Quarterly literature review of the remote sensing of natural resources

The Technology Application Center reviewed abstracted literature sources, and selected document data and data gathering techniques which were performed or obtained remotely from space, aircraft or groundbased stations. All of the documentation was related to remote sensing sensors or the remote sensing of the natural resources. Sensors were primarily those operating within the 10 to the minus 8 power to 1 meter wavelength band. Included are NASA Tech Briefs, ARAC Industrial Applications Reports, U.S. Navy Technical Reports, U.S. Patent reports, and other technical articles and reports

EPSRC IMPACT Exhibition

This exhibition was conceived by Dunne (PI) and comprised 16 mixed-media speculative design research projects. It marked the culmination of an EPSRC-funded initiative also partly supported by NESTA. Dunne supervised and then curated the projects by staff, graduates and students of the RCA Design Interactions programme. Each was conducted in collaboration with an external research partner organisation already supported by the EPSRC. The topics covered ranged from renewable energy devices and security technologies to the emerging fields of synthetic biology and quantum computing. Dunne and an advisory panel from EPSRC and NESTA selected themes on the basis of diversity of topic, design opportunities, intellectual and creative challenges, and public relevance. Dunne invited the designers to take a radical, interrogative approach, exploring the social, ethical and political implications of the research. Each designer visited the relevant science lab, consulted with the scientists throughout the project, and participated in a one-day workshop hosted by NESTA between scientists and designers on such forms of collaboration. Designers carried out literature, journal, and project surveys before developing their projects through iterative prototypes. The exhibition, held at the RCA in 2010, was considered by EPSRC to offer a powerful insight into how today’s research might transform our experience of the world. It was reviewed in the Guardian (2010), Wired (2010) and Design Week (2010). Dunne presented ‘IMPACT!’ in conferences including the IDA Congress, ‘Design at the Edges’, Taipei (2011) and at the Wellcome Trust, London (2011). He gave a related lecture to researchers at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing (2011). Individual exhibits from the project featured in exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art (2011), National Museum of China (2011); Z33 (2010–11); Wellcome Trust (2010–11); Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial (2010); Ars Electronica (2010); The Times Cheltenham Science Festival (2010); and V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media (2010)

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Assessing the utility of geospatial technologies to investigate environmental change within lake systems

Over 50% of the world's population live within 3. km of rivers and lakes highlighting the on-going importance of freshwater resources to human health and societal well-being. Whilst covering c. 3.5% of the Earth's non-glaciated land mass, trends in the environmental quality of the world's standing waters (natural lakes and reservoirs) are poorly understood, at least in comparison with rivers, and so evaluation of their current condition and sensitivity to change are global priorities. Here it is argued that a geospatial approach harnessing existing global datasets, along with new generation remote sensing products, offers the basis to characterise trajectories of change in lake properties e.g., water quality, physical structure, hydrological regime and ecological behaviour. This approach furthermore provides the evidence base to understand the relative importance of climatic forcing and/or changing catchment processes, e.g. land cover and soil moisture data, which coupled with climate data provide the basis to model regional water balance and runoff estimates over time. Using examples derived primarily from the Danube Basin but also other parts of the World, we demonstrate the power of the approach and its utility to assess the sensitivity of lake systems to environmental change, and hence better manage these key resources in the future