Deforestation in Madagascar

Credit: Credit: NASA/Landsat, Posted on: Sunday, 13 July 2003, 06:00 CDT Download full size image

All over the world humans struggle to provide themselves with food, housing, and comfortable lives, while preserving the natural environment so that it can continue to sustain animals, plants, and other living things, including humans. Such struggles come into sharp focus on islands, such as Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, where resources are clearly limited and human population continues to grow.

The image above shows a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image of southern Madagascar with a color-coded overlay showing the location of two important ecosystems on the island—rainforest (light blue) and spiny forest (light green)—as well as areas deforested in the 1990s (pink). Based on observations from NASA’s Landsat satellite and verified through aerial digital photography and videography, the deforestation maps were produced as a joint project.

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