Google-backed database steps up fight on deforestation

Terra Daily via AFP: Google, environmentalists and governments on Thursday unveiled a state-of-the-art database to track deforestation, hoping to ramp up enforcement of a major culprit behind climate change. The website, www.globalforestwatch.org, will show tree loss around the world in high resolution and with frequent updates. The data -- aimed both at policymakers and companies buying from forest areas -- will be available for free and not require much technical skill to use.

The planet lost some 2.3 million square kilometers (900,000 square miles) of forest from 2000 to 2012, according to data by Google and the University of Maryland, despite what some environmentalists call good-faith efforts by nations such as Indonesia.

"The problem to date hasn't been the lack of goodwill, or even the lack of nice forest regulations and laws written down. It has been, among other things, the lack of ability to really know what's going on," said Andrew Steer, chief executive of the World Resources Institute, a leader in creating the database.

"When the president of Indonesia passed good laws on forests, it was very difficult for him to know what was actually going on in real-time," Steer told reporters ahead of Global Forest Watch's launch Thursday in Washington.

The database will allow anyone to look online and verify the boundaries of protected forests, including buyers of palm oil who want to avoid illicit production, Steer said....

Deforestation in Haiti (left) and the Dominican Republic (right). NASA image

Google Earth enables remote tracking of fish catches

Ola Al-Ghazawy in SciDev.net: Persian Gulf governments could use Google’s free global satellite imaging program to better monitor and control fishing in their waters, say experts. Their comments follow a study that used Google Earth to uncover huge discrepancies between reported and observed fish catches in the region.

The study, which tracked fishing from space, found that actual catches taken from Persian Gulf fisheries could be six times greater than the official numbers the Gulf states reported to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada used Google Earth to count, for the first time, intertidal fishing weirs — an old technique used to catch fish by placing obstructions across tidal waters. They examined six countries on the Persian Gulf: Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The study, which was published last year (27 November) in ICES Journal of Marine Science, highlights the unreliability of some countries’ official reports to the FAO. It found 1,900 weirs were operational in the countries surveyed in 2005 and estimated their combined production that year at approximately 31,000 tonnes of fish — more than six times the combined total of 5,000 tonnes the six countries reported to the FAO that year.

“Underreporting fish catches can jeopardise a country’s food security and economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” says Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak, the study’s first author...

Combating global disease with a cell phone, Google Maps and a lot of ingenuity

UCLA Newsroom: In the fight against emerging public health threats, early diagnosis of infectious diseases is crucial. And in poor and remote areas of the globe where conventional medical tools like microscopes and cytometers are unavailable, rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, are helping to make disease screening quicker and simpler.

RDTs are generally small strips on which blood or fluid samples are placed. Specific changes in the color of the strip, which usually occur within minutes, indicate the presence of infection. Different tests can be used to detect various diseases, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis.

While the advantages of RDTs are significant — better disease-management, more efficient surveillance of outbreaks in high-risk areas and the ability of minimally trained technicians to test large number of individuals — they can also present problems.

"Conventional RDTs are currently read manually, by eye, which is prone to error, especially if various different types of tests are being used by the health care worker," said Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering.

To address such challenges, Ozcan and his colleagues from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a compact and cost-effective RDT-reading device that works in tandem with standard cell phones.

"What we have created is a digital 'universal' reader for all RDTs, without any manual decision-making," he said....

Cell phone with RDT reader developed by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institue at UCLA.