Rebecca Moore is an American software engineer, director of Google Earth, and director and founder of the Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine computer mapping projects. [1]
Rebecca Moore is an American software engineer, director of Google Earth, and director and founder of the Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine computer mapping projects. [1]
Moore grew up in Roslyn, New York, with one sister and two brothers. [2] Her father, Earle K. Moore, was a communications and civil rights lawyer in Manhattan, who won a landmark case establishing that broadcast stations must serve the interests of their viewers. [3] Her brother, Frank C. Moore, was an artist and activist, including being an originator of the Red Ribbon project for AIDS solidarity. [4] (Rebecca Moore completed his work setting up the Gesso Foundation for artists after his death.) [5] She attended Roslyn High School, graduated Brown University with a bachelor's degree with honors in Artificial Intelligence in 1977, then worked as a software engineer for companies including Hewlett-Packard and General Instrument. [2] [6] [7] [8]
When her father died in 2001, then her brother Frank in early 2002, Moore felt a duty to accomplish something in her life, as they had. [9] [10] She returned to academia to study bioinformatics, to treat disease with the help of computer analysis, earning a master's degree in cognitive psychology from Stanford University, but left after three years before completing her PhD in computer science. [11] [9]
Moore was then living in Los Gatos, California, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a rural area that was poorly served by government agencies; an ambulance took 2 hours to reach a neighbor's house, partly because they were using a hand-drawn map from 1983. So Moore founded a civic association, the Mountain Resource Group, [12] and began work on digital maps of the area. They were used by first responders, civil agencies, and her neighbors. She used consumer software, then professional geographic information systems software, before settling on Keyhole, Inc's Earth Viewer. [9] [13]
Moore was an active user of Keyhole's Earth Viewer software, enough so that in 2005 she was invited by the company to give a tech talk on using the product. She gave a list of eight to ten specific suggestions to improve the tool. Google had recently acquired Keyhole, Inc (in October 2004), [14] and offered her a job on the project, which would become Google Earth. [9] [10]
Google gives its employees 20% time, the ability to use a fifth of their hours to work on side projects, and Moore used hers to work on what would become Google Earth Outreach, acting as a link between the mapping software and the environmental community. [15] [16] Brian McClendon, a co-founder of Keyhole, Inc. then a VP leading Google Earth, was a strong supporter of the idea from the beginning, and made sure Google provided the funds. [17]
In August 2005, the San Jose Water Company (SJWC) submitted a proposal to log a 1000-acre swathe of redwood trees in the Los Gatos Mountains, and sent copies to Moore and her neighbors. [1] Moore started a subgroup of her civic association, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, to oppose the project, and used the Google Earth application to create a detailed map, including a 3-D "flyover" movie, displaying the area that would be logged in relationship to the mountains and the local watershed. [18] It demonstrated that logging trucks would be taking winding roads used by children to walk to school, [19] and that helicopters would be carrying large tree trunks over homes, schools, and playgrounds. [10] It was referenced in local and national newspapers, shown on local television news, to Ira Ruskin, the district representative in the California State Legislature, and to former vice president Al Gore, who issued a statement opposing the proposed logging. [10] [20] [21] The debate went on for years; in 2006, Moore got Kenneth Adelman of the California Coastal Records Project to fly her in a helicopter over the SJWC land to take photographs to prove the water company owned more timberland than would qualify it for the open-ended logging permit that it was applying for. After a September 2007 California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection hearing, the proposal was defeated. [13] [22] [19] [23] Equally important, the publicity Moore's work had gathered by using Google Earth to save a redwood forest led to contacts by many nonprofits interested in working with Google Earth Outreach. [17]
The first Google geoblog, a Web log with the entries referenced by geographical locations in Google Earth, was a joint project with the Jane Goodall Institute in 2006. It covered the daily lives of the chimpanzees of the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and the field researchers who studied them. [24] [25] The Google Earth imagery was used to draw attention to the loss of chimpanzee habitat, and to map the location of chimpanzee poaching snares. [26] Moore was a fan of Jane Goodall's work, and personally cold called JGI to propose the cooperation. [10] [15] Googlers returned to Gombe in 2014 with Google Street View cameras, to map the forest from the viewpoint of a person walking its trails. [27] Goodall herself thanked Moore in her book Seeds of Hope, for her help and her personal friendship. [28]
Another early Google Earth Outreach project was with Appalachian Voices, which used the tools to illustrate the effects of mountaintop removal mining, with before and after pictures of 470 mountains that have been razed for coal. Within a week of the launch of their project using Google Earth in 2007, their online petition got 12,000 signatures. [24] [29] Yet another 2007 project was a collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the crisis in Darfur, controversially naming it a genocide, and showing satellite pictures of razed villages and refugee camps and personal photographs and stories of people who lost families and homes. [30] [24] By 2013, the HALO Trust was using Google Earth to help clear landmines, by mapping cleared and yet uncleared areas; a Google Earth Outreach grant funded an online minefield tour narrated by Angelina Jolie. [31] [32]
Moore was among the first to support the Paiter Suruí people, an indigenous tribe of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, by teaching them to use Google's maps to preserve their culture and their land. [33] The tribe only had its first contact with outsiders in 1969, but in the years since had seen their land destroyed by mining and logging. The tribe's chief, Almir Narayamoga Surui, the first person of his tribe to go to college, discovered Google Earth in an Internet café, and thought it could be used to help. In 2007, the Amazon Conservation Team flew him to the United States, where he met with Moore in her Mountain View office at Google Earth Outreach. In 2008, Moore and four other Google employees flew to the Amazon to teach the Suruí, many of whom had never used a computer, to use Google's tools to make maps, blogs, photos, and YouTube videos to document the loss of their land; in exchange, the Suruí painted the Googlers' skin with Jenipapo berries and made them honorary members of the tribe. [16] The Suruí blogs drew international attention. In 2009, the Googlers returned with Android phones equipped with GPS, that the tribe could use to photograph illegal logging to present as evidence to law enforcement, and inventory trees and calculate carbon content to apply for forest carbon offsets. They became the first indigenous people to generate credit by saving rainforest, and in 2013 had sold 120,000 tons of offsets to Natura. [34] [35] Moore unveiled the Surui cultural map in 2012. [36] [37]
Moore founded the project that would become Google Earth Engine after she was approached by Carlos Souza Jr., a geoscientist from Imazon, on that first Brazil trip to aid the Suruí tribe in 2008. Souza asked for a way to analyze satellite data to observe and prevent illegal logging which was costing the Amazon rainforest more than 1 million acres each year. The project Moore's team built harnessed tens of thousands of computers to process and monitor Google Earth's satellite images and set off alarms about suspicious changes or activity. This would alert Imazon, or the Suruí, in enough time for people to be sent out to confirm illegal logging, and then notify the authorities. Imazon says this allowed them to reduce illegal logging in Paragominas by 97 percent between 2007 and 2010. [16] [37] [38] Google Earth Engine launched to the public in 2010, and is used by over a thousand scientists around the world for applications from forecasting drought and estimating agricultural crop yield, to predicting where chimpanzees are likely to build their nests. [39]
One of the first large scale Google Earth Engine projects was a study of global forest change. Researcher Matthew Hansen had been mapping global land cover since the mid-1990s, first at South Dakota State University, then at the University of Maryland, but lacked sufficient high-resolution data. The data came in 2008, when the United States Geological Survey made 3.6 million satellite images at 30 meter resolution from the Landsat program freely available on the Internet. The computer power to fully analyze it was provided by Moore and Google Earth Engine. For the release of Google Earth Engine in 2010, Moore, Hansen, and CONAFOR the Mexican government agency, processed 53,000 images in 15,000 computer hours to create the highest resolution forest and water map of Mexico ever. [39] [40] Then, for a global survey of all forestation change from 2000 to 2012, cloud computers processed 700,000 images in 1 million hours spread among 10,000 CPUs. [41] The work was made available online and the resulting joint paper was published in the November 2013 issue of Science . [42] [43]
Moore credits her childhood with instilling a love of nature. Her hobbies include mountaineering and trail construction. [9] In May 1978, Moore went on a 33-person Brown University expedition led by Thomas A. Mutch, to climb Devistan, a peak in the Nanda Devi region of the Himalayas. One died in the attempt. [44] [6] Moore was one of a four-person all female team to make the summit. In 2013, she made a memorial Google Earth map of the expedition. [45] In 1990, Moore led a team climbing mount Denali in Alaska for 28 days. [9] More recently, Moore and her neighbors in the Mountain Resource Group have built and mapped a Community Trail Network in the Santa Cruz Mountains using Google Earth, GPS, and skills she learned from the National Outdoor Leadership School when she was 20. [8] [9] [12]
Moore has publicly said that she has two dogs, but no children, as she wouldn't have been able to have children and do her work. [9]
The chimpanzee, also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close relative the bonobo was more commonly known as the pygmy chimpanzee, this species was often called the common chimpanzee or the robust chimpanzee. The chimpanzee and the bonobo are the only species in the genus Pan. Evidence from fossils and DNA sequencing shows that Pan is a sister taxon to the human lineage and is humans' closest living relative. The chimpanzee is covered in coarse black hair, but has a bare face, fingers, toes, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. It is larger and more robust than the bonobo, weighing 40–70 kg (88–154 lb) for males and 27–50 kg (60–110 lb) for females and standing 120 to 150 cm. According to studies published in 2017 by researchers at The George Washington University, bonobos, along with common chimpanzees, split from the human line about 8 million years ago; moreover, bonobos split from the common chimpanzee line about 2 million years ago.
Dame Jane Morris Goodall, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees.
The genus Pan consists of two extant species: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Taxonomically, these two ape species are collectively termed panins. The two species were formerly collectively called "chimpanzees" or "chimps"; if bonobos were recognized as a separate group at all, they were referred to as "pygmy chimpanzees". Together with humans, gorillas, and orangutans they are part of the family Hominidae. Native to sub-Saharan Africa, chimpanzees and bonobos are currently both found in the Congo jungle, while only the chimpanzee is also found further north in West Africa. Both species are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and in 2017 the Convention on Migratory Species selected the chimpanzee for special protection.
Dian Fossey was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.
Frank C. Moore II was a New York-based painter, winner of the Logan Medal of the Arts, and a member of the Visual AIDS Artist Caucus—the organization responsible for the (Red) Ribbon Project, A Day Without Art, and A Night Without Light.
Gombe Stream National Park is a national park in Kigoma District of Kigoma Region in Tanzania, 16 km (10 mi) north of Kigoma, the capital of Kigoma Region. Established in 1968, it is one of the smallest national parks in Tanzania, with only 35 km2 (13.5 sq mi) of protected land along the hills of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. The terrain is distinguished by steep valleys, and the vegetation ranges from grassland to woodland to tropical rainforest. Accessible only by boat, the park is most famous as the location where Jane Goodall pioneered her behavioural research on the common chimpanzee populations. The Kasakela chimpanzee community, featured in several books and documentaries, lives in Gombe National Park.
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bike, air and public transportation. As of 2020, Google Maps was being used by over one billion people every month around the world.
The Goualougo Triangle, is a 100-square-mile (260 km2) region on the southern end of the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, located in the Republic of Congo, in Central Africa. The northern Congo lowland forest ecosystem of the park is one of the most intact fauna habitats of its type in Africa. Populations of several endangered or threatened species are found here, including forest elephants, western lowland gorillas and a high density of common chimpanzees.
Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data onto a 3D globe, allowing users to see cities and landscapes from various angles. Users can explore the globe by entering addresses and coordinates, or by using a keyboard or mouse. The program can also be downloaded on a smartphone or tablet, using a touch screen or stylus to navigate. Users may use the program to add their own data using Keyhole Markup Language and upload them through various sources, such as forums or blogs. Google Earth is able to show various kinds of images overlaid on the surface of the earth and is also a Web Map Service client. In 2019, Google has revealed that Google Earth now covers more than 97 percent of the world, and has captured 10 million miles of Street View imagery.
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files, but other projects such as Marble have added KML support.
Ai is a female western chimpanzee, currently living at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. She is the first subject of the Ai project, a research program started in 1978 by Kiyoko Murofushi and Tetsuro Matsuzawa which is aimed at understanding chimpanzee cognition through computer interface experiments.
The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is a global non-profit wildlife and environment conservation organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1977 by English primatologist Jane Goodall and Genevieve di San Faustino (1919-2011). The institute's mission is to improve the treatment and understanding of primates through public education and legal representation, to protect their habitats in partnership with local communities, and to recruit and train young people for these missions.
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is a non-profit organization that works in partnership with indigenous people of tropical South America in conserving the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest, as well as the culture and land of its indigenous people. ACT was formed in 1996 by ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin and Costa Rican conservationist Liliana Madrigal. The organization is primarily active in the northwest, northeast, and southern regions of the Amazon.
The Paiter, also known as Suruí, Suruí do Jiparaná, and Suruí de Rondônia, are an indigenous people of Brazil, who live in ten villages near the Mato Grosso–Rondônia border. They are farmers, who cultivate coffee.
The Kasekela chimpanzee community is a habituated community of wild eastern chimpanzees that lives in Gombe National Park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. The community was the subject of Jane Goodall's pioneering study that began in 1960, and studies have continued ever since, becoming the longest continuous study of any animals in their natural habitat. As a result, the community has been instrumental in the study of chimpanzees and has been popularized in several books and documentaries. The community's popularity was enhanced by Goodall's practice of giving names to the chimpanzees she was observing, in contrast to the typical scientific practice of identifying the subjects by number. Goodall generally used a naming convention in which infants were given names starting with the same letter as their mother, allowing the recognition of matrilineal lines.
Brian A McClendon is an American software executive, engineer, and inventor. He was a co-founder and angel investor in Keyhole, Inc., a geospatial data visualization company that was purchased by Google in 2004 to produce Google Earth. Keyhole itself was spun off from another company called Intrinsic Graphics, of which McClendon was also a co-founder. McClendon was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for strategic, technical, and managerial leadership resulting in widespread accurate and useful geographic information.
Google Fusion Tables was a web service provided by Google for data management. Fusion tables can be used for gathering, visualising and sharing data tables. Data are stored in multiple tables that Internet users can view and download.
Dale Peterson is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects.
Chimpanzee is a 2012 nature documentary film about a young common chimpanzee named Oscar who finds himself alone in the African forests until he is adopted by another chimpanzee, who takes him in and treats him like his own child. The American release of the film is narrated by Tim Allen.
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