Landsats Aff

Famine - Impact – Ethics

We have an ethical obligation to mitigate or prevent famine

LaFollette 2k3 [Hugh, Cole Chair in Ethics University of South Florida St. Petersburg, "World Hunger" Blackwell Companion to Applied Ethics, ed. Ray Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman, Blackwell 2003, http://www.stpt.usf.edu/hhl/papers/World.Hunger.htm]

Those who claim the relatively affluent have this strong obligation must, among other things, show why Hardin's projections are either morally irrelevant or mistaken. A hearty few take the former tack: they claim we have a strong obligation to aid the starving even if we would eventually become malnourished. On this view, to survive on lifeboat earth, knowing that others were tossed overboard into the sea of starvation, would signify an indignity and callousness worse than extinction (Watson 1977). It would be morally preferable to die struggling to create a decent life for all than to continue to live at the expense of the starving.

***Biodiversity Advantage***

Bio-D – Solvency – General

Landsat key to conservation – 10 major areas
Leimgruber et al 5 (Peter, Conservation and Research Center, National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Institution, Catherine A. Christen, same, and Alison Laborderie, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at U Kent, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 106: p. 81–101, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ScientificPublications/pdfs/E48D1034-C95B-4400-ABB5-66A1E5A32EC8.pdf, accessed 7-6-11, JMB)

Among forest habitats the focus has been on temperate forests, about 47% of the published papers (Figure 1c). This is followed by research on tropical rainforests (37%). All other forest types seem to be little monitored or studied using Landsat satellite imagery. That temperate edges out tropical by such a margin is a bit surprising considering that NASA had a special research program – the Landsat Pathfinder Program – that focused largely on changes in humid tropical forest ecosystems in the Amazon basin and Southeast Asia. However, the U.S. Forest Service and its university extensions were probably among the largest users of Landsat imagery, and clearly focused their efforts on temperate forest ecosystems in the continental U.S. In addition, one component of the Pathfinder program was actually focused on North American forests. Much of this work found easy access to the scientific journals, many of which are published in the United States. We identified 10 major subject areas that were addressed in conservation biology through analysis of different aspects of Landsat imagery (Table II). The list of subjects is lead by research on land cover change, but also addresses more specific areas such as gap analysis, a method developed in the U.S. to identify gaps in the protection of biological diversity on a state-by-state basis (Scott et al., 1993). Most of the publications address biological changes, ranging from broadly-addressed land cover changes to, more specifically, deforestation, habitat loss and fragmentation, fire monitoring, erosion and climate change. The biodiversity monitoring and gap analysis research are targeted especially towards using land cover types identified from remote sensing analysis of Landsat imagery to approximate biodiversity across the landscape and determine its current status and potential future threats. Lastly, the landscape ecological studies generally pertain to research that assesses effects on ecological processes of heterogeneity in the spatial arrangement of ecosystems or habitat types.

Landsat data key to conservation, and its use is increasing
Leimgruber et al 5 (Peter, Conservation and Research Center, National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Institution, Catherine A. Christen, same, and Alison Laborderie, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at U Kent, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 106: p. 81–101, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ScientificPublications/pdfs/E48D1034-C95B-4400-ABB5-66A1E5A32EC8.pdf, accessed 7-6-11, JMB)

From our analysis of published research, it appears that over time Landsat data have become more widely available and utilized throughout the conservation biology community. However, even allowing for the existence of a considerable amount of gray literature, which was not included in our bibliographic search, the use of Landsat-derived data in conservation biology publications is not as extensive as we had expected. This may reflect the difficulties in developing scientifically rigorous ways for linking ecological processes across scale, i.e. linking the behavior of an organism or patterns in biodiversity at the local scale to changes in the biosphere at the regional, continental or even global scale. Glimpses of these scale issues become apparent in recent reviews of ecological and conservation applications of satellite remote sensing (Kerr and Ostrovsky, 2003; Turner et al., 2003). Significant advances have already occurred, and, as conservation biologists continue to tackle scaling issues, it is clear Landsat use in conservation research will continue to expand. Many of these conservation uses of Landsat-derived data occurred in the early 1990s, almost 20 years after the launch of the first Landsat satellite. While they paralleled NASA’s and the U.S. government’s recognition that Landsat data were truly useful for Earth system science and global change research (Goward et al., 1999, 2000), applications of Landsat data for conservation biology received little attention. Considering the pattern of use in light of the early evolution of the Landsat program explains some of this imbalance:

Bio-D – Solvency – Research

Landsat data key bio research
Leimgruber et al 5 (Peter, Conservation and Research Center, National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Institution, Catherine A. Christen, same, and Alison Laborderie, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at U Kent, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 106: p. 81–101, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ScientificPublications/pdfs/E48D1034-C95B-4400-ABB5-66A1E5A32EC8.pdf, accessed 7-6-11, JMB)

Today, Landsat satellite imagery and comparable products clearly belong in the toolboxes of landscape ecologists and many conservation biologists. Many of these researchers are probably relying on free or cheap Landsat data that is being distributed by various universities and conservation organizations via the Internet. Purchase of larger numbers of images for conservation biology research is probably mostly restricted to government agencies and U.S. universities. Surprisingly, these user communities have not yet widely voiced concerns about the future of the Landsat program and what this might mean for their applied and basic conservation research.

Landsat key to biodiversity studies – multiple environments
Urho and Niemela 9 (Niko, Ministry of the Environment of Finland and Jari, Urban Ecology Research Group, U Helsinki, 1/15, http://www.biostrat.org/Sustainable%20use%20of%20biodiversity%20-%20FI.pdf, accessed 7-6-11, JMB)

Several studies have shown that satellite-based land cover images combined with topographic data are useful in identifying farmland areas important for biodiversity. Landsat TM satellite images from South-West Finland were studied and found useful for mapping semi-natural grasslands (Toivonen & Luoto 2003), which are considered highly important for biodiversity. Other studies have shown that environmental variables derived from Landsat TM images and topographic data can be used to assess plant species diversity (Luoto et al. 2002) and bird species richness (Luoto et al. 2004) in agricultural landscapes. Remote sensing data has been used during the period 2000- 2006 to identify high biodiversity farmland areas and to monitor recent changes of land use in the MYTVAS follow-up study of the biodiversity effects of the agri-environmental scheme (see chapter 2.2). The results suggest that satellite images and GIS provide an approximate cost-efficient method to estimate the biodiversity status of wide areas on a broad scale thus have given rise for a new tool for sustainable land use planning. These studies can be considered as a starting point for further studies that have been made to identify HNV farmland discussed below.