The satellites basically transmit information to what's called a Receiving or Ground Station. And researchers can buy data from these stations in either digital form or hard copied format. To find the right image, you can search these databases by criteria such as satellite types, the date, by the amount of cloud cover or by geographic location.

This is one of the areas where we wanted to work this year. You see that we probably wouldn't want to buy this image and that this image actually--hopefully--focuses. It's the clearest image, certainly, but if we were looking for, say, this area, we would want to buy this image instead of this image because there's so much cloud cover in it. So, because of the web and because of all the technological advances, we actually have a huge amount of information available for us essentially at our fingertips right now.

This is, in fact, an image of the area where the Vietnamese government has asked us to go. We'd like to go there in March. It is now February. We don't have a lot of time to find sites. The reason why we had to wait this year is the Vietnamese New Year is next week actually and no one will be working during New Year's. So, we don't have a whole lot of time to find these sites. Thankfully, we do have these satellite images that will help us identify these sites because I do not want to be walking around Vietnam with 20 researchers behind me while I try to figure out where the water is for camping.

This image was taken on the 12th of March in 1994. We're working on getting a 1998 image. They're out there but we haven't actually gotten access to them yet. But we're going to base our decisions now on these different sites, on the 1994 data.

Narrative Index

Table of Contents

BioForum Index

AE Partners Collection Index

Activities Exchange Index