NASA Earth Science / Applied Science publishes an article on how SERVIR leverages Amazon Web Services resources to help protect the Amazon Rain forest. The article features how SERVIR-Amazonia is training scientists to monitor forests without face-to-face meetings.
During traditional in-person training sessions, SERVIR trainers have to find dozens of laptops that are powerful enough to run resource-intensive imagery software. That can be a challenge in some of the locations where training sessions are held. “It requires a lot of computational resources to process because each satellite image can be very large,” explains Africa Flores-Anderson, SERVIR-Amazonia’s Science Coordination Lead. For the new virtual training, SERVIR leaders approached the company Amazon Web Services and their Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which donated cloud computing services. The trainees were then able to use a basic computer with an internet connection to tap into this centralized computer resource, also known as the ‘cloud.’ The result was a virtual, powerful system pre-loaded with the required software and data the trainees needed.