Linking Pixels and People

Abstract

Integrated land-change science (Turner 2002) seeks to join remotely sensed (pixels), biophysical (terrestrial), and social science (people) data. The history of joining these three fundamentally different data types is remarkably short. The effort focused on the social science-remote sensing data beyond photogrammetrics has only emerged over the last decade or so. The organizers of the National Academy of Science volume People and Pixels (Liverman et al., 1998), which was designed to provide illustrations of studies that joined the two types of data, had to scramble to find a sufficient number of experts and research to fill a workshop and the resulting volume. Indeed the careful reader of that volume might wonder about the extent to which some chapters actually link social science and remotely sensed data. The paucity of robust pixel-people studies is unfortunate given the increasing need for such linkages as global environment change, biocomplexity, and sustainability science turn to questions of the coupled human-environment system.