Macroscopes on Earth – Why we live in the golden age of satellites

As most of us know, our planet is changing on several fronts such as climate change, polluted oceans, biodiversity declines, land degradation, and so on. But Earth is a big place and keeping tabs on these changes is huge task. There is currently one tool at our disposal that can provide us with the big picture about the health of our planet. That tool is the system of satellites that observes Earth day and night.

How we “observe” biodiversity from space

Biodiversity is a complex term but it essentially encompasses life in all its variety, ranging from individual genes to entire ecosystems. The legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson defines biodiversity as “the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth”. The loss of biodiversity due to human activities and its negative effect on ecosystems are well documented.

To communicate or not to communication science

Should scientists be concerned if their research output is inaccessible to non-experts? Put another way, should scientists make an effort to communicate their science to the wider public? I posed these questions to a group of graduate students and postdocs and the feedback was mixed. On the one hand, there were legitimate concerns about the time and skill needed to “translate” complex science into an accessible language. On the other hand, there was strong support for science communication as part of a scientist’s moral and professional duty.

Ten years in Sweden

At 7am on October 16 2012, I was on board SAS Flight 910 from Newark that landed at Copenhagen Airport. I was ready to begin a PhD at Lund University. I didn’t know much about Sweden except the usual stereotypes, for example it’s a rich country with happy people, lots of nature, and a generous welfare state.

New milestone: My paper is now the most read and cited

This is an exciting milestone for me. As of December 13th, my open access study on the Land cover and land use classification performance of machine learning algorithms in a boreal landscape using Sentinel-2 data that was published in 2020 is the most read (22,885) and most cited (101) paper in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

European forests in the spotlight and how satellites can help monitor them

We are officially in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021 – 2030), which is global movement to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems. Whichever way you look at ecosystem restoration, chances are that you will eventually encounter trees, and by extension forests. Here in Sweden, forests have been in the national discourse since the EU’s new forest strategy for 2030 came out in July 2021.

An ethical blind spot in the natural sciences

Some disciplines such as cultural anthropology are better adept at recognizing power imbalances than others due to decades of field research on human society and mistakes learnt from earlier work. Although natural scientists conduct field research that is often not directly about people but their field sites, for example climate stations, flux towers, geological formations, or bird colonies, are frequently located where people live. Yet, there is a lack of awareness of the power dynamic between the scientists themselves and the local community where the research is being conducted.

Remembering Simon Aspinall

Today marks ten years since the passing of Simon Aspinall. Few people have impacted the trajectory of my career as much as Simon has. When I was 13, I developed an interest in natural history, which gradually turned into an interest in birds. I suppose it was an evolutionary progression since I was quite interested in dinosaurs when I was younger and memorized the names of many of them.

Nomination for WWF's "Environmental Hero" award

In mid-September I got an email that said “ditt arbete med Birding Therapy som en av de nominerade av Årets Miljöhjälte i kategorin biologisk mångfald” (your work with Birding Therapy is one of the nominees for this year’s Environmental Hero award in the biodiversity category"). At first I didn’t know what to think and thought it was a phishing/malware type of spam. But then it sunk in that this is real, and it’s difficult to put into words how I felt. I didn’t think that anyone was paying attention to the small side project I started to get more people, particularly underrepresented groups, out into nature and birding.