Cold war spy satellite images reveal long-term decline in biodiversity

By Layal Liverpool

U.S. Geological See

Photos taken by chilly war stare satellites possess published a long-time length decline in biodiversity as a result of the expansion of farming in Kazakhstan over the last 50 years.

Catalina Munteanu at Humboldt College of Berlin, Germany and her colleagues analysed satellite tv for computer photography of Kazakhstan taken between 1968 and 1969 by US satellites spying on the Soviet Union and declassified in 1996. Other than shopping for nuclear weapons, as the US authorities modified into doing at the time, the researchers searched the photography for marmot burrows.

By comparing the chilly war photography with satellite tv for computer photos taken between 1999 and 2017, Munteanu and her crew found that the gathering of marmot burrows internal the same 60,000 sq. kilometre verbalize in northern Kazakhstan had fallen by 14 per cent between 1968 and 2017.

A vital amount of the decline appears to be like to be as a result of the expansion of farming, which started in Kazakhstan after the tip of the second world war, says Munteanu. An estimated 60 per cent of the burrows were misplaced in areas that were transformed into farmland.

These historical photography are moreover helping to shed mild on animal behaviour. “I modified into in fact very much surprised to search out that the marmots were utilizing the particular identical burrows for half of a century long,” says Munteanu. On condition that this particular marmot species only dwell around 6 years on sensible, which draw the same burrows were venerable over many generations.

Be taught about satellite tv for computer knowledge will probably be venerable to hunt historical biodiversity more broadly, equivalent to by taking a see at the incidence of beaver dams, termite mounds or colonies of gargantuan birds fancy flamingos or pelicans, says Munteanu. These declassified photography return additional than other satellites, attributable to they were among the first in orbit. “It’s a dinky goldmine of data,” she says.

“I never conception of utilizing this as a source of data,” says Dan Blumstein at the College of California Los Angeles. Blumstein says this knowledge gives a benchmark for working out the pause of human pattern on recent patterns of biodiversity.

Monitoring marmots in particular can also simply show conceal critical attributable to they originate a key fragment of the ecosystem, says Erle Ellis at the College of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Declines in their populations is in overall a useful indicator of a diversity of ecological dangers, from extinctions to ecosystem collapse,” he says.

Journal reference: Court cases of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.2897