Earth’s land surface is changing rapidly due to the combined effects of climate change and human activities. This includes changes in vegetation due to urbanisation, deforestation, expansion of farming and wildfires, as well as erosion and the impacts of flooding and drought. Satellite imagery can help to map these changes, but their resolution is often too blurry for small-scale changes, and they also need to be ‘ground-truthed’ by field observations.
By simply taking photographs and making some observations of the land surface using the EarthTrack app, you can help to ‘ground-truth’ satellite imagery, and to record how our landscapes are changing. These observations will be posted onto a publicly available global map, used by scientists at Aberystwyth University and University College Dublin to validate maps created from satellite imagery, and used to track future change.