Conservation biology is in many ways doomed from the outset—with many orders of magnitude more species than humans can ever hope to observe, there’s an unavoidable issue of scale that makes complete classification of an ecosystem impossible for all but the simplest systems. At best we can hope to come up with reasonably large samples that can provide insightful pictures of the underlying ecosystems. In this area, recent years have seen a revolution with the increased use of remote sensing.
In many cases, global climate change is destroying the most interesting habitats before conservationists can study them. Using satellites and other imaging technologies, biologists like Christopher Raxworthy (link: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Conservation/) at the American Museum of Natural History are improving their capacity to identify candidate areas for further study. Raxworthy uses these methods to identify likely regions in pursuit of tropical chameleons in Madagascar.
Other researchers (link: http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/perch/resources/turnerarticle-trevol8306.pdf) have found advances in remote sensing useful in mapping distributions of different species or measuring biodiversity on a large scale. In some cases, for example, it is possible to identify the species of individual trees from a satellite image.
As technology continues to improve, we may see even more advances in automatic data collection from remote sensing. In time, these may completely revolutionize conservation biology and provide essential tools for protecting and understanding the planet.
In many cases, global climate change is destroying the most interesting habitats before conservationists can study them. Using satellites and other imaging technologies, biologists like Christopher Raxworthy (link: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Conservation/) at the American Museum of Natural History are improving their capacity to identify candidate areas for further study. Raxworthy uses these methods to identify likely regions in pursuit of tropical chameleons in Madagascar.
Other researchers (link: http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/perch/resources/turnerarticle-trevol8306.pdf) have found advances in remote sensing useful in mapping distributions of different species or measuring biodiversity on a large scale. In some cases, for example, it is possible to identify the species of individual trees from a satellite image.
As technology continues to improve, we may see even more advances in automatic data collection from remote sensing. In time, these may completely revolutionize conservation biology and provide essential tools for protecting and understanding the planet.
