True Spin Conference

I just gave a presentation, "The Use of Advanced Technology for Environmental Outreach Campaigns," at the second True Spin Conference in Denver. This is a meeting of communications professionals from a broad range of public-benefit organizations, addressing issues like public health, affordable housing, social justice, and the environment.

I talked about SkyTruth's mission to understand and illustrate environmental issues using satellite images and other remote-sensing and digital mapping technologies. Of course, free tools such as Google Earth and Maps figured prominently, but we also discussed the potential to recruit people to actively provide us with "ground truth" -- photos, video and other information they collect for a specific facility, mine, gas well, or other place of interest. There were a lot of good questions from the audience of about 30-40, who were very engaged and politely tolerated my bad jokes.

I was able to catch a couple of great presentations. Karen Showalter of Netcentric Campaigns covered the latest online communications tools being used for public outreach ("twitter" was new to me). John Kelly of Morningside Analytics provided an intriguing look at interconnectedness in the blogosphere that used statistical techniques and graphical cluster mapping to show how the most-cited bloggers are not necessarily the most influential (so I take heart in that...!) Click here for the two-day program, and here to check out all of the presenters.

Pebble Mine, Alaska

What could become one of the world's biggest open-pit gold mines, called the Pebble Mine, is being proposed in southwest Alaska. Opponents of the plan, including sportsmen, commercial fisherman, many native Alaskans, and former Alaska governor Jim Hammond, are concerned that the mine could affect the economically important wild-salmon fishing and tourism industries. The mine site is located in the headwaters of streams flowing into Lake Iliamana and Bristol Bay.

SkyTruth has generated a gallery of satellite images showing what the mine site looks like now, and a series of simulations based on several versions of the mine development plan that have been published by the mining company, Northern Dynasty. A tip o' the hat to one of SkyTruth's talented volunteers, Andrew Vernon, who produced this simulation showing the most recent plan.

And another nod to Erin and Hig McKittrick for their excellent Pebble Mine website, including a blog, photo gallery, and interactive Google map of the Pebble Mine site and surrounding area. All in all, this is an outstanding example of the "ground truth" comment Paul discussed a few days ago. Expect to see a whole lot more of this in 2008!

GroundTruth

Ground Truth: Information that is collected on location, on the ground, from a close up perspective, in fine detail. From Wikipedia: Ground Truth

Sky Truth: Information that is collected from above, with a broad vision, giving the big picture.

We at SkyTruth spend a lot of time working out how to give people an "elevated" perspective on environmental issues. Most of the time we do this by providing top-down views from satellites in space or from aircraft.

We often find the SkyTruth perspective illuminates new questions and identifies sites of interest that local environmental groups may be unaware of. Or we simply wish we had more local, first-hand knowledge contributed from folks with boots on the ground to complement and help explain our high-flying images to our global audience.

In these cases, we strive to augment our images with targeted "Ground Truth" for these sites. This may mean someone on the ground needs to go to the site with a camera and a GPS and take some pictures. Or it could mean a visit to the county courthouse to find out who owns the property, or when construction got underway.


One example is the recent work we did on habitat loss for the threatened Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse in Colorado. In this case we identified dozens of locations where construction and development is clearly taking place - or already existed - within designated "critical habitat" areas. For each of these sites we'd like to know if the development was already there before the mouse was officially recognized as a threatened species (1998), or if it's been constructed since then, a very important distinction. Ground Truth could consist of recent and historic on-location photos, and documentation from the county on when construction permits were issued and approved. Concerned local citizens could provide this with fairly modest effort, if they know what to get and where to send it.

To harness this potential citizen-army of ground-truthers, SkyTruth is building a system to organize "help wanted" requests, publicize the needs, and collect and organize the responses. That, however, is keeping us very busy, and is a topic for another post...

Please share your thoughts and comments on how you think we should go about this.

SkyTruth Image Galleries

By the way, SkyTruth features an ever-growing collection of online image galleries that address issues like hardrock mining, oil and gas drilling, habitat loss, and pollution. The galleries include a variety of maps and pictures taken from public and commercial orbiting satellites, government aerial surveys, and out-the-window shots taken from low-flying aircraft (most of those aerial pics are provided by our friends at EcoFlight). And important ground-truth photos taken by ordinary folks all over the world that complement the high-flying SkyTruth perspective.

We've also created simulations to show what proposed developments - such as gold mines and natural-gas fields - could look like if they are built:
Browse the complete list of galleries here. Once you're in a gallery, click on any pic to get a bigger version accompanied by a descriptive caption; click on "Medium" or "Large" to display even larger versions, and "Original" to download the highest-resolution version available.

Please contact us (info@skytruth.org) if you'd like to use any of the pictures from our site. We typically grant permission for non-profit, educational and media use.