Satellite image of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Congo, endangered habitat of mountain gorillas. At right is Lake Kivu on the Rwandan border.
CREDIT: NASA
Keepers of UNESCO World Heritage sites are getting a new set of tools to help safeguard cultural and natural treasures--data from Earth observation satellites.
The world's 730 World Heritage locales range from the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia to mosques in Timbuktu, and nearly half are in developing nations. Up to now, they've only enjoyed patchy surveillance from space. But last month at the Paris Air Show, the heads of the European Space Agency (ESA) and UNESCO agreed to bring remote-sensing technologies to scientists overseeing the heritage sites. NASA and space agencies elsewhere, including Brazil and Argentina, are also expected to join the effort.
The initiative got its start in 2001, when ESA began monitoring the habitat of mountain gorillas. An estimated 600 gorillas live in the misty highlands of five national parks in the war-torn countries of Rwanda, the Congo, and Uganda. ESA scientists have been using optical and cloud-penetrating radar satellites to make detailed topographic and vegetation maps that conservation authorities combine with their own field observations. That pilot project is now expanding to track deforestation. Analyzing such trends in such rugged, inaccessible areas is "much more easily done using satellite imagery than on the ground," says Liz Macfie, program coordinator of the International Gorilla Conservation Program.
