Category Archives: Environmental Change

Greetings from Camp Landsat: Cities and Suburbs

Greetings from Camp Landsat!

Postcards From Camp: Cities & Suburbs
Are you exploring any cities this summer? Rain or shine, urban planners use Landsat to take stock of city growth and its environmental impact. The front of this postcard features a natural-color Landsat 8 image of Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China acquired May 6, 2020.

This week’s camp theme is Cities and Suburbs and focuses on the growth of cities and urban areas as seen over time through Landsat images. Urban growth has impacts on the surrounding environment. Visit Camp Landsat to learn more and experience a time-laspse video of urban growth in Qatar, a storymap about urbanization of vacation towns, and learn about urban heat islands in Minnesota. This week’s camp crafts include Color by Number Image Classification and creating a bird house with a “green roof.” Thank you to our friends at NASA for making this fun summer camp possible!

Release of Cover Crop ID Toolbox and Handbook

IowaView staff have released the Cover Crop ID Toolbox and Handbook. This toolbox allows users to quickly identify possible cover crop fields using three Sentinel-2 images from the fall, early spring, and late spring downloaded from the Earth Explorer website based on field boundaries supplied by the user. On the project webpage you can download the toolbox which works with both ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro as well as the Cover Crop ID Toolbox Handbook that provides additional details about each step of the tool.

Seminar Alert: Reducing Nutrient Loss At Arkansas Discovery Farm

Today, Mike Daniels from the University of Arkansas will be presenting about how the Arkansas Discovery Farm is reducing nutrient loss, defining and building soil health, improving irrigation efficiency and edge-of-field monitoring of runoff. His statewide Extension efforts encourage agricultural producers to adopt conservation practices to protect natural resources and improve agricultural sustainability.

Here is the registration link: https://bit.ly/35AVFMt. The session will be recorded and are available on the Iowa Nutrient Research Center (INRC) website. For more information about the upcoming INRC seminar events: https://www.cals.iastate.edu/inrc/events/list?tid=304.

Earth Science Week – Day 3: Earth Observation Day

Happy Earth Observation Day!

Today we are celebrating remote sensing, the study of the earth using secondary observations from instruments such as planes, kites, drones, satellites as an exciting and powerful educational tool to help us show changes over time.

This year the AmericaView/NASA team has put together a fun and beautiful educational poster!

Read More

Oh how the years go by: 40 years – Mount St. Helens

This week marks 40 years since the Mount St. Helens eruption. The image above is from the USGS Earthshots trading card series. The images are displayed in color infrared which is useful for showing living vegetation in red. The mountains surrounding Mount St. Helens are primarily forest. Notice the extreme change in the landscape from the 1973 image to the post eruption image in 1983. The damage was extensive and ash covered much of the surrounding forest land.

Additional Resource

Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change – Mount St. Helens: https://earthshots.usgs.gov/earthshots/Mount-St-Helens#ad-image-0-0
Scroll through the images to watch the forest begin to return as the years go by!