The NASA LCLUC Program continues to chart new waters in different parts of the World. The South and South-east Asia Research Initiative (SARI) was presented to and endorsed by NASA senior management at the end of last year and was formally launched at the Regional LCLUC Science Team Meeting in Yangon, Myanmar, in January. The meeting introduced many new regional scientists to the program and how to access and use NASA data through hands-on training. The coordination for this meeting was a challenge, and so special thanks go to Krishna Vadrevu, University of Maryland College Park, for his unwavering commitment to making this an outstanding scientific meeting with broad regional representation. The land use presentations on Myanmar were fascinating and as the new government is established and the country opens up to international investments, this will be a place to study land use, as it changes. We look forward to the next two rounds of the ROSES LCLUC proposal selections to gain critical mass for our research in South and Southeast regions. We are now in the planning stage for the next SARI regional workshop in Ho Chi Minh City in October, 2016 to be held jointly with the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan and local hosts from the Ho Chi Min University of Technology (HCMUT), Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) and Vietnam National University of Engineering and Technology (VNU-ET) to examine agricultural land use and emissions. We are strengthening our regional partnership with the NASA USAID SERVIR program (www.servirglobal.net/), specifically its Himalaya and Mekong nodes, with an emphasis on regional capacity building and training on the use of earth observations. Our webinar series continues and this newsletter contains the topics discussed at the recent webinar session pertinent to SARI region. The coverage and availability of ESA Sentinel data are improving and augmenting the moderate resolution data available from Landsat 8, enabling the LCLUC Multi-source Land Imaging Team to undertake their research using both optical data from Sentinel-2a and radar data from Sentinel-1. We are eagerly awaiting the opening up of the Sentinel-2 archive at the Eros Data Center. Sentinel-2b is planned for launch in the middle of this year. Having two Sentinels and combining their data with Landsat data will substantially enhance our capability for monitoring relatively fast processes in agriculture or, more generally, seasonal changes in vegetation. The Global Land Project (GLP) Office has moved to its new location at the University of Bern, Switzerland. We are planning to enhance our link to this international LCLUC sister-program, especially to its research component in the SARI region as well as with the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) housed at that university. Our relationship with the EARSeL Special Interest Group on Land Use/Land Cover is continuing with an open international joint EARSeL-LCLUC workshop planned for May, 2016 associated with the ESA Living Planet Meeting in Prague. In the meantime, we are anticipating the upcoming Science Team Meeting in April (Bethesda, Maryland), where we will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the LCLUC program. It doesn't seem that long since we held our first Science Team meeting at Airlie House, Virginia and we hope that some of our first round LCLUC alumni will be able to join us. - Garik Gutman, Program Manager and Chris Justice, Program Scientist
