Sarah Parcak: observation

Transcript context

…Lidar. That stands for light detection and ranging. In places like Cambodia, the Khmer, Angkor Wat, the Maya or Central America, South America — of course, we can’t see through trees. What the lidar does is, it allows you to fly — whether it’s an unmanned aerial vehicle, a helicopter, or airplane — it’s a sensor system that allows you to send down thousands, millions of pulse beams of lasers where you can remove the overlaying vegetation, and you’re left with what’s called a bare-earth model or a digital elevation model. You can, in effect, see everything that’s there. My colleagues have used this to find tens of thousands of new features and sites in Central America and Cambodia and many, many other places in the world. It’s the only way to see through trees. Do you worry that we’re now finding new sites more rapidly than we can protect them?…

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