It's time to meet another of Earth Blox's co-founders in our "Meet the experts" series. Iain H Woodhouse is a Professor of Applied Earth Observation at Edinburgh University, specialising in active remote sensing. Iain brings over 27 years of experience in academia and industry to Earth Blox. He has over 100 research publications, authored three academic textbooks, and Earth Blox is the third Earth observation company he has helped set up. He advises the UK and Scottish Governments on EO strategy and was the Chair of the Earth Observation Advisory Committee for the UK Space Agency. Read on to learn more about Iain.
How and when did you become interested in Earth observation?
As a teenager, I wanted to be an astronaut, mostly because of the view you get from space. I wrote a letter to NASA when I was about 13, something along the lines of “dear NASA, please send me some stuff”, and popped it in the post to Cape Canaveral, Florida. Around a month later, a huge orange envelope with the NASA logo emblazoned on the front turned up, stuffed full of information pamphlets from the visitor centre. This interest in space stayed with me as I entered a BSc in Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, transitioning mid-way through the course to a degree in Physics. From this desire to look at the Earth from space, it was a natural progression for me to move into Earth observation. My experiences as a child made me feel like I had a connection with NASA - a connection that has stayed with me throughout my career as I continued to write to them, to obtain specialised planetary facts and information in a time before the Internet.
Tell us about your qualifications and experience.
I began a BSc in Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, eventually transitioning to a BSc in Physics. During this time, I became interested in Earth observation: an optional module, ‘Physics of the Atmosphere’, introduced me to the physical modelling of the atmosphere and how this could be measured from space. Following this, I moved to Dundee, having been awarded a place on a fully-funded Master’s degree in Remote Sensing, Processing, and Image Applications. I was lucky to learn from the best. The professor who led the programme was Arthur Cracknell, one of the founders and long-term editor of the International Journal of Remote Sensing.
After graduating from my MSc, I worked for a year as a research scientist at the Marconi Research Centre. I had the chance to work alongside people that went on to do some really cool radar work at the site that designed the first European Space Agency spaceborne radar. I then moved back to Scotland, to study towards a PhD in Atmospheric Sounding at Heriot-Watt University. This involved using passive remote sensors to measure water vapour and ozone in the atmosphere, also in collaboration with NASA. After a 3-year post-doc position at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, I was offered a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 2000. I’ve been working at the University of Edinburgh ever since, first as a lecturer and now as a Professor of Applied Earth Observation. This has led to so many interesting opportunities. I’ve worked in Malawi as part of a Scotland-Malawi partnership where I taught remote sensing to students of land management and forestry. I was one of Ecometrica's founding team, and was the CEO of Carbomap, which focused on making high-resolution 3D data available worldwide.
While at Edinburgh I’ve mostly focused on the use of radar for forest mapping. My physics background means I’m particularly interested in understanding what the fundamental principles are when measuring forests, and how the architecture of trees impacts the measurement. But I’m also interested in Lidar and 3D drone mapping, and pioneered a new lidar instrument for 3D forest mapping.
In addition to the research, I love my teaching. I've written a textbook on "Introduction to Microwave Remote Sensing," which is a core text for anyone learning about radar for the first time. I have also authored "13 Short Chapters on Remote Sensing", and "101 Top Tips for PhD Students".
I also like to contribute to the community, so over the years I have been involved in advising the UK and Scottish Government on EO strategy, I have been a member of the GEO Capacity Development Working Group and most recently the Chair of the Earth Observation Advisory Committee for the UK Space Agency.
What’s your role at Earth Blox and how did you get involved?
My role at Earth Blox is Knowledge and Outreach Lead, and I’ve been involved since the beginning, as part of the team that came up with the original concept. I’d been tinkering at home, trying to make an educational game about climate change and deforestation. I had been developing ideas for this using the block-based programming tools that my children used. It was so easy! It was just like coding, except with a simple user interface that anyone could understand.
It was around the time that I was experimenting with this game that Google Earth Engine was becoming very popular. When I looked into using it, it was all in JavaScript, which is too complicated for most people. So I created a tool that I would want to use, hoping that if I could solve the problem for myself, I could solve it for others too.
With block-based programming, you don’t have to spend all your time worrying about little things, like the placement of semicolons, which allows you to focus on the bigger picture. Together, with Genevieve and Sam, we developed a prototype for what was to become Earth Blox, and applied to various places for funding. We were passionate that Earth Blox was going to be groundbreaking, and eventually, we found funding to allow us to take the idea forward.
What project or experience are you particularly proud of?
During my career at the University of Edinburgh, I had the opportunity to teach remote sensing at the University of Mzuzu in Malawi as part of a Scotland-Malawi exchange programme. In addition to teaching, I ran conferences and workshops to bring artists and forestry experts together to share knowledge. This was a real adventure! During this time, my eyes were really opened to the reality of deforestation and climate change. Malawi has one of the highest population densities in Africa, with its population predicted to double by 2040, yet there is already a huge strain on the resources they have available. Cutting down trees for fuel is an absolute necessity for those living in rural areas, and it’s difficult for many to move away from this. My time in Malawi brought the realities of global warming and the pressure of humans on the landscape into perspective and focused my attention on why forests are vital in the fight against climate change.
Alongside teaching, I worked with artists to spread the word about deforestation. Solving problems like climate change is a creative process: you need people that can come up with new ideas and creative ways to do things differently. We also managed to bring together some musicians, including a former MSc student, to sing songs about the environment and deforestation and they ended up performing at the Blantyre Arts Festival. We even ended up on a radio show talking about climate change. And, we set a competition to write and illustrate a children’s book about climate change that got published and distributed across schools in the area.
What does your work at Earth Blox involve? What does a typical day look like for you?
As Head of Knowledge, I’m responsible for maintaining our Knowledge Hub and creating resources to help customers learn how to use Earth Blox. I help our marketing team find customers and communicate what we do, regularly contributing to the Earth Blox blog. Another part of my job involves building workflows. Together with Sam, we create new workflows that perform specific tasks and functions and understand why they do and don’t work. This helps us to combine our scientific knowledge and expertise to create and optimise a set of simple reusable workflows that novice users can use.
Why is building Earth Blox important to you?
Earth Blox is incredibly intuitive, a few clicks and the software will run the complicated science for you. You can build a workflow to understand, for example, drought in Malawi, then to expand it for the whole of Africa takes only 30 seconds. You can then take that workflow, alter it slightly, and use it to look at, for example, the last 40 years of environmental change across the continent. In minutes, you can have an incredibly accurate indication of the stress points across Africa, presented in a way that’s easy to visualise and understand. Knowing that we can simplify the process to help people focus more on their analysis and logic is really rewarding.
To me, building Earth Blox is about getting the software in the hands of others and letting them come up with ways to solve the problems that they’re working on. The real test for Earth Blox will be when people start to do things that we haven’t even imagined yet! It will be incredibly cool to see what people come up with. I think it’s something that’s going to change how we use and think about Earth observation data.
How do you think Earth observation technology will evolve in the next 5-10 years?
I'm hoping that in 10 years time, Earth observation will be such an integral part of our lives that it will be completely invisible, in the same way that GPS evolved from a scientific tool into a daily necessity. Earth Blox will progressively become less about being a tool for using satellite data. Instead, it will incorporate information from different sources, which in Earth Blox can be combined as blocks to create an unlimited number of unique workflows to help inform decision making.
I also believe Earth Blox is going to be a great tool to get more people interested and knowledgeable about Earth observation, which will ultimately be key in solving current and future problems. It will open up a world of possibilities for people from a non-technical background, who will be able to apply this in new and creative ways. People won’t be limited by what they think is possible, they’ll use block-based programming to explore satellite and other data, which will increase awareness and generate solutions for the problems our planet currently faces.