[MUSIC PLAYING]
AFRICA FLORES: Guatemala is a beautiful, beautiful country.
However, the water resources are not well-managed
and have gone polluted.
We need that water to survive.
I'm in a privileged position.
I live in the US, and I have access
to satellite data, technological advances,
but I am a Guatemalan at heart.
I feel very privileged to come back home and join efforts
with the rest of the people that are trying to do something
for Lake Atitlan.
We are in a revolutionizing era for satellite data
because we have so many freely available resources.
We have satellites orbiting the Earth
from NASA and from the European Space Agency.
With that completely different perspective,
you can tell so much about the surface of the Earth.
It's just amazing.
I am Africa Flores.
I work with satellite data to inform decision-making
for environmental management.
I grew up along the Pacific coast of Guatemala.
In the town where I grew up, there is a lot of agriculture,
and there is also a lot of pollution
that goes into the rivers.
I remember the stories from my parents
and my grandparents of those freshwater bodies,
that they were clean, and they would
go there to play, to swim.
When I was growing up, those were already polluted.
When I was a studying at college,
I had the opportunity to visit different parts of the country,
and I saw clean water resources.
For me, it was amazing, and inspiring, and so beautiful.
To see that we still had clean surface water in Guatemala
drove me and inspired me to keep working
on protecting our environment.
So I study renewable natural resources,
and I took a lot of classes like hydrology, soil, forestry,
and everything was on the field, measuring
the trees, the rivers, and then I was introduced to a satellite
image.
From above, from space, I could see directly
the forest and the condition of that forest,
and I could see the river and the water
quality of that river.
It completely revolutionized my world of the work
that I was doing, and I was like, I
want to keep doing this.
I started working in a project called SERVIR,
and SERVIR is a project between NASA and USAID
that focuses on building the capacity of countries
to use air observation for environmental decision-making.
Once we map the surface and everything
that is on the surface, and the changes
that are happening there.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There are many parameters that we can
derive from satellite images.
The observation that has been used the most
comes from optical sensors.
But in addition to that, we have radar,
and that's a different type of observation.
We call it "all weather" because it can see through clouds.
So for example, this is our result for the Maya Biosphere
Reserve.
There is a lot of deforestation.
Fire is a very common practice that is
being used to clear the land.
So we can see a lot of changes here, and when it happened.
The colors identify the dates.
Also, water quality, which is what I have focused a lot,
try to use satellite data to monitor
the quality of the water.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lake Atitlan one of the most beautiful places on Earth,
as you can see.
And I say, I'm not biased because I'm from Guatemala,
but it is.
The water of the lake is vital for the tourism, for fishing,
and even for human consumption.
The lake is surrounded by towns, and about 40% of those towns
consume the water directly from the lake without any treatment.
This lake is known for being pristine, clean, beautiful,
and then, suddenly, an algae bloom happened.
An algae bloom is the proliferation of one
or two species that is massive.
It's due to the lack of waste water management
and the mononutrients come into the lake that
become food for it.
It was identified as cyanobacteria.
The species that caused the algae bloom,
it did not produce toxins.
However, other cyanobacteria identified in the lake
do have the possibility to produce toxins.
Everyone was worried, and it had a big hit in tourism
at the time.
The first algae bloom occurred in Lake Atitlan in 2009,
and we monitored that bloom from beginning to end.
Since 2009, it has been suffering from algae blooms.
So this is in October of last year, and there is some algae.
This is January.
We definitely see the algae bloom there.
That's March.
There is algae bloom.
All algaes contain the chlorophyll pigment,
so we use it as a proxy.
And I work on calibrating an algorithm that
will allow us to estimate chlorophyll concentration
from satellite images.
We raised a lot of awareness in terms
of how massive the algae was, and it
was information that was used a lot by the local authorities
and by the society as well.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Now, the project is about forecasting algae blooms,
and we need data to calibrate our model.
We are collecting our data to see how much sedimentation
has gone into the lake.
That carries nutrients for the algae,
and connecting that with what we can do here
at SERVIR with artificial intelligence and machine
learning.
If we are able to predict with enough skill
when algae blooms are going to happen,
we can also have a timeline of, how long
do we have to save the lake?
There is the impression that natural resources
can go forever, but they can disappear.
They actually can disappear.
The real impact we want to have is
that this will drive actions to preserve the lake--
for example, building water treatment plants,
raising awareness in civil society about the system itself
and know that the actions that they take
have an impact on the water quality of the lake.
There is no better people to manage these resources
as the local people.
I think it's beautiful, so beautiful.
I can't even use words to describe the richness
and everything that it represents,
and to think that you come from this land,
and you want to make the best use,
and you want your kids, also, to be able to see it.
This is an amazing opportunity to come back
home and do something with the skills that I have gained.
It makes me closer to my roots and to my family,
and it gives me the opportunity to do something for my country.
[MUSIC PLAYING]