6. Environmental Characterization

Environmental process and the products of human decision making that assume discernable geographic patterns are actors on a landscape that exhibit behaviors expressed as a function of time. The temporal dimension, while implied in most remote sensing investigations, becomes explicit when concern is focused on the question of change. Change is a familiar theme in the context of applied remote sensing whether couched in terms of land cover, land use, or more specific environmental conditions (Walker and Peters 2007; Berberoglu and Akin 2009). As a concept, change is perhaps on the more intriguing subjects in science, if only because its presence illustrates the fact that events do not simply occur in the here and now, but along a continuum of constant flux and adjustment. The challenge to us is recognizing when change has occurred and connecting together the myriad pathways and processes that conspired to produce a difference in the status of the landscape that we now observe. Tracing the pathways followed to a changed system is fundamentally more involved than the present looking backward into the past with perfect knowledge, but the more complicated problem of projecting the present into tomorrow.