Here, we share a little bit more about the fieldwork process, and how we worked around the problem of not being able to go to the field during the first years of our project. A significant part of the Climate Stress Syria project consisted of data collection in Turkey, which we hoped would allow us…
On Tuesday this week it was the United Nations’ (UN) International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (November 6th). Throughout the day, various organizations and people shared articles about how conflict affects the environment and how we need to prevent further exploitation of the environment due to conflict. Along with 58 civil society organisations and…
A paper that I’ve been working on since 2014 is finally done. Some papers take longer than others to mature, especially when they integrate different disciplinary perspectives. This paper is about agriculture in the Duhok governorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, the area i focused on in my PhD thesis. So in a way, this is an…
In November 2015, me and a colleague (Michael Degerald, visit his blog here) asked the question: how is agriculture affected in the areas seized by the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Da’esh)? We couldn’t find much information to answer our question, so we decided to investigate it ourselves. At first we wanted to look at…
Night light data recorded by satellites can be used to trace human activity and have been statistically linked to economic activity proxies, such as Gross Regional Product (GRP). Furthermore, night light data has shown the lack of electricity at night in North Korea. A google search for “satellite night lights”, however, gives me a list…
I’ve downloaded a bunch of Landsat 8 data over the Middle East that I am planning to use to create training data for land use classification (like I did in this paper). Exploring satellite data is very useful for finding interesting research questions. In this False Color Composite from summer 2015 it’s quite evident that…
Just a few days after publishing my latest paper I came across a similar paper that had been published recently: “Sociopolitical influences on cropland area change in Iraq, 2001–2012” by Gibson, Campbell and Zipper. This article investigates changes in cropland area in Iraq and their connections to the sociopolitical situation in the country during this…
Some time ago I wrote about how the food security in Iraq had been affected by decades of war and suppression by the Iraqi regime. After researching and summarizing that subject I decided to investigate if changes in agriculture, potentially induced by conflicts, were visible in satellite images in my own study area, the Duhok…
Yesterday I discovered the CORONA Atlas of the Middle East where you can look at old spy satellite images. The images below show Duhok city in 1967 and the same area, approximately 40 years later. Things have certainly changed. There was no Duhok dam in 1967 and Duhok city was not really a city.
Working in a rather mountainous area is interesting but can be a challenge when trying to determine land use through satellite imagery. Cropping land is mainly located in the plains where fields are usually of a larger size, easy to distinguish from surrounding pastures and other area. Orchards, on the other hand, are located in the mountains,…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 