Monitoring and Mapping the Environment

Future city design should meet the needs of the populace, animal populations, and native plant life. At the same time the design must be compatible with the local landscape and topography, aided by aerial photography and satellite images. City designers confer with ecologists to study the environment and assess the effects of urbanization on it today and tomorrow.

Mapping helps environmental scientists assess the size and dispersal of human populations, as well as the effects of human activities on the earth and the atmosphere. Today global maps describe the following conditions: atmospheric temperatures, ocean temperatures, surface water plant life, forest area and other vegetation, drought areas, population centers, and light intensity. The National Geographic Society, for example, creates accurate maps by combining satellite images with information in databases on populations. The detailed maps show population densities, growth rates, family sizes, life expectancies, population movement patterns (immigration and emigration), and population age and gender.

High-resolution satellite images have been used for several years by law enforcement and census takers for estimating population size. Census workers begin by taking images of small blocks of a city and then counting the individual people in the block. They then compile block after block of data until they have calculated an entire region’s population size. Measurements like this make up part of a field of study known as population dynamics, which describes the major living and nonliving factors that cause increases, decreases, or other changes in the composition of a species, human or wildlife.

Of course, almost all of the components of human population dynamics impact biodiversity in some way. The growth and migration of human populations is the single biggest factor in pushing animals out of their habitat, destroying habitats, and causing extinction. Maps and images also provide information on the secondary effects of population dynamics on the environment. For instance, scientists use mapping to monitor the following by-products of climate change: coral reef bleaching, algal blooms (an overgrowth of algae in water due to pollution), phytoplankton levels, desertification, topsoil erosion, distribution of nonnative species, glacier regression, and melting of polar ice caps. Online maps generated by satellite imagery enable the public to find all the hazardous waste sites near them by typing in their zip code. Ecologists use this same technology to assess the wildlife populations most threatened by pollution. The Locus Technologies president, Neno Duplancic, explained the future of environmental imaging in a 2008 interview to discuss his company’s technology: “Huge progress has been made over the past forty years. Back then, this industry did not exist. Today it makes headline news every day. . . . Our focus is information management. . . . The amount of environmental data has grown exponentially over the past decade and it will continue to rapidly increase with the emergence of real-time sensing and wireless transmission technologies.” As Duplancic suggests, environmental
science is entering a phase in which hardly an inch of the Earth has not been scrutinized.