March 20, 2024
(press release)
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Dear Yee, At Land & Carbon Lab we've embarked on an ambitious journey to redefine the frontiers of ecosystem monitoring. We’re excited to announce that in a major step toward comprehensive ecosystem monitoring, our partners at the University of Maryland (UMD) have worked with NASA’s OPERA project to produce a groundbreaking new vegetation disturbance monitoring system known as OPERA Land Surface Disturbance Alert, or DIST-ALERT. This first-of-its-kind monitoring product detects disturbances to any kind of vegetation cover, including forests, grasses, shrubs and even crops, occurring anywhere on Earth in near real-time. This data shows exciting potential to provide information on the conversion of non-forested vegetated land to agriculture, near-real-time alerts on forest disturbances outside of the tropics and better insights on vegetation health for land managers in a changing world. Land & Carbon Lab is now working with UMD to integrate the alerts with other information and make them available to a wide range of users including researchers, land managers, corporations, journalists and more. Join our upcoming webinar to learn more. Join our webinar, “Beyond Forests: How New Innovations in Geospatial Monitoring Will Help Protect All Ecosystems,” on March 27 at 9am ET (1pm UTC) to hear from experts from the NASA-funded OPERA project, UMD and Land & Carbon Lab as we discuss how our innovative new geospatial monitoring solutions will inform more sustainable decisions about how to prevent the conversion of natural ecosystems. Plus, we’ll be joined by our partners at the Accountability Framework Initiative, as well as a representative from Cargill, for a discussion about the importance of setting ambitious goals to avoid the conversion of natural ecosystems. Interested in using this data? We want to hear from you. To let us know how this data could help you in your work, please complete a brief survey. Your feedback is incredibly valuable to us and OPERA, and will help ensure we develop tools and products that best suit your needs. Kind regards, The OPERA project is funded by NASA to address remote sensing needs identified by the Satellite Needs Working Group. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, OPERA funds and manages UMD’s DIST-ALERT product development. All OPERA products are free and openly available through the NASA public data archives. Learn more here. World Resources Institute • 10 G Street NE Suite 800 • Washington, DC, 20002 • 202.729.7900
DIST-ALERT Showing Vegetation Loss Related to Soy Expansion in the Brazilian Cerrado
The Land & Carbon Lab team
Land & Carbon Lab is proud to fund our partners at the University of Maryland Global Land Analysis and Discovery Lab's research into land cover, land use and land cover change mapping and monitoring. This includes turning OPERA DIST-ALERT into targeted near real-time alert products. Learn more here.
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