With Google Earth’s overhead view,
ecologist Adelia Barber can generate
maps of California’s White Mountains
that highlight regions (yellow outline)
where bristlecones (far left) might grow.
An eye on the wild
Zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton,
founder of Kenya-based Save the
Elephants, is doing just that.
r. kamadjeU/INT. JOUR. OF HEALTH GEOGRAPHICS 2009, © 2007 google, nasa, © 2008 terrametrics, © 2008 and, © 2008 eUropa technologies
Shortly after Google Earth was
released in 2005, Douglas-Hamilton
brought his tracking data from GPS
collars on African elephants to Google
and asked for help integrating the data
with the program. Today, the tagged elephants’ whereabouts are streamed onto
Google Earth’s satellite maps. This visual
data, which the scientists can access from
anywhere in the world, provides details
about the when, where and why of elephant movement. Working with Google
Earth has offered new insights into
elephant ranges and roadways, for example, shedding light on favorite watering
holes, the value of protected corridors of
land and who is interacting with whom.
“It provides a really nice overview of
what an elephant’s been up to,” says Jake
Wall, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver
who is working with Save the Elephants.
More recently, the team has used the
program to spot potential poaching. If a
young and healthy elephant stops moving or suddenly moves a very long distance — both red flags that the animal
has been killed — Douglas-Hamilton’s
team can send a detailed history of that
elephant to local wildlife officials.
Google Earth is all about visuals, not
analysis, Wall notes. He compares it to
Microsoft PowerPoint, which makes
data pretty and digestible, as opposed
to Excel, which does the actual number
crunching. Yet visual tools in the right
hands can have great power, providing
a universal language that crosses scientific disciplines. Public health officials recently harnessed Google Earth
to guide an entire vaccination program
after more than 50 people acquired
polio during an outbreak in the Congo.
“I had my GPS device and I started
putting in coordinates of reported cases,”
says Raoul Kamadjeu of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global immunizations division in
Atlanta. When he saw the data expressed
all at once on the computer screen,
Kamadjeu realized that the outbreak was
tracking along the Congo River.
With Google Earth, which provided
much better geographic data than available handmade maps, Kamadjeu and his
colleagues could estimate how long it
would take and how many staff members
were needed to vaccinate every young
child living along a particular stretch
of the river. The program allowed the
design of a speedy and effective campaign
that vaccinated many people who had
previously been missed, he reported
in the International Journal of Health
Geographics in 2009. This “river strategy”
continues to be helpful in fighting polio in
the region today.
Caller corrections
Back in the lab, Google Earth can help
scientists out in another way—as
they try to test their hypotheses. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s National Severe
Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.,
collects high-resolution radar and satellite data that are fed into algorithms
used for storm warnings and forecasting.
One test of these predictions is voluntary reports by citizens who call to say,
“Hey, it’s hailing here,” says Valliappa
Lakshmanan, of the NOAA lab and the
By mapping the locations of recent
polio outbreaks (dots) in the Congo
along with vaccination data (colors),
researchers could better understand
how the disease spreads.
University of Oklahoma. But in sparsely
populated areas, the lab might get just
one data point from a citizen caller.
Now the lab integrates prediction data
with Google Earth as part of an ongoing project called the Severe Hazards
Analysis and Verification Experiment,
or SHAVE. Phone number data sets
are overlaid on a map of a region, and
University of Oklahoma students are
called upon to contact people in areas
where storms were predicted, gathering
location-specific data on when storms
started, how big the hailstones are or how
much a stream is overflowing its banks.
After applying this system to flash
flood predictions throughout the United
States in the summer of 2008, the team
found that only 133 of the 417 severe
events reported to SHAVE occurred
within areas designated by the traditional approach.
This find suggests that the traditional
algorithms aren’t capturing the full spatial extent of flash flooding, researchers
from the NOAA lab and the University
of Oklahoma reported in the Journal
of Hydrology in November. Now the
researchers can refine their algorithms
to better predict which environments
are most vulnerable to flash flooding,
Lakshmanan says.
For all the help that Google Earth
gives to researchers at NOAA and elsewhere, scientists are helping Google
Earth too, uploading a wealth of data
now easily available to the public. Users
can access the U.S. Geological Survey’s
earthquake data to see where and how
big each recorded quake rumbles, look
up local ant species or follow a shark as
it swims the Pacific.
Students can even explore the American West. But gone are the clunky
graphics of the game Oregon Trail; the
experience of today’s kids approaches
the richness of Lewis and Clark’s
original journey. s
Explore more
s to see how scientific and other
organizations are using google earth:
earth.google.com/outreach/
showcase.html
september 24, 2011 | SCIENCE NEWS | 27
