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.

copernicus

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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How we “observe” biodiversity from space

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Biodiversity is a complex term but it essentially encompasses life in all its variety, ranging from individual genes to entire ecosystems. The legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson defines biodiversity as “the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth”. The loss of biodiversity due to human activities and its negative effect on ecosystems are well documented.