This will acquire pictures of land use and vegetationchanges from an altitude of 820km, maintaining an important data series started by the French Spot satellites in the late 1990s.
Dr Clay's reasoning is that changes made to the vegetationof the eastern United States over the past century have created a habitat that is ideal for cicadas.
This second mission is supposed to loft the Proba-V satellite to collect data on land cover and vegetationchanges over the entire globe every couple of days.
The United Nations recently raised concerns regarding the health and climatic impacts of particles emitted by vegetation fires in regions subject to land use changes and human driven deforestation such as South-East Asia, where they are responsible for 10, 800 premature deaths per year.