The purpose of cyberseminars is to provide a forum for scientists from the social and natural sciences to debate and discuss cutting edge population-environment research topics. Past topics include population and deforestation, international migration and the environment, population-consumption-environment linkages, and urban spatial expansion.
Finally, this extract from a presentation by Dr. Stephen Volz (1MB, PDF),
Associate Director of NASA Flight Programs, gives an up-to-date description
of the Decadal Survey missions as well as other planned missions to be
launched by NASA over the coming decade.
Paul Sutton and Benjamin Tuttle, Department of Geography, Denver University,
USA; and Christopher D. Elvidge, NOAA-NESDIS National Geophysical Data
Center, USA
The goal of this cyberseminar is to identify the past use of remote sensing data products in population-environment research, to explore challenges of remote sensing data integration, and to begin to think about the specifications of future remote sensing data products that would meet the needs of the research community. An ancillary goal is thinking about how to organize a process whereby greater social science input is provided for the design of future satellite sensors. The cyberseminar is co-sponsored by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), which supports the PERN Web site, and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). SEDAC has been tasked by NASA and its User Working Group to think specifically about how to increase the input of social scientists in designing future missions, and GEO has expressed a similar interest in engaging the social sciences as it builds a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) to address nine societal benefit areas. It is recognized that the nature of the challenges to global sustainability are fundamentally interdisciplinary, but that social scientists have often not had a place at the table when discussing data needs for Earth systems science in the broadest sense, which comprises coupled human-environment systems.
Major questions that this cyberseminar will address include:
1. What are the branches of population-environment research that use remote sensing data? 2. Which sensors/instruments are most often used in P-E research?
3. What are the barriers to greater use?
4. How do indicators constructed from remotely sensed data compare with those collected through field research or in surveys?
5. What data integration issues are faced in combining data from different sources and resolutions?
6. What are the prerequisites for inter- and transdisciplinary research in terms of standards of data interpretation, access to data from different sources, and the social and political purposes for which the data are used?
7. What are the societal benefits from the fundamental or applied research (using remote sensing data) engaged in by the P-E research community?
8. Are there common data needs that can be articulated by our community?
9. What are the major programmed missions such as NASA’s Decadal Missions (from the US National Research Council’s Decadal Survey) or those of the European Space Agency, China, Brazil, India, or commercial providers, that may meet important data gaps?
10. Recognizing that past research may have been constrained by the capabilities of existing sensors, what capabilities might be desired by this community for future missions (which hopefully are also technically feasible to build and launch)?
11. Is there a way to build a broad consensus across the social science community for the remote sensing data that is most needed by this community? What kind of process would be required?
As in the past, PERN will engage several experts to write brief contributions touching on these different themes. But the cyberseminar will be conducted in the spirit of a “brainstorming session”, in which there is freedom to think “out of the box” and express ideas for new sensors and how they might be applied to specific research questions.
In line with the above questions, the structure of the seminar will have three parts: The first part of the seminar will focus on what sensors researchers have used in the past to answer different P-E related questions and how data integration challenges were met. The second part will would look towards future programmed missions and examine how those future missions might be used to address P-E research questions. And the third part will consider “ideal” future missions for answering P-E research questions. Examples include the proposed 50m “NightSat” mission that, if launched, would provide much higher resolution night-time lights imagery than the current DMSP-OLS sensor.
How to participate in (or leave) a cyberseminar:
PERN Cyberseminars are conducted using a standard email discussion list. There are two main ways to join (or leave) the PERN Cyberseminars discussion list: Via the web-based interface, or Via email commands sent to the listserv software.
1) Via the Web Interface: The web address for PERN Cyberseminars (PERNSEMINARS) list is http://listserver.ciesin.columbia.edu/. The first step is to create an account on the listserv server. To do this you select the "Get a LISTSERV password for this server" link on the main listserv page, under the "Assistance" category. Using the "Subscriber's Corner" follow the instructions to subscribe and unsubscribe to the list called PERNSEMINARS.
2) Via E-mail: You can send commands to subscribe and unsubscribe to the listserv@listserver.ciesin.columbia.edu. If you would like to participate in a cyberseminar please send an email message with the body text "SUBscribe PERNSEMINARS". You may leave the list at any time by sending a "SIGNOFF PERNSEMINARS" command.
Once you are subscribed, you may wish to change subscription settings so that you receive a daily digest of postings (all postings attached to one email message) instead of individual postings. To do this you can either use the web interface to change your settings or send a message to the LISTSERV email address (in #2 above) with the text “SET PERNSEMINARS DIGEST”
Contributions sent to this list are automatically archived. You can get a list of the available archive files by sending an "INDEX PERNSEMINARS" command. You may also visit http://listserver.ciesin.columbia.edu/pernseminars.html.
Further commands that can be sent to the LISTSERV email address can be found in this LISTSERV Reference Library (16KB PDF).
Standards of Conduct
All who are interested in cyberseminar topics are invited to participate and subscription is free. Please adhere to the following standards of conduct when participating.
To ensure that the cyberseminar is successful and that we have a lively intellectual discussion, we would like to ask all the participants to be mindful of a few standards of conduct similar to those you might find in a face-to-face meeting. Please remember :
Respectful disagreement is fine; impoliteness is not accepted.
Opinions are welcome; advocacy is not - this is an intellectual debate, please refrain from using this forum for any advocacy purposes.
Respect other's email space: do not repeat something you have already said and limit yourself to a reasonable number of postings.
With these standards in mind, we look forward to your active participation in the seminar.
PERN is a project of The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) on Global Environmental Change.
Technical support for
PERN is provided by the NASA-funded
Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC)
at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)
of Columbia University.
PERN Cyberseminars are conducted using a standard email discussion list. There are two main ways to join (or leave) the PERN Cyberseminars discussion list: Via the web-based interface, or Via email commands sent to the listserv software. 
