Cold War Satellite Captures Threat to Marmots

Cold War Satellite Captures Threat to Marmots

Data from a Cold War spy satellite reveal how agriculture has destroyed the living conditions of marmots in Eurasia.


Researchers used the satellite data to map the impact of agriculture on biodiversity across Eurasia.


The Eurasian Steppes stretch from Europe, through Russia and to Mongolia, and includes countries such as Austria, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.


“Since the 1960s, there has been a significant decrease in the number of marmots in northern Kazakhstan, at 14%. This is connected to the expansion of agriculture in large grasslands due to the high demand of food in [the Soviet Union] after the Second World War.


“Their flight could lead to an eventual decrease of the overall population of these rodents,” says Alexander V. Prishchepov, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s department of geosciences and natural resources management.


Until now, it was impossible to gauge how animal and plant species reacted to increasingly large agricultural tracts prior to the late 1980s, as no systematic observations had been made before then.


But using satellite data, the researchers could map the impact of agriculture on the bobak marmot, for one, as far back as the 1960s, and up to the present day.


“It is absolutely fantastic that we can use data from a spy satellite—launched into space as a response to an American pilot being downed over the Soviet Union by the Russian military in the 1960s—to count marmots and gain an overview of biodiversity,” says Prishchepov.


Along with his Romanian, Kazakh, and German research colleagues, Prishchepov compared images from the satellite with imagery from other service ..

Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.