Forget about informants and spy satellites and millions in bounty money, implies a recent piece at the journal Science, reblogged lots of places. All you need to find fugitives like Osama bin Laden is GIS software and probabilistic models.The story goes like this: in 2009, a class of UCLA undergrads pretty accurately predicted where Osama Bin Laden was hiding. Working under UCLA geography professors Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, the students determined that bin Laden was hanging out in a large town, not a cave, with an 88.9% chance he was within 300 km of his last known place of residence, in Tora Bora, Afghanistan.While that giant circle includes the sleepy enclave of Abbottabad, where bin Laden was found, contrary to the headlines, the most likely spot, they determined, was the city of Parachinar. Near the Afghan border, that’s over 400 km from Abbottabad. Abbottabad itself isn’t mentioned in their 2009 paper (PDF).The students’ prediction was based on a concept called island biogeography, which says that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct after a catastrophic event than a species on a small one. "The theory was basically that if you're going to try and survive, you're going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town," Gillespie says. "We hypothesized he wouldn't be in a small town where people could report on him."Gillespie, whose focus is using remote sensing from satellites to study ecosystems, told Science, “It's not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff. But the same theories we use to study endangered birds can be used to do this.” His geographical forensic skills aside, he remains focused on getting trees off the endangered species list. He thinks mostly about the dry forests of Hawaii, where 45% of the trees are endangered.American officials used more, um, on-the-ground methods – and a better set of satellite data – to eventually remove Osama from their own endangered species list. Under scrutiny of American spies, the late al-Qaeda leader’s digs probably didn’t help him, says Gillespie. "An inconspicuous house would have suited him better."Connections
Image from “Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery” (PDF)
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