Ecosystems and Poverty

The management of ecosystem services, and any research on their role in poverty alleviation, always requires data.  We’re fortunate that the array of satellites up in the skies, and the information revolution that it accompanies is capturing vast amounts of data every second.  The challenge is converting that data into something useful, and accessible.  Mark Mulligan from King’s College London has put a whole range of environmental datasets online through Google Earth interfaces at his geodata portal.  For the non-GIS experts, you can visualise the data in Google Earth, and for the GIS-geeks out there you can find links to download most of the data.  Some of the more interesting datasets on ecosystem services include results from his FIESTA model on water resources, land-use cover and change datasets such as those derived from MODIS-VCF, and a number of climate related datasets on tropical cloud cover and rainfall.  Check it out!