Hakim Abdi
Nomination for WWF's "Environmental Hero" award

In mid-September I got an email that said “ditt arbete med Birding Therapy som en av de nominerade av Årets Miljöhjälte i kategorin biologisk mångfald” (your work with Birding Therapy is one of the nominees for this year’s Environmental Hero award in the biodiversity category"). At first I didn’t know what to think and thought it was a phishing/malware type of spam. But then it sunk in that this is real, and it’s difficult to put into words how I felt. I didn’t think that anyone was paying attention to the small side project I started to get more people, particularly underrepresented groups, out into nature and birding.

Hakim Abdi
TEDx talk on “Satellites for Everyone”

My TEDx talk is now available on YouTube. The basic premise of the talk is that when you put all the recent advances in perspective, it results in a democratization of data on one hand, and science on the other. It means that anyone with a computer and a decent internet connection can have access to satellite data, process them using open source methods and extract information for their own use. This not only helps accelerate the rate at which scientific discoveries are made but also makes knowledge sharing and international development more equitable and inclusive.

Satellite Data

Macroscopes on Earth – Why we live in the golden age of satellites

As most of us know, our planet is changing on several fronts such as climate change, polluted oceans, biodiversity declines, land degradation, and so on. But Earth is a big place and keeping tabs on these changes is huge task. There is currently one tool at our disposal that can provide us with the big picture about the health of our planet. That tool is the system of satellites that observes Earth day and night.

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Behind the Paper: Testing a new satellite-derived vegetation index in a new biome

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The last chapter of my PhD dissertation was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. From conception to publication, this paper took about two-and-a-half years of work. It signifies the end of my PhD era, so to speak. The idea came from my supervisor, who suggested that testing the relatively new Plant Phenology Index (PPI) in semi-arid biomes would be a worthwhile cause because its only been evaluated in the boreal biome.