Remote Sensing of Oil Spills: Linking Community Monitoring and Satellite Image Processing in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores a case study on how community monitoring systems and remote sensing can be linked to maximize opportunities. Specifically, this study tries to find new ways to find the extent of oil liabilities and to explore the real magnitude of oil impacts in the landscape in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. The article reports preliminary findings on the work of local monitoring that feeds into direct and indirect methods of remote sensing detection of oil impact. Main remote sensing methods used were fractional coverage, normalized difference vegetation index, constrained energy minimization, and linear spectral unmixing.