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ISPRS Commission VII Symposium Victoria (BC) - Canada, September 17 - 21, 1990
GLOBAL and ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING
the challenges to educators
K.J. Beek and H.A.M.J. van Gils *
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY
New environmental problems have reached general public awareness in the last decade
especially those on the GLOBAL scale such as:
• the stratospheric Antarctic ozone-hole,
• the green house effect or global warming,
• acid rain leading to "Waldsterben",
• desertification and
• deforestation
New tools which support our monitoring of these conditions and the exploration of future
scenarios are or will be operational; these are
• firstly, remote sensing satellites; especially those with high temporal resolution
and/or a large area coverage (NOAA, Meteosat, ERS-1)
• Geo Information Systems known as GIS; both PC-based and for powerful
mainframes/workstations
Global environmental problems often involve interaction of the atmosphere, biosphere and
hydrosphere (as in global warming); therefore scientific understanding of these global
problems requires interdisciplinary natural sciences, in other words geography. Global
environmental problems involve fluxes of matter and energy, that is ecology. However
both geography and ecology have to be practiced currently on relative extreme spatio-
temporal scales for human perception. These are either short temporal scales (hours) over
large areas: as is shown by clouds, oceanic currents, wind, air and water temperature; or
long temporal scales (decades) such as changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Following Lovelock (1979), we have to learn to look upon the globe as GAIA: the living
planet, as a self regulating ecosystem stabilizing itself (e.g. atmospheric oxygen concentra
tion) with corrective feedback loops. The specifics of these stabilizing GAIA functions are
only conjectured but we willingly and wittingly risk their deregulation and the establish
ment of new but less condusive equilibria by the waste and residues of our economic
activities.
* International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC),
P.O. Box 6, 7500 AA Enschede, the Netherlands
