THE USE OF REMOTE SENSING FOR THE GLOBAL MONITORING OF THE HUMAN 
ENTERPRISE: THE CIESIN EXPERIENCE 
Gary E. Johnson, Ph.D. 
Vice President & Director 
Information Resources & Technologies Division 
Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network 
2250 Pierce Road 
University Center, Michigan 48710 
USA 
Commission VII, Working Group 5 
KEY WORDS: Remote Sensing, Global Monitoring, Socioeconomic Data, Data Integration, CIESIN 
ABSTRACT 
The Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization 
founded in 1989. It's mission is "To provide access to and enhance the use of information worldwide, advancing understanding of 
human interactions in the environment and serving the needs of science and public and private decisionmaking". 
Remote sensing is playing an increasingly important role in the understanding of human interactions in the environment through its 
integration with both socioeconomic and natural science data. CIESIN is producing a number of global, regional and local scale 
data products which integrate available remotely sensed data with socioeconomic data, in a common scale and format, and 
accessible via the World Wide Web (WWW). 
CIESIN's experience with global one-kilometer resolution satellite and population data; with regional socioeconomic and remotely 
sensed data of Shenyang, China; and the merging of ten-meter satellite data with U.S. Census demographic data will be discused. 
Additional information is available at URL: http://www.ciesin.org 
438 Intemational Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998 
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