The potential of remote sensing data for decision makers at the state, local and tribal level: experiences from NASA's Synergy program

NASA's Earth Observation System (EOS) satellite data are contributing to the development of policy relevant, remote sensing applications. To promote the use of EOS data for application development, NASA funded the Synergy program in 2000 in partnership with academia, end users, and industry. Three examples of remote sensing applications from the Synergy program are presented here and include agriculture, range management, and water resource management. These examples show that remote sensing products have the potential to be useful to a variety of decision makers and policy makers because of the opportunity to reduce chemicals in the environment, improve crop yields and better manage range lands and water resources. Transitioning from research and development to successful applications must overcome challenges such as the lack of awareness by end users of these technologies, inadequate feedback mechanism between application developers and end users, and unproven cost benefits of remote sensing data. Experience from the Synergy program indicates that these issues could be mitigated by educating and training end users, demonstrating the utility of remote sensing data in improving decision making, and establishing and maintaining a continuous dialogue between developers and end users. Sustainability of remote sensing applications ultimately depends on users continuing reliance on products and benefits from remote sensing data. The Synergy program also demonstrates that remote sensing data sets that are collected primarily for global change research contribute to the development of applications in a variety of disciplines at the regional and local level. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.