March 2004

The Global Land Cover Facility participated in the Tech2004 forum on March 19. Tech2004 is 'a showcase of electrical engineering, computing and systems research at the University of Maryland'. At this well attended event, the GLCF development team presented current research into data grids, interoperability, and off-site processing of large Earth Science datasets.

The Global Land Cover Facility presented research results at the 100th annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, in Philadelphia, on March 19. The GLCF science team presented a paper titled "Subtropical Deforestation: Paraguay in the 1990s". This was held in the paper session on "Remote Sensing Forest Issues". The abstract is:
"Deforestation has significant impacts on soil erosion, watershed hydrology, local climate, biodiversity, and is a key component in atmospheric carbon models. Remote sensing data from the Landsat series of satellites has been used to successfully identify and map deforestation in tropical forests. In this study, data from Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 were used to map deforestation in the subtropical forests of Paraguay for the decade of 1990 - 2000. The Rio Paraguay bisects the Republic of Paraguay into two distinct ecological regions. West of the river are dry deciduous woodlands on the alluvial plains of the Gran Chaco. Although the Chaco is sparsely populated, recent large scale conversion of forest to agriculture has occurred in the vicinity of established Mennonite settlements. East of the Rio Paraguay, where most of the Paraguayan population resides, are remnants of the humid Interior Atlantic Forest. This biologically diverse forest that once covered 85% of eastern Paraguay has been reduced to a quarter of its original area by timber harvesting, conversion to agriculture and encroachment by rural settlements. This study examines the extent, patterns, causes and impacts of deforestation in these two very different forested biomes."