Community remote sensing tools that advance the contribution of indigenous peoples to Earth information. Portions of the world with less dense populations, such as communities with indigenous peoples, are often under-sampled and underserved by centralized satellites and aircraft remote sensing systems. Yet these communities hold and their homelands contain equal, if not greater, understanding of our environment and can provide solutions to issues pertaining to it - particularly climate change. Tools that allow indigenous peoples to augment remotely sensed information from centralized systems have great potential for contributing to a deeper understanding of Mother Earth.
At the local level, integrating indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge and the eagle's eye perspective of remote sensing, encourages multi-level interpretations of our communities. We seek to document stories that identify solutions to self determination, title negotiations, homeland management, natural resource, language, cultural, and lifeway issues. Sharing our stories and lessons learned can assist stakeholders and other indigenous communities tackle similar community issues and adjust community, state, federal and international policies in doing so.
The Indigenous Remote Sensing Collaborative (IRSC) is a new initiative, founded by Indigenous Mapping Network (IMN). The purpose of IRSC is to increase awareness of community remote sensing as a tool for serving the needs of indigenous peoples. Community remote sensing can help indigenous peoples manage and preserve the resources of their local environment. It also presents a means for indigenous peoples, with limited academic and financial resources, to contribute their local environmental knowledge as part of the formal scientific understanding of the Earth. IRSC will promote and document contributions of indigenous peoples in these two key areas.
To do this, it will solicit, select, and guide projects that demonstrate ways in which indigenous communities can perform and participate in community remote sensing. These may include efforts as simple as creating photographic records that formally document local environmental change or as sophisticated as validating satellite imagery to help ensure global environmental analyses accurately reflect the actual environment at local scales. IRSC will work with indigenous communities to help define appropriate project proposals and to ensure the success of selected projects. During the coming year, it will also work with IGARSS to promote selected projects on the IGARSS website, create collaborations with related IGARSS projects, and enable participation in the IGARSS conference.
Within IRSC, projects are sought from indigenous communities who would like to share their use of remote sensing. Project leads are encouraged to review projects on the IGARSS Community Remote Sensing website to learn from the techniques presented, and form collaborations with other projects as appropriate.
Selected projects will be posted on the IGARSS Community Remote Sensing website and to IndigenousMapping.Net, under its new "remote sensing" category. Student volunteers will assist in reviewing, publishing, and updating online projects. Each project includes a brief description, what it hopes to accomplish, key participating individuals, tribal nation, NGO or other institution working with an indigenous community; funding sources; and whether they will be presenting at the IGARSS Conference.
Indigenous Mapping Network needs additional funding for creation and maintenance of this collective endeavor and asks for assistance. For further information on funding needs, contact Rosemarie McKeon at the address below.
To be posted when available.
| Project Lead | Rosemarie McKeon (rose@indigenousmapping.net) |
| Indigenous Mapping Network (IMN) website | http://indigenousmapping.net |
| IMN Indigenous Remote Sensing Collaborative website | http://indigenousmapping.net/imnrscollab.html |
| IRSC Call for Proposals | http://indigenousmapping.net/irsc/IMN_IGARSS2010ProjectCFP.pdf |