The disputed areas of Georgia include the regions known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What might the loss of this land mean to Georgia in terms of the land's resource potential? One basic resource is food, as measured in cropland acreage. In this exploration we'll use tools available in TerraViva! Global Data Analyst to compare cropland acreage before and after the Russo-Georgian War of August, 2008.

IMAGE 1. The first image illustrates the location of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The illustration highlights two masks which were created using the Mask Manager in TerraViva! Global Data Analyst. To create the mask of Abkhazia we direct the Mask Manager to access Georgia's 1st level administrative boundaries, as recognized by the US State Department, and to pull out Abkhazia. Borders are shown in orange. The mask of South Ossetia was created and saved using a prior version of TerraViva!'s 1st level administrative boundaries that was based on boundaries of the former Soviet republic. (Download South Ossetia shapefile and mask zip file.)

IMAGE 2. Next we'll perform a spatial query of land use. In this case, we've selected IGBP Land Cover 2004 data from MODIS as our query data. Our purpose is to create a query that shows total cropland in Georgia, as Georgia was defined before the Russo-Georgian War in August, 2008. The query results, shown in the table at the top of Image 2, indicate that about 18,720 square kilometers in Georgia were dedicated croplands.

Next we'll combine the two masks of Abkhazia and South Ossetia into one, and use the combined mask to perform a spatial query of cropland loss in the disputed areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Mask Manager allows us to use the newly created mask as a query area using the Spatial Query tool. The query results, shown at the bottom of Image 2, indicate that 1,312 square kilometers of cropland have presumably moved out of Georgian control as a result of the August war. This represents a loss of 7%.

IMAGE 3. The landcover map in Image 3 illustrates the power of TerraViva! to give pixel-by-pixel data simply by pointing to an area on the map. The text box reveals that the pixel closest to the cursor position is "Croplands." The legend contains a color table that includes 17 different categories in the IGBP Land Cover 2004 map from MODIS.

The masking and spatial query tools in TerraViva! Global Data Analyst could be applied to investigating the loss of other important resources. The accuracy and timeliness of boundary data impacts evaluation of ongoing geopolitical global resource realignment.