Virginia (Gini) Close, a reporter in the natural history unit at the BBC, contacted the Earth Science branch at NASA MSFC requesting assistance showing the impacts of agricultural land use change at the Katavi National Park in Tanzania. The team observed that Katavi Lake, a remote hippo habitat that is the subject of one episode, faced increased water shortages due to upstream inlets being redirected to irrigate rice fields. Gary Jedlovec, Brian Freitag and John Mandel advised on the best modern techniques to visualize these changes with NASA satellite imagery and provided a time series created from Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel-2 (HLS) imagery showing the seasonal drying of Katavi Lake. Close forwarded the imagery to the production team and will communicate with the NASA scientists as they continue production of the show scheduled to air in 2024.
