Automatic Acquisition and Sustainable Use of Political-Ecological Data

Abstract

The sustainable management of anthropogenically-impacted ecosystems will require ongoing monitoring and advocacy by people across the globe. To this end, automatic methods are developed herein for acquiring several types of such political-ecological data. On the political side, a method is developed for gathering news articles about human actions that affect the ecosystem along with a method for identifying themes in social media that concern the consumption of an ecosystem’s products. On the ecosystem side, a method is derived for estimating wildlife abundance from purchasable high-resolution satellite images. A simple website architecture is described for holding this data and enabling its use in developing sustainable conservation policies. A rhino conservation website illustrates this architecture. A fundamental contradiction between the desire for open data on the locations of endangered flora and fauna versus the need to hide these locations from poachers is addressed through a new security protocol that enables the secure distribution of sensitive ecosystem data to trusted data consumers.

Keywords

• socio-ecological data
• environmental management
• information extraction
• mining social media
• remote sensing
• rhino conservation