ENVIRONMENT
• Jane Goodall Institute – you can visit Flirt and the other Gombe preserve chimpanzees and follow their daily exploits with the Institute's "geo-blog" in Google Earth.
http://www.gombechimpanzee.blogspot.com/
• Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument- The Marine Conservation Biology Institute helps us explore the world's largest marine protected area around the Northern Hawaiian islands in Google Earth.
http://www.mcbi.org/shining_sea/s2ss_globe.htm
KML: http://www.mcbi.org/shining_sea/google_earth/s2ss.kmz
http://www.mcbi.org/marineprotected/NWHI.htm
• Explore the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)'s BioGems- pristine American wildlands.
http://www.savebiogems.org/googleearth/
• Sierra Club's Arctic- Migrate with the caribou across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and visit Native American villages, and current oil drilling operations.
http://www.sierraclub.org/arctic/
• The James Reserve Real-time Environmental Sensor Network- Explore real-time sensor networks including sensors for measuring the climate, webcams of bird nesting boxes, and "Roboducks."
Blog: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/03/realtime_sensor.html
KML: http://www.mcbi.org/shining_sea/google_earth/s2ss.kmz
• See Ecoregions of the World from the World Wildlife Fund and UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/487008/an/0/page/6#487008
• Plan your future Earthwatch Expedition- Volunteer to join a research team on Earthwatch projects around the world from the Lions of Tsavo in Kenya to the Marine Mammals of Monterey, California.
http://www.earthwatch.org/site/pp.asp?c=dsJSK6PFJnH&b=1844001
• US Forest Service Lands for Sale. Green Info Networks helps us visualize hundreds of thousands of acres of public land that the US Government proposed to sell earlier this year.
http://sierraclubplus.org/forests/maps/
http://www.sierraclub.org/forests/notforsale/
KML: http://www.sierraclubplus.org/maps/publicland_forsale.kmz
Community Action
+See Appalachian Voices' National Memorial for the Mountains and explore the consequences of mountain top removal for coal mining.
http://www.ilovemountains.org/multimedia
KML: http://www.ilovemountains.org/memorial/national_memorial_9_10.kmz
+Video by Inuit people in the Nunavut Territory showing use of Google Earth by indigenous people to promote self-determination:
http://www.nunavut-broadband.ca/videos/Land%20Management.mov
• Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging (NAIL)- Residents of communities in the Santa Cruz Mountains mobilize to challenge local redwood forest logging proposal.
http://www.mountainresource.org/loggingmodel
Movie fly over canyon with proposed area to log redwoods in red:
http://www.mountainresource.org/flyover
• Losing Georgia- Citizens in Douglas County, Georgia are using Google Earth to understand change caused by heavy development, in the hope of raising public awareness on these issues.
http://www.losinggeorgia.com/category/updates/interactive-tour/
KML: http://www.losinggeorgia.com/downloads/tour/losing_georgia2.kml
+Tokyo Residents explore a proposed redevelopment plan.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/240302/page/vc
CULTURE
• King Tutankhamon's Tomb in 3-D
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/408502/page/0
• Iraqi Civilian Casualties. http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/224601/page/
kml: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=224601
• World Wide Panorama Project http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=165663
• World Heritage Sites. Visit hundreds of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, World Heritage Sites that exemplify our cultural and natural heritage.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12116
Animating the London building boom since 1950 using Google Earth...
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/10/animation_of_london.html
• ArchAtlas Cultural and Archaeology Sites
http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk/web/googleearth/googleearth.htm
• Visualizing Import/Export in South American Trade - www.thetimoneygroup.com/google_trade.html
kml: www.thetimoneygroup.com/sa/SA_trade.kmz
• Darfur, Sudan -Destroyed village huts visible.
http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/10/darfur.html#comments
• 100 Major Cities in the World:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/47564/page/0/fpart/all/vc/1
Natural Disaster Response
• Explore Hurricane Katrina flooding through dynamic imagery overlays in Google Earth. Use the slider to slide between before flooding and after flooding to see how rescue workers used NOAA imagery to help those in need.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~globalconn/katrina.html
http://earth.google.com/katrina.html
• Examine flooding in low lying zones in southern India affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake with the Auroville Tsunami Relief & Rehab Project. Using the data they mapped onto Google Earth imagery, they presented local and regional design solutions to prevent future flooding to government planning officials in Tamil Nadu.
http://www.auroville.org/tsunami/tsunami.htm
• Monitor the USGS' real-time earthquake reports.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/catalogs/
•See mudslides after the Pakistan Earthquake and how imagery aided disaster response.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~globalconn/pakistan.html
• Weather with MODIS data; Storms and Natural Hazards.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/52813
• Visit the NRDC's New Orleans environmental impact of Katrina.
http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/katrinadata/contents.asp
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CLIMATE CHANGE
• Explore the effects of Global Warming in Alaska with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/qthinice.asp
• Sierra Club's Arctic- Migrate with the caribou across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and visit Native American villages, and current oil drilling operations.
http://www.sierraclub.org/arctic/
• Will my house be under water?- The Sierra Club of Canada helps Vancouver residents explore the possible impact of a 6 meter rise in sea level due to global warming.
http://www.sierraclub.ca/bc/media/item.shtml?x=798
• Explore the Cryosphere or "Where the world is frozen" with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado. See daily global ice concentration and snow extent and a collection of glaciers in the Americas and Europe.
http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/04/watch_ice_melt.html
• California Energy Commission Climate Zones:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/maps/climate_zone_map.html
• Understand climate change in the Arctic with DAMOCLES, the Developing Arctic Modeling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies, project.
http://www.damocles-eu.org/article_9.shtml
KML http://www.seaice.dk/damocles/google/DAMOCLES.kmz
• Monitor Coral Reef bleaching threat and sea surface temperatures:
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/ge/index.html
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/530406/page/0/vc/1
KML http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/ge/products/CRWGE_CurrentProducts.kmz
• See glaciers melting from New Zealand to Switzerland to Peru:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Board=EarthNature&Number=289260&fpart=1&PHPSESSID =
ENERGY
• World Wide Panorama: Energy.
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp905/index.html
• World Energy Consumption in 2004:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Board=EarthNature&Number=410988&fpart=1&PHPSESSID =
http://www.xist.org/default1.aspx
• Hurricane Rita and Katrina impact on U.S. Oil & Gas production:
EDUCATION
• German students track the Whale Shark named "Schroeder" by satellite tag.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=EarthExternalData&Number=126999
+See the shark's dynamic ocean progress by downloading the time-stamped layer here:
http://earth.google.com/earth4-beta4.html
KML: http://services.google.com/earth/kmz/whale_shark.kml
• Death Valley Driving Tour
http://destinsharks.com/maps-charts/93
• Greenpeace's Tour of the Bering Sea.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Number=507014
Global Health
• Avian flu spread by Declan Butler. Visualize avian flu outbreaks in the first online map of each of the more than 1800 individual outbreaks of avian flu in birds that have been reported over the past two years. It also provides a geographical overview of confirmed human cases of infection with the H5N1 influenza virus.
Declan Butler's Blog:
http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=16
See it with the added Google Earth time feature:
http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/09/avian_flu_layer.html
Download the KML here: www.declanbutler.info/Flumaps1/Timeseries.kml
• Global Infant Mortality - http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=64
KML: www.declanbutler.info/Poverty/Infant_mortality.kmz
Biodiversity
• Check out AntWeb and the Google Ant:
http://www.antweb.org/google_earth.jsp
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/ants-unearthed-with-google-earth.html
• Look at wildlife distributions like polar bears with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility- GBIF.