Environmental degradation can lead to sustained natural and humanitarian disasters, which may foster political instability when societal demands exceed the capacity of local governments to cope. The influence of local land use changes on resiliency to droughts and on external food dependency is not very well understood. The effort will integrate environmental measurements and signatures, numerical climate models, and predictive statistical models with trends identified from large historical data sets, in order to provide valuable information and analyses for use in planning and understanding the impact of environment-based instabilities. The proposed methodology will allow evaluation of such effects and provide information to allow for mitigation. Mitigation of regional impacts is more tractable than global climate change impacts and could be effected through external aid. The focus is on regions of sub-Saharan Africa, where in the arid and semi-arid regions, the reduction in rainfall caused by land use change is likely to have significant implications for agriculture. The uniqueness of the proposed methodology is the coupled approach of examining the impact of population growth, land use change and climate feedback to food security in a relatively local area. By integrating current environmental measurements with current and historical data and a suite of proven modeling approaches, the project will enhance the ability to integrate and interpret these disparate information sources. The researchers will provide for the integration of students into research efforts at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Principal Investigator: Sara J. Graves, PhD Information Technology and Systems Center University of Alabama in Huntsville Huntsville, AL 35899 Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) have developed a methodology and software to help identify current trends and project future trends of interest to the Intelligence Community (IC). The Globally Leveraged Integrated Data Explorer for Research (GLIDER) software visualizes, analyzes, and integrates data from satellites and other sources, fusing the data together to provide additional information for analysis. Relationships between land use and human activities can be explored in order to provide the IC with valuable information and analyses for use in planning and understanding the impact of environmental issues on national security. A proof of concept implementation was developed to explore the relationships among land use, moisture conditions, and crop production in Afghanistan. In this scenario, a hypothetical environmental linkage to broad human impact was explored. The GLIDER software was used to test a hypothesis that snow cover in the mountains of Afghanistan may have a direct relationship to the amount of runoff water available to crops during the summer, and increased moisture may have linkages to increased crop yields, including opium poppies. Since opium poppy production is known to fund insurgent activities in the area, an increased snow pack may lead to larger poppy crops which in turn may lead to increased insurgent activities. A methodology was developed that uses environmental satellite data to compute an estimate snow cover in the mountains of Afghanistan and simultaneously computes estimates of vegetation cover and surface type. GLIDER provides analysis tools for performing data mining and analysis of the results, and was used to compare snow cover with vegetation type and extent. Preliminary results showed a good correlation between snow melt and changes in vegetation cover, pointing the way toward more detailed analysis of land used change relative to snow melt. Human activity data such as insurgent activity and opium poppy field locations could be used to test the final part of the hypothesis relating winter snow cover directly to insurgent activity after the spring thaw. The focus of this work was on developing an approach to examine human-coupled environmental effects using a framework which is adaptable to any hypothetical linkages. The methodology and software can be extended and adapted to address other environmental security issues, and will be beneficial to both military and intelligence communities in building risk assessment models for predicting regional instability for different parts of the world. Publications and Presentations Berendes, T., "New Tool for Satellite Image Analysis", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 92, issue 11, pp. 1407, 11/2011. Berendes, T., R. Ramachandran, M. Maskey, and S. Graves, "GLIDER: Application for Earth Science Data Mining and Visualization",Rocket City Geospatial & Alabama GIS Conference, Huntsville, AL, 11/2011.
