Is the Fire Alert System being used for other applications like detecting illegal logging?
Figure 4: Google Earth KML with NASA Modis data. John Musinsky: As part of our efforts to help local counterparts in Indonesia improve enforcement and more effectively protect national parks and reserves against illegal activities such as logging, hunting and forest conversion, we are using a range of satellite data to detect suspected illegal activity as quickly and accurately as possible, and distributing these detections through suspected illegal activity alerts, including fire alerts. However, within Indonesian parks, fire is most frequently an indicator of larger-scale activity such as slash-and-burn agriculture rather than an indicator of selective logging or road building. And on any given day, cloud cover may prevent detection of active fires, which means it is important to follow-up with satellite data analysis to determine the location and extent of forest conversion that may have resulted through the use of fire. We are therefore complementing fire alerts with illegal loggin
