Planetary skin institute ALERTS: automated land change evaluation, reporting and tracking system

Abstract

In December of 2010 the Planetary Skin Institute announced the beta release of ALERTS -- Automated Land change Evaluation, Reporting and Tracking System. ALERTS is a decision support Evaluation, Reporting and Tracking system for near real-time global land use, land cover change, and disturbance detection and analysis. It provides global coverage of deforestation or other land change events and offers users a number of useful tools for identifying, characterizing and responding to disturbances. This public beta release of ALERTS was a direct result of the Planetary Skin Institutes' community swarming efforts with NASA, INPE, MINAM, Cisco, University of Minnesota, and Terrestrial Carbon Group. The team spent 12 months designing an immersive decision support environment to facilitate Planetary Skin Institute's mission for pioneering emerging R&D initiatives across sectors and disciplines for the monitoring and managing of scarce resources. Further by incorporating over 200 layers that span spatial and temporal land related themes ALERTS empowers the users to go beyond disturbance detections and assess and analyze projected transitional risk scenarios. During the session Mr. Stanley will discuss ALERTS and its capabilities.