Traditional, national and international conservation efforts have tended to rely on strict protection through the establishment of national parks and other protected areas. These conservation efforts have made limited impact because they failed to address the values, priorities and practices of the people. The future of conservation efforts hinges upon cooperation and support (participation) of the local people. One of the main challenges in engendering participation of local people in the conservation efforts is the fact that most communities often view conservation as antithetic to development. It is therefore the believe of most conservationists that environmental conservation especially in developing countries would not succeed in the long term unless local people perceive those efforts as preserving ecological integrity as well as serving their economic and cultural needs and the effective way of achieving this is through community participation.

The Geography Seminar Series is organized by the Geographical Honors Society Gamma Theta Upsilon Eta Omicron Chapter.

The advanced baseline imager (ABI), which will be on board the GOES-R satellite being launched approximately in 2014, will provide a best-ever opportunity for measuring land parameters from geostationary orbit. From this instrument, the GOES-R series of satellites will have the capability of providing these land surface products: land surface temperature (LST), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), green vegetation fraction (GVF), fire detection and characterization (FIRE), surface albedo, and occurrence of standing water. The GOES-R land algorithm working group (AWG) is responsible for developing, evaluating and delivering corresponding algorithms for the above products.

This presentation introduces activities and accomplishments that have been conducted within the GOES-R AWG land team. I start with an overview of the GOES-R program and a brief description of the ABI instrument. Following that, I introduce you the GOES-R program required land products and their corresponding responsible member scientists. Next, I summarize the performances have done in the past two years within the land team. Finally, future plan on the algorithm development and calibration/validation will be discussed.