ENVIRONMENTAL REMOTE SENSING

The goal of this project is to use remote sensing data to build an ecological model. This project shows the distribution and the potential of mosquito borne diseases, especially Malaria. The studies areas for this project where the Sado Estuary in Portugal and the Alqueva Dam also in Portugal. The main achievements where the determination of the importance of rice fields in the mosquito’s life cycle, the identification of the spatial constrains to determine the mosquito’s habitat and the quantification of the mosquito’s densities based on environmental variables and satellite images from the AVHRR sensor.

Climate changes have repercussions in the landscape. Some of them may be good, but others may be disastrous for the world environment. Therefore, it is important to study how the landscape is going to evolve due to these changes. The purpose of this project is to shed some light into this topic. Specifically, we address the following question: Given forecasted data on climate changes, is it possible to predict how the landscape will look like in the next 50 years? We believe it is possible to do so with the aid of computer simulation incorporating multi-scale processes and patterns, and utilizing genetic algorithms to simulate landscape evolution.The simulation of future behaviours of physical systems under climate change scenarios raises the possibility of improving the state of knowledge of the physical systems´ underlying processes.