Biodiversity monitored from space
ESA TV Exchanges
The world's biodiversity is vanishing at an unprecedented rate ñ around 100 species every day ñ due to land use change and pollution, for example. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity calls to reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss and to support this initiative, ESA has kicked off its new DIVERSITY project.
ESA has identified four main users for satellite data, among them UNESCO who is also the main coordinator between the data users and contractors selected by ESA.
Today's Exchange was recorded at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, and documents how satellite data actually helps to monitor the environmental conditions that influence biodiversity.
The Exchange is made of an A-roll of 4 minutes with English voiceover (split audio) plus a B-roll with clean international sound.
The A-roll script script is online as a PDF file under http://television.esa.int/photos/EbS48938.pdf
A Media Player preview clip (24 MB) of the A-roll is online under htt

10h00""30"" ESA ñ Biodiversity
Introduction, beetle and biodiversity in any form.
10h00í43"" In ancient Egypt, a beetle represented immortality and revival.
Today, animals symbolise bio-diversity, a balance quite difficult to maintain in our modern society in any form: culturally, and biologically.
Maintaining diversity is one of the main objectives of UNESCO.
(00í20íí Jessica Bunning and Mario Hernandez watching the 3D map and satellites images.)
10h01í05"" Jessica Bunning and Mario Hernandez are working together in the remote sensing unit in the headquarters of the organization in Paris.
They examine a three-dimensional map of a park listed World Heritage in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Thanks to data from Envisat, an ESA satellite circling the Earth at 800km altitude, the map is a complete working tool, allowing to visualize in the vegetation patterns and the rivers in a wide area in equatorial Africa which is very difficult to access.