Geospatial technologies - Remote Sensing and GIS

So far we have talked about the climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem disturbance causing various issues in the Himalayas, these issues need to be closely monitored and studied in order to reduce scientific uncertainty and provide a science-lead analysis for policymakers to address. 

The well-known complex terrain in the Himalayas with its high variability of landmass and topography, make the ground monitoring and measurement less successful, point data from weather or hydrological station are not good enough to be a representative in certain areas.  Data coverage and quality are of high importance for developing environmental models, incorrect parameters will result in significant model error, thereby the cutting-edge geospatial technologies - Remote Sensing & GIS have been applied and funded to bridge the spatial information gap for the Himalayas since two decades ago.  

By definition, Remote Sensing is ''the gathering of information without actual physical contact with what is being observed''. This involves the use of radars, sonars, spectroscopy, and the use of airborne and satellite photography. Geographic Information System (GIS ) is ''a suite of integrated software tools for handling and analysing spatially referenced data''.

These two geospatial technologies are being used in the research of the Himalayas to 

• image deformation of the land cover impacted by human and natural processes
• measure surface heat flux;
• map the habitats;
• monitor and estimate vegetative biomass;
• map the cryosphere of snow cover, snow-water equivalents, and monitoring glacier variations;
• monitor greenhouse gas inventory;
• map mountain hazard mapping for disaster risk management;
• apply to the river basin programme

Source: http://www.innovativegis.com/basis/BeyondMappingSeries/