A decision by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to investigate the possibility of commercialising access to satellite data used by conservation agencies may negatively affect conservation efforts across the world, in particular in South Africa and the rest of Africa.
Dr Zoltan Szantoi and Dr Helen de Klerk
The recent news that the USGS is convening an advisory committee to determine whether users of the service would be willing to pay for increased spectral and spatial resolution images, is deeply troubling for both academics and conservation practitioners. The decision to do away with free access will impact users’ ability to monitor important habitats, including forests and fynbos to aid decision-making and planning, as well as to create alerts of when protected areas and other natural landscapes are being impacted by illegal activities.
Our concerns have been publicly raised in a letter written in conjunction with scholars from different parts of the world, and published in Science.
The availability of high-resolution satellite data at no cost, which was made possible by the USGS in 2008, has just about revolutionised the ability of conservationists to monitor biodiversity globally by detecting changes, setting conservation priorities and targeting conservation action through this data.
This public statement by scholars in the field of conservation and ecology and from the remote sensing and geospatial domains calls for high-resolution satellite data to remain freely available to all, because it would impact our ability to map and monitor habitat of species such as waterbirds or chimpanzees. Biodiversity sustains ecological functioning, and monitoring it is crucial as it impacts food security, natural resources such as water, farming and climate change, to name a few.
Requiring users to pay would put these images beyond the reach of conservationists. It would halt time-series analyses that have been useful in monitoring the effects of climate change, land-cover change and terrestrial monitoring of coasts, likely hindering the achievement of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals to which many countries subscribe.
Even though the Sentinel-2 satellites by the European Commission provide similar data freely, in certain areas, especially in Equatorial Africa, cloud cover hampers observations, and thus Landsat’s imagery is absolutely necessary to gather enough information for time-series analyses and land-cover change monitoring.
Of the 17 goals of the Sustainable Development Goals, nine refer to sustainability in terms of food security, water resources, clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, climate change, the oceans, seas and marine resources, and ecosystems.
Biodiversity is in crisis, with extinction rates orders of magnitude higher than background levels. Underfunded conservationists need to target their limited resources effectively. The USGS’s decision to make data freely available was followed by the Copernicus Program of the European Commission that subsequently made their data available freely as well. These resources have been instrumental to biodiversity research.
Assessments of environmental changes such as deforestation are now readily available. The current spatial and spectral resolution of Landsat data make it appropriate to many conservation applications, and although they are not always ideal, pragmatic researchers with limited resources use them regularly. We would really urge the USGS to reconsider their position and to continue to provide data from the Landsat programme freely to all users.
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