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In this 7-minute excerpt from the documentary Roots of Change: The Vision of Wangari Maathai see how she became the first African woman, and first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Green Belt Movement that she founded has profoundly changed the physical and social landscape of Kenya...and it all began with planting trees.

Great connection to "Bird's Eye View of Changing Landscapes." "China's Pearl River Delta has experienced massive urbanization since the early 1970s. Derived from Landsat imagery, this animation shows urban expansion between 1973 and 1999."

To stem the adverse effects of climate and landscape change, adaptive management of natural resources * integrates a variety of available tools * provides a scientific basis for management decisions * improves our understanding of how ecosystems function

The Land Use Calculator is a tool for rapid scenario analysis of land-use implications, useful for decision-makers to address real-world challenges and for classroom teaching of conservation biology, sustainable development, environmental economics and global change biology. It is a decision-support tool targeted at land-use decision-makers in the tropic, allowing users to evaluate the implications and tradeoffs of pursuing alternative development scenarios by simultaneously accounting for the societal priorities of agricultural production, economic development, carbon conservation and biodiversity protection. Users specify a few environmental and socioeconomic parameters describing a landscape scenario, and the tool determines the implications of that scenario in terms of biodiversity, carbon stocks, greenhouse-gas emissions, financial returns of the land and employment opportunities.

High-resolution earth imagery has provided ecologists and conservationists with a dynamic new tool that is enabling everything from more accurate counting of wildlife populations to rapid detection of deforestation, illegal mining, and other changes in the landscape.

This online data viewer provides user-friendly access to regional land cover and land cover change information developed through NOAA's Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP). The Land Cover Atlas eliminates the need for desktop geographic information system software, or advanced technical expertise, by processing C-CAP data for the user and providing easy access to that distilled information.

Community mapping, a form of citizen science whereby local people participate in geographically defining an area, is increasingly taking on greater significance--especially during times of emergency and natural disaster. Director of the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Spatial Studies Michael Goodchild discusses "From Community Mapping to Critical Spatial Thinking: The Changing Face of GIS"

Satellite imagery matching game for middle and high school students.