind the development of this interactive map are LCLUC
support team members: Indrani, who moved on recently to other activities (during
the past few months her duties has been performed by Rohan Purekar) and Meghavi,
who still provides a perfectly reliable and loyal LCLUC support to the website
maintenance and other programmatic /organizational issues. Please see the
interactive map on the website:
https://lcluc.umd.edu/content/hot-spot-map.
About half of the selected LCLUC-2022 projects aim at studying adaptation of land
use to climate change. I welcome the new researchers
to the LCLUC program. Some of them already had a chance to present their
project plans at our October Silver Anniversary LCLUC Science Team meeting. Most
of the recently selected studies will feed in results of their science and
collaborative work with regional researchers to the GOFC-GOLD regional networks,
discussed further.
ROSES-2023
will be announced as usual around Valentine Day (mid Feb). The LCLUC-2023 solicitation
is in the framework of MuSLI component of the program. That is, it’s directed
at the innovative and efficient use of multi-source land imaging methods by combining
observations from optical, microwave and thermal infrared region (which is the emphasis
of the current call). The socio-economic component will not be required. There
will be two steps – please watch the website and the announcement of ROSES-2023
for the due dates.
During
the past few years, the Program has invested much in studies under South/Southeast
Asia Research Initiative (SARI; Project Scientist Krishna Vadrevu, NASA MSFC). The
amended call LCLUC-21 (A.47) directed at developing SARI synthesis yielded only
one selection - a team that will develop synthesis for South Asia. No
selection, however, was made for Southeast Asia. The amended call LCLUC-22
(A.55) is out and will hopefully result in a selection of a synthesis project
on SE Asia.
As
we are synthesizing our accumulated science for South Asia and Southeast Asia,
we are exploring possibilities to put more focus on Latin America and Africa. Perhaps,
a research initiative could be developed on either continent similar to what we
have had in Northern Eurasia and South/Southeast Asia. NASA did have regional campaigns
in both South America (LBA) and South Africa (SAFARI). So, if we embarked on new
initiatives, they would need to complement the previous ones, while building on
the existing synthesis from them. For example, as LBA was a program in Amazon
(mostly Brazilian), I’d foresee a development of a research initiative “beyond
Amazon”. A similar approach would be for Africa. We do have a critical number
of projects on both continents, so it’s a matter of getting self-organized like
we did for NEESPI (in Northern Eurasia) and SARI (in Asia).
One
of the future focii for the program, I foresee the use of remote sensing-derived
land-use products in numerical weather forecast and climate models. Research
would include studying sensitivity of forecast skill and its improvement by
using various (well validated) land-use datasets with different spatial
resolutions. This topic not only is important for improvements of the numerical
models by incorporating realistic land-use changes in models but also would
contribute to the development of Earth System Digital Twins, ongoing at both
NASA and ESA. About 33 years ago, I brought together remote sensing specialists
with meteorological/climate modelers at a workshop at NOAA, where I worked at
that time (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26228050).
Maybe it stemmed from my personal background (before becoming remote sensing
scientist I was a climate modeler with meteorological background) but it definitely
attracted many high-level US and European researchers. So, in the end of my
career, I’m kind of “closing the loop” (or maybe it’s just another iteration?).
I checked with my good old friend and colleague Jean-Louis Roujean (CNRS) about
having an international workshop on this topic and he agreed it would be a good
idea. Thus, there is a good chance that such an event will be organized in the
future.
As
usual, let me remind all 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, including those
for Early Career Scientists (FINESST, NIP). Recall that the LCLUC Science Team
includes not only projects that are funded through the LCLUC solicitations 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 (I do pick up some good proposals from other
programs’ rounds for funding by the LCLUC base funds). In 2023, the IDS-22
program’s element “Processes
across the Land-Ocean Continuum” will likely result in funding a few
LCLUC-related projects.
Science Team Meetings. After a long period of virtual
communications, we have moved to in-person meetings, the first one being the
Silver Anniversary meeting last October. The in-person meetings provide opportunities
for younger researchers to meet veteran LCLUCers, interacting during breaks,
having informal conversations, and developing new ideas for projects between sessions.
No doubt that the energy exchange between the speakers and the audience (as
well as the exchange of viruses J) is missing at virtual
meetings.
The
next Science Team meeting in DC area is planned for May 8-12, 2023 in College
Park, MD (details on the website). The first two days (May 8-9) will be our
LCLUC meeting with an emphasis on the early career scientists’ projects
(LCLUC-19 oral presentations, LCLUC-21 posters). After that we will join other
NASA Earth Science programs of the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area at
plenary sessions (May 10-12). This will be a joint Focus Area meeting which we
hold every few years.
The
Space Week Nordeste 2023 meeting in northeast Brazil will be held August 14-20,
2023, organized by Geraldo Ferreira, my old friend at the University of Ceara, Brazil, with a
little help from NASA LCLUC. As it will be our first regional meeting in Latin
America, I hope to leverage this event by having also the GOFC-GOLD Latin
America network meeting about the same time at the same location and bringing representatives
of all LCLUC projects on Latin America to this gathering. Please, watch the
LCLUC website calendar on LCLUC- and LCLUC-related meetings.
Publications. I am always grateful
to PIs for keeping us posted on their achievements concerning published results
in books, special issues, peer-reviewed journals and press releases. Those
should be submitted to our website curator Meghavi (cc me, Krishna and Chris J.).
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. Each year, in
the early fall season, I am asked to provide scientific achievements of the year
including publications. This is when I use whatever was submitted to me so that
your inputs can become visible to the upper management.
During
the past year, a new Special Issue Research Topic (aka Research Topic) “Our Changing Planet: Half-a-Century Landscape Dynamics
Observed From Space” was published at the journal “Frontiers in
Remote Sensing” under the Remote Sensing Time Series Analysis specialty
section (https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/25147/our-changing-planet-half-a-century-landscape-dynamics-observed-from-space).
This special issue was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary
of the Landsat program, co-edited by Chris Justice (UMD), Eric Vermote (NASA) and
myself, with a few articles by LCLUCers.
Data and Missions. The biggest event of the
past year for the Earth’s researchers was celebration of the 50th
anniversary of the Landsat program. The
NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of
Earth’s land in existence. Watch a cute short video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XKVSTX1vdE&t=4s
The
Landsat-9 data have been used successfully during the past year along with
Landsat-8 data. The Landsat data together with those from Sentinel-2a,b provide
a global coverage almost every 3 days. And if Sentinel-1 radar data are
included in an investigation then there is a possibility to derive some surface
properties during cloudy days too. This is the thrust of the virtual constellation
multi-source approach I’ve fostered all along for MuSLI - the next MuSLI round will
be selected next year.
Among
surprises during the past year was the retirement of Jeff Masek from NASA. Chris
Neigh, NASA GSFC, stepped up to take on Jeff’s responsibilities of Landsat-9 Project
Scientist. Jeff has been very helpful in all Landsat-related activities as well
as leading the MuSLI component of LCLUC program, such as production of the
Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel dataset. Many thanks to Jeff and good luck with any
of his new endeavors.
Constellations
of hundreds of commercial satellites allow to obtain quasi-daily coverage anywhere
on the globe at meter resolution. NASA provides free access to Very High Resolution
(VHR) data (see https://lcluc.umd.edu/announcements/commercial-smallsat-data-acquisition-csda-program-update)
for NASA-affiliated researchers. I’d like to remind you that Planet data are
available for free in the limited amounts to Academia (see constraints at the
Planet website). Also, note that Planet global data over tropics were made
available for free and accessible by the Norwegian government – see the LCLUC
website for details (https://lcluc.umd.edu/announcements/norways-international-climate-and-forests-initiative-data-program).
Just a few months ago, the ESA WorldCover Team announced an
updated Global 10m Land Cover Map for 2021 (https://lcluc.umd.edu/announcements/esa-worldcover-2021).
I suggest
LCLUCers to start looking at the 2021 and 2020 products (https://worldcover2020.esa.int).
The ESA land cover 10m maps can help detecting some land-cover/use
changes that may not be easily caught at coarser resolution. So it would be
interesting to compare their use with Landsat-derived 30m changes as well as with
those from the 3m Planet data, and see advantages in detecting remote sensing signatures
with the increase of the resolution -- from
30m to 10m to 3m.
International Programs and Activities.
The NEFI (Northern Eurasia’s Future Initiative, formerly NEESPI), as part of
the Future Earth program, led by Pasha Groisman (NOAA, http://neespi.org/NEFI-ExecutiveSummary.pdf)
has been supported by the LCLUC, with several ongoing projects in Central Asia,
Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Russia has been on hold for the past 8 years and
now it’s unclear when we will have collaboration with Russian researchers again
– I am glad we used the window of opportunities during the NEESPI for about 10
years (2004-2014). The LCLUC activities in Central Asia (led by Geoff Henebry,
Michigan State U.) have been progressing in the framework of Central Asia
Regional Information Network (CARIN) of the GOFC-GOLD (Global Observations of
Forest Cover and Land-use Dynamics) program. CARIN has had regular virtual webinars
that include both US and regional scientists. I commend Geoff for making CARIN a
vibrant network.
The
South-Central East European Network (SCERIN) led by Petya Campbell (NASA/UMBC),
Jana Albrechtova, and Lucie Kupkova, both at Charles U. in Prague, followed
CARIN in establishing a series of webinars (on “hot topics”) and hopefully will
have them regularly attracting many interested researchers by disseminating the
announcements through GOFC-GOLD and LCLUC contacts (not just SCERIN list). The Mediterranean MedRIN activities (led by Vince
Ambrosia, NASA), Ioannis Gitas, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, and Fantos Hadjimitsis, University of Technology, Cyprus ), the Latin
American RedLaTif network (led by Wilfrid Schroeder, NOAA and, until recently,
by Nicolas Mari, INTA, Argentina) and the African networks (led by David Roy, Michigan
State U., and his regional partners Natasha Ribeiro, Yudith Kamoto, Navashni Govender,
Landing Mane, Cheik Mbow and others) go on a regular basis. Continuity within
the year of these regional activities is critical as these networks provide
interface between GOFC-GOLD Implementation Teams and data users in the regions.
I will put more personal attention to activities in both Latin America and Africa,
as more projects in these parts of the world have been selected in the recent LCLUC
rounds. As a general coordinator for all GOFC-GOLD regional networks, Krishna
Vadrevu (NASA MSFC) has plenty on his plate, but he is also doing an excellent job
in leading the two SARI networks: South Asia coordinated with Prof. Garg,
TERI School of Advanced Studies in
India, and Southeast Asia coordinated with regional partners: Dr. Perry, KMUTT,
and Dr. Tanita, GISTDA, both in Thailand, and Dr. Israr in Indonesia. The last
regional workshop and training in Southeast Asia was held in Cambodia hosted by
the Royal University of Agriculture. We are grateful to Dr. Thav
Sopheak for making all the arrangements at the Royal University of Agriculture
and taking care of our travel within Cambodia. The next regional workshop, focused
on air pollution in Asia, is planned for early February 2023 in Hanoi, Vietnam followed
up by a training in Cambodia. I’d like to express my gratitude again to our partners and co-sponsors
Tsuneo Matsunaga-san and
Ohara-san at NIES, Japan for the continuous support
of LCLUC workshops in Asia on the topic of biosphere-atmosphere interactions.
For
GOFC-GOLD activities please follow the website https://gofcgold.org,
maintained by Krishna, who continuously updates it. The planned GOFC-GOLD
Network Summit meeting is still in our plans. Krishna will be checking with potential
hosts in Armenia, Morocco, and Turkey. The Summit in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2017 was
recognized as very fruitful by all the network representatives and GOFC-GOLD
leads, all looking forward to a follow-up Summit. However, the COVID situation
and other circumstances have prevented organizing a Summit. The GOFC-GOLD
leadership will continue developing plans for this big event. In the meantime, I’d call for wider distribution of the announcements
of regional networks’ webinars, so that cross-fertilization between various
networks could be pursued at least virtually.
I’d
like to commend START’s Jon Padgham and Clay Oboth for helping in organizing
all our GOFC-GOLD virtual and first in-person regional meetings. Clay left
START last April, he’s done a great job on the coordination of GOFC-GOLD
activities during the past few years and will be missed. In the meantime, Jon
will take over Clay’s responsibilities. I’d also like to thank two Davids: David
Skole, the Land Cover Implementation Team Co-Chair, and David Roy, the Fire
Implementation Team Co-Chair, both at Michigan State U., for their outstanding
supervision of their respective teams in collaboration with their European
co-chairs, two Martins and Jesus: Martin Herold (GFSET, Potsdam, Germany) for Land
Cover IT, and Martin Wooster (King’s College, UK) and Jesus Ayanz (JRC, Italy)
for Fire IT.
Our
program closely collaborates with the Global Land Program (GLP) – the international
sister-program of LCLUC. The Executive Officer Ariane De Bremond (UMD/U. Bern)
has been working diligently on coordinating GLP with LCLUC activities. Subscribe
to the GLP newsletter or follow their website for the updates. Many of LCLUC alumni
and current members have been GLP members; they can be found on https://glp.earth/find-scientist.
Capacity Building. The LCLUC program puts
much emphasis on cultivating the next generation of LCLUCers. All our
international Science Team meetings include training sessions building regional
capacity in coordination with SERVIR activities. The previous couple of years training
workshops have been held virtually. The first in-person training in the SARI
framework was held last August in Cambodia.
LCLUC
continues support of the NASA-ESA Trans-Atlantic Training (TAT) initiative, organized
by Premek Stych (Charles U. in Prague), Francesco Sarti (ESA) and me (NASA), on
promoting remote sensing methods and spaceborne data use in Eastern Europe. The
first in-person TAT session was held in Prague last March, this time independently
of SCERIN, which had its meeting virtually later in the year. The current plan
for the next year SCERIN and TAT in-person workshops is having them adjacent in
time and place (June, in Brno, Czech Rep.).
Program Support. Dr. Krishna Vadrevu (NASA
MSFC) continues handling tasks the best he can with enthusiasm and efficiency
both as LCLUC Deputy Program Manager and the GOFC-GOLD coordinator. We continuously
improve the program website, maintained by the LCLUC Program Support Team at U.
Maryland. Meghavi Prashnani carries on the responsibilities of developing newsletters
and the website updates. The LCLUC webinars are led by Alison Thieme. The webinars’ theme has covered all LCLUC hot
spot studies going from urban to agriculture to forestry. All webinars are recorded
and can be accessed on the LCLUC website. The in-person meetings are organized
by Mary Mitkish and Meghavi. Jack O’Bannon
takes care of IT issues. All of them have my personal appreciation. If you
haven’t looked carefully at the LCLUC website, please do so at your leisure – there
are many interesting things there. For example, if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll
find a map of projects’ locations, with team membership and members’ pages, a
map of research polygons, and the recently developed hotspots map. We need each
PI to verify the content of all the above-mentioned maps as far as their
projects are concerned – please spend time by browsing through the info on
those maps, at least just for your own projects, to check the locations,
affiliations, the full list of collaborators and their affiliations/locations,
etc. Further down, you’ll find the NASA LCLUC and LCLUC-relevant calls and
selections. On the right, you’ll find
the calendar of LCLUC and LCLUC-related meetings and on the left, listed are the
past and future LCLUC ST meetings and the link to LCLUC-related meetings. If you’d
like to list the past and ongoing projects on a particular region, you’d need
to click on the Project tab on top and scroll down to see the list. And if you’re
searching for details just click on the project of interest.
We
also need input from you on the metadata and links to the datasets from the
projects. Thanks to all those who contributed populating this page: https://lcluc.umd.edu/content/metadata.
Through this page you not only help the LCLUC program with the inventory but
also promote the results and products from your project.
Also,
please help us produce statistics on publications, as well as number of grad student
under the LCLUC projects, awards for papers, etc.
I
can’t underemphasize the support I get from Krishna and Chris in running the
program. It’s hard to imagine how the program would function if not for their continuous
and thoughtful support.
Honorable
Mentions.
Kudos to Chandra Giri (EPA), whose work on mangroves has been the most cited
paper in “remote sensing of mangroves” annually from 2014 to present. Jeff Fox’s (East-West Center, Hawaii) mapping work in
Nepal was recently cited in the New York Times (https://lcluc.umd.edu/media/how-nepal-grew-back-its-forests-nytimes).
I’d
like to extend warmest congratulations to Krishna Vadrevu – the recipient of the
Headquarters Honor Award during the past year.
Please
let me know when you are in the media or receive an award, so that we could put
it on the website.
Final
Notes. I
am sending this letter primarily to LCLUC PI’s (current and alumni) and friends
of LCLUC. Before you discard my message, please forward it to your team members
including non-US partners.
The program is expanding and growing in numbers, with many early career
scientists joining in the last couple of years. Remember: once LCLUCer is
always an LCLUCer - all LCLUC alumni are invited to keep in touch and
attend LCLUC events. And, of course, all veterans are welcome to submit new,
exciting proposals with novel methods, synergy of various kinds of satellite observations,
“big data” and “machine learning” methods, as well as advanced methods to
incorporate socio-economic data and methods in LCLUC studies. So, the program
is going through both rejuvenation and reinvigoration. During the past couple
of years, the program accepted many young talented researchers who know to ask
right questions. As Voltaire once said, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers”. Welcome
all to the LCLUC family!
This
has been a hard year - I’d say more difficult than the previous one - compounded
of the continuous virus situation and the growing international tension related
to the crisis in Ukraine. My heart goes out to our colleagues in Ukraine,
specifically at the Space Research Institute in Kyiv and the researchers at the
Ukrainian National Forestry University, which
was supposed to host the next SCERIN meeting. I promise that once a stability and peace are established, we WILL
organize a meeting there. I commend all of you for the resilience you have
demonstrated in the face of the challenges this past year. I trust you will
continue to look after each other and overcome any new difficulties.
I
appeal to newcomers and veteran LCLUCers to carry on with projects’ plans in
the 2023 as according to Confucius: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long
as you do not stop.”
I’d
like to wish the whole LCLUC family, friends and international colleagues
exciting results and discoveries and a productive New Year 2023.
Thanks for the patience to those who reached the end of this message, and sorry
for taking your time from your family and holidays.
Happy
Holidays, and Healthy and Peaceful New Year!
- Garik
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