In an op-ed in today’s Miami Herald, Peter Seligmann of Conservation International and Wes Bush of Northrop Grumman teamed to discuss the need for greater information gathering and spatial analysis to address climate change. The piece discusses the needs for an integrated “Global Change and Ecosystem Monitoring System” that would incorporate sensors and systems to take the pulse of the planet.

On all fronts, our current data-gathering is perilously inadequate. In the tropics, we get information either from a biologist counting species in the space of a few square meters or from a vast global view provided by orbiting satellites. That leaves a huge gap in monitoring, fundamental to understanding changes in climate. Such ecosystem-level data could be collected from sensors on manned and un-manned aircraft or by adding additional sensors to observation satellites already in development by the U.S. government. Satellite communications systems can be used to enable real-time data availability from anywhere on Earth.

You can read the full piece here.

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