from on
High
Science
Google Earth gives researchers new access By Rachel Ehrenberg
If Christopher Columbus wanted to travel the globe today, he wouldn’t need three ships and the financial backingof royalty—an Internet connection would do the trick. With Google
Earth’s three-dimensional interactive
view of the planet, Columbus could sail
to the New World from the comfort of his
living room (after checking out an overhead view of his house in Genoa).
California’s White Mountains seeking
the long-lived bristlecone pine. Barber,
Cruz, has found that Google Earth’s
resolution of that swatch of the globe is
good enough for her to tell a bristlecone
forest from a stand of piñon pine, greatly
simplifying her efforts to map and study
bristlecones.
By combining satellite imagery, aerial photography and geographic data,
Google Earth provides views of planet
Earth — and its moon and Mars — that
were once available only to the well-funded and tech-savvy. And while the
computer program offers unprecedented
virtual trips to places many would never
be able to visit, such as the Colosseum
and the Galápagos Islands, Google Earth
isn’t just a tool for voyeuristic global
tourists. The technology is changing the
way scientists conduct research.
Marine ecologist Elizabeth Madin is
taking this bird’s-eye view to the seas.
After a colleague mentioned seeing halos
of bare sand around sections of coral reef
on Google Earth, Madin, a postdoctoral
fellow at the University of Technology,
Sydney, immediately suspected that
small critters munching swaths of seaweed formed the rings. Madin checked
out the lagoons of Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef with the program and
was astounded that the little nibbles of
fish and sea urchins might have such a
visible effect.
In areas where overfishing has cleared
out top predators, small grazers dine
where they like, leaving no obvious
footprint, Madin and her colleagues
reported online June 14 in Scientific
Reports. Google Earth might be a good
tool for remotely monitoring interactions between predators and prey in
all kinds of environments, Madin says.
She can imagine scientists probing such
relationships high in the Rockies, where
the reintroduction of wolves is shifting
elk populations, thus altering the distribution of plants on which elk graze.
Some are using the tool for good old
scientific discovery, à la Lewis and Clark,
who documented much of the wildlife
of the American West. Ecologist Adelia
Barber, for example, scouts the rugged
and largely inaccessible terrain of
Subsequent trips to the reef con-
firmed that the barren rings were what
are called “grazing halos,” relatively
safe zones into which the grazers dare
venture from the reef’s shelter. Further
looking via Google Earth revealed no
such halos in a heavily fished section of
a reef off Jakarta.
“These are really small-scale inter-
actions and yet they have really large-
scale effects that you can actually see
from space,” Madin says. “It’s cool.”
Getting to reefs often involves hiring
a boat and a crew of scuba divers, which
can cost tens of thousands of dollars,
Madin says. Likewise, high mountain
habitats can be hard to reach. But sur-
veying from space may provide scientists
like her with a “first cut,” saving time
and money.
“At this stage we’re really using it like
a telescope,” she says. While Google
Earth surveys won’t replace on-the-ground work, they could be harnessed
for conservation management, says
Madin, especially in areas with limited
staff and funding.
