Climate data, including rainfall and temperature, are important for studying climate and water issues in an area. A major issue with doing research in the Middle East is getting access to reliable and complete data. In this blog I’ve talked about access to, and quality of, data, in posts like “Your guide to the “data…
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…
Data can be one of the biggest challenges for a researcher, especially if you’re junior or entering a new field/subject area. During my PhD I remember thinking about why we didn’t learn how and where to find data during the courses I took in remote sensing and GIS as an undergrad. When working on my…
Scale is a concept that have different meanings to different people. A cartographer most likely thinks scale refers to the scale of a map, i.e. the distance that one unit on the map represents in the real world. But scale doesn’t always refer to distances. It can be hierarchical and this refer to different levels…
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…
I will admit that even though I’ve had a few courses on land use/cover classification and accuracy assessments during my Master and PhD, I always get confused about what user and producer accuracy are, and even more so what Kappa is. In trying to assess the accuracy of my phenology based classification of cropland, I…
The title of this post pinpoints exactly what I feel about the secondary data I’ve found on my study area. It is also the (slightly modified) title of a report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development‘s Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods Programme. This report, written in 1993, was named after a quote by an…
This joint post developed from several discussions about correlations with (soon to be) Dr Martin Brandt who helped write this post. You will find the same post on his blog, as well as many other interesting posts. Correlations are a very famous and popular way to express relationships (and their strength) between two variables. Applications in environmental sciences span from relations…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 