December 22, 2002

CIESIN is pleased to report that the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands passed a resolution at the 8th Conference of Parties (held November 18-26, 2002 in Valencia, Spain) that authorizes the Ramsar Bureau to make the Ramsar Sites Database available over the Internet through the Ramsar Wetlands Data Gateway. CIESIN will continue working with the Ramsar Bureau and Wetlands International to ensure regular updates to the Gateway, so that users will be able to access current Ramsar site data integrated with other socioeconomic, environmental, and remote sensing data.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/ramsardg

December 1, 2002

CIESIN is pleased to announce the release of a new dataset, Population, Landscape and Climate Estimates (PLACE). This dataset makes interdisciplinary geospatial data usable by analysts who require data aggregated to the national level. It includes estimates of the population and area within distinct classifications of biomes, climate zones, coasts, elevation, population density, and slope. The dataset consists of aggregates of sub-national, geospatial data to the national level in standard tabular format.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/plue/nagd/place.html

16 November 2002

CIESIN has released a new Thematic Guide on Social Science Applications of Remote Sensing. This guide provides an introduction to remote sensing for non-technical audiences and reviews key issues in the application of remote sensing techniques in social science research. The online guide provides examples of the application of remote sensing in six different social science fields and includes an extensive research bibliography and a listing of major satellite systems and sensors.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu:9080/tg/guide_main.jsp

14 November 2002

CIESIN is pleased to announce the availability of a new set of disaggregated population and income projections derived from the scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES). These national-level estimates of population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) density for 1990-2100 and gridded population and GDP estimates for 1990 and 2025 were developed under the guidance of the IPCC Task Group on Scenarios for Climate Impact Assessment (TGCIA). The data are accessible through the IPCC Socioeconomic Data Distribution Centre hosted by SEDAC. The site also contains a draft guidance paper and other supporting documentation.

see: http://sres.ciesin.columbia.edu/tgcia/

14 November 2002

CIESIN is pleased to announce that the Human Footprint and Last of the Wild data sets are now available for downloading in GIS formats. More information on this collaborative project with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is available from the WCS website. This research was reported on by the National Geographic and CNN.

see: http://wcs.org/humanfootprint/

see: http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/wild_areas/

30 October 2002

CIESIN has released an updated Guide to Metadata. This guide provides information on the preparation of metadata that conforms with the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee's Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (FGDC-STD-001-1998). The site also includes detailed information on the indexing vocabulary used by SEDAC to prepare metadata records for SEDAC's data catalog and for the Global Change Master Directory.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/metadata

25 September 2002

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) Open House will take place on Saturday, October 5th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. SEDAC will participate in a display in the Remote Sensing Laboratory. We will demonstrate SEDAC's interactive data viewers for the Environmental Sustainability Index and the Ramsar Wetlands Data Gateway and distribute other outreach materials. The Open House typically attracts several thousand students, teachers, and residents from the greater New York Metropolitan region.

see: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/OH2002/index.html

10 September 2002

A resource page on Urban Remote Sensing is now available. This page provides links to SEDAC-sponsored research, resources, and publications concerned with remote sensing applications for urban research.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/urban_rs

10 September 2002

CIESIN has released a Guide to Land-Use and Land-Cover Change as the second in a series of updated Thematic Guides. This thematic guide presents the latest understanding on changes in land use and land cover, a key area of global change research. The guide includes an online bibliography of some 1,300 references.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/tg/guide_frame.jsp?g=47

21 July 2002

SEDAC has released a Guide to Population Projections as the first of a series of updated CIESIN Thematic Guides. Population projections are a key input into long-range assessments of the implications of global environmental change. This guide to global population projections helps researchers and educators to better understand how projections are produced and to choose the best set of projections for their needs.

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/tg/guide_main.jsp

11 May 2002

The Remote Sensing and Environmental Treaties website has been updated from its original format as a workshop website to a web resource designed to facilitate communication among those interested in this subject. The site now includes papers published after the workshop (held in December 2000) and a revamped Image Gallery of Remote Sensing Instruments of Relevance to Environmental Treaties (prepared by Karen Kline of the University of California at Santa Barbara).

see: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/rs-treaties/

10 March 2002

SEDAC Project Scientists Deborah Balk and Christopher Small, along with other SEDAC staff and collaborators from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have completed a white paper on "Global Infrastructure Mapping: The Potential for SRTM to Break New Ground."

see: http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/whitepaperfinal.pdf

4-8 February 2002

The Open GIS Consortium (OGC), an international industry consortium with more than 220 members from industry, government, and universities, held its next technical and planning committee meetings at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. CIESIN participated actively in this meeting, primarily through its involvement in the OGC Web Services Initiative (Phase I), which has undertaken a demonstration "testbed" focused on the New York metropolitan area. NASA and several other federal agencies are sponsors of this initiative, and Columbia University is participating as a coordinating organization.

see: http://www.opengis.org/

4 February 2002

The 2002 Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) is a measure of overall progress towards environmental sustainability developed for 142 countries. The ESI scores are based upon a set of 20 core "indicators," each of which combines two to eight variables for a total of 68 underlying variables. The ESI permits cross-national comparisons of environmental progress in a systematic and quantitative fashion. It represents a first step towards a more analytically driven approach to environmental decisionmaking. A companion Pilot Environmental Peformance Index more closely tracks recent environmental performance in four key areas: air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and land protection.

See: http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/indicators/ESI