Hello, and welcome to this Asia-Pacific-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is Deforestation. A new study suggests that nearly twice as much primary forest is being cut down in Indonesia as in Brazil, the historical global leader in this dubious category. Belinda Arunarwati Margono, who was in charge of Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry for seven years and is now a researcher at South Dakota University, calculated that the country lost 840,000 hectares of its primary forest in 2012. Indonesia has the third-largest stretch of tropical rainforest, after the Amazon and Congo, and it’s also the world’s third-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. An estimated 85 percent of its emissions are coming from forest destruction and degradation. Data from remote sensing show that many losses come from the destruction of primary forests in wetlands and government-protected areas.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
IBM Corp. was contracted to provide the city of Beijing with advanced weather forecasting and cloud-computing technologies to address the city’s smog problem. Beijing will be a partner in IBM’s 10-year “Green Horizon” initiative to predict smog build-ups.
In a related environmental story, Juniper Research published a report predicting that charging mobile devices will globally generate 13 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2019, about twice the current levels. Nearly 50 percent of these emissions, equivalent to annual emissions from 1.1 million cars, will come from coal-fired Asian electricity grids.
Punjab Chief Minister Muhammad Shahbaz Sharif stated that space technology is of utmost importance for socio-economic development of Pakistan, specifically mentioning satellite remote sensing and GIS applications to improve various socio-economic sectors such as agriculture, urban planning and forestry.
Grape growers in New South Wales, Australia, are using satellite technology to improve their vineyards. A project called irriGATEWAY uses the imagery to interpret and create optimal watering schedules.
In industry headlines, the Mineral Resources Authority of Papua New Guinea implemented a mineral tenement management system based on Spatial Dimension’s FlexiCadastre framework.
Indian software dealer SATPALDA supplied ScanEx Image Processor Software to four companies in Nepal.
University of Adelaide, Australia, students Jesse Jones and Will Thurlow won Maptek Mining Engineering scholarships for 2014, allowing them to travel to industry conferences, and buy textbooks and other resources to develop their technical skills.
And Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and Esri are jointly developing a smart 3-D mapping tool, based on Esri CityEngine, that incorporates various planning and urban design rules. Here’s a short video clip:
And now for today’s Final Thought:
If you’re not up to speed on Indonesian politics, check out this article on the Asian Surveying and Mapping Web site.
www.asmmag.com
It points out that the world’s fourth most populous country, and third largest democracy, recently elected a new president, Joko Widodo, who has a history of backing geospatial technology innovation. As the governor of Jakarta, he applied geospatial technologies for transportation, planning, drainage systems, flood response and other applications. He’s a major believer in spatial planning, so let’s hope he moves to stop the unsustainable practices covered in today’s top story on deforestation. People can make a difference, and national presidents can make a massive difference.
That’s it for this broadcast. I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.