Amazon Projects

10 June 2002
bibliographic cache

Last year I started to collect material on what looked like it might be a focused project (notes and links below), but a year later it's much larger and more diffuse... and needs some order.


Amazon mining database

A project for Summer 2001, in collaboration with CETEM in Brazil. I'll be working with Sallie Strang (in Spring term) and Jim Kahn (who will be in Brazil through August). Here's a chronology:

16 Jan 2001
Jim Kahn stopped by to talk about several things, one being a project to build a bibliography about mining in the Amazon...

I did a quick GeoRef search for '(mines or mining) and amazon', as a place to start.

And of course there is a vast array of Web sites that need some sort of curation...

Would the ALSOS Project be a relevant model for the eventual database?

17 Jan
Did a quick search for 'mining and amazon' in Web of Science and got 61 hits, a set that would be worth a closer look for details of citations, abstracts, etc. Most of them have to do with mercury contamination as a byproduct of gold mining.

Some google.com searches for 'amazon and mercury' [83,000 hits...], just to see the sorts of resources that pop up:

Quicksilver for Gold: The poisoning of the Amazon (Greenpeace)

MERCURY POISONING IN THE AMAZON: THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG (Speaker : Dr. Jean Lebel, Senior Program Officer, Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health Program Initiative, International Development Research Centre [IDRC])

HEURISTIC APPROACH TO MERCURY POLLUTION IN THE AMAZON (Marcello M. Veiga and John A. Meech University of British Columbia, Department of Mining & Mineral Process Engineering)

text of Reuters news article

MERCURY, MINING & MAYHEM: SLOW DEATH IN THE AMAZON (from Drillbits and Tailings, Volume 4, Number 10, June 24, 1999)

18 Jan
This project has the potential to tie Environmental Studies and Global Stewardship together. Here we have a Brazilian institution
(CETEM [Center for Mineral Technology], "a research centre addressed to the devolopment, adaptation and dissemination of mineral, metallurgical, materials and environmental tecnologies", which has the mission to "Promote the Brazilian tecnological development creating solution compatible to the sustainable use of non-renewable resources and to the preservation of the environment, thus contributing to the social welfare and to the economical progress of the country")
...and a request for assistance in making information accessible via the Web; and we have the tools (in the fundamental structure developing in Frank Settle's Alsos project) to build and distribute the requested database, and Jim Kahn's long-term connection to projects in the Amazon region provides specific opportunities for our students' useful engagement. There's plenty to do here in building and continuing to elaborate the database, which starts with a specific issue but connects outward to many others
Bioremediation Of Mercury Pollution, Emerging Technology for Bioremediation of Metals , etc., for example
There are also GIS connections, pretty obviously: if we had satellite coverage and other map data for the Amazon...

Some sites Jim Kahn pointed me to: INPA and datasets and another, all to be investigated.

24 Jan
The article on The Future of the Brazilian Amazon in Science this week (19 Jan) led me to a couple of searches for 'fearnside' as an author and the same set of articles sorted by of number of citations.

 I did a couple of searches in SciFinder Scholar, with dramatic results

6 Mar
 System for the Vigilance of the Amazon (SIVAM)

23 April
Sallie Strang will be doing the heavy lifting in building the Bibliography. I need a basic Access structure to contain what she'll be working with, and we'll need space to put it...

27 April
Skip set me up on http://little.wlu.edu/amazonia/ with the Alsos front end. It will need a good bit of redesign/recoding, but the basic structure is there. From my machine, RUN \\little\amazonia gets to the directory. The entry Form is accessed via the Main SwitchBoard on the FORMS menu of the Access 'mining' file. I've cleaned out many of the TABLES.

31 May
Suggestion that there might be a Project having to do with oil development... leads me to hunting for detailed GIS coverage for the Amazon watershed. And some links to keep track of:

 Tropical Rainforest Information Center (an example of hosting? "Users can view and download data products derived from the analysis of Landsat MSS and TM satellite data. These products are the scientific results of land use and land cover change research conducted at the Tropical Rain Forest Information Center (TRFIC) at Michigan State University. The goal of this research is the spatial and temporal analyses of tropical forests and tropical forest dynamics through empirical observations of South America and Southeast Asia using high-resolution satellite data." --I registered with the predictable pw...)

 Exploring the Amazon

 Woods Hole Future of Amazonia and  datasets ... and  Institute of Environmental Research for Amazônia - IPAM

 Amazon River and Rainforest (numerous links)

I'm extracting DCW tiles for all of Brazil, 44 in all, with the idea that they will provide the coverage we need. There may be better ways to achieve the same goal... and I'm not sure how to think about the projection they're in --coordinates are stored in decimal degrees
 

13 Feb 2002
Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP)