Abstract
Orbital photography from the Space Shuttle missions (1981–88) and earlier manned spaceflight programs (1962–1975) allows remote sensing time series to be constructed for observations of environmental change in selected portions of the global tropics. Particular topics and regions include deforestation, soil erosion, supersedimentation in streams, lacustrine, and estuarine environments, and desertification in the Greater Amazon, Tropical Africa and Madagascar, South & Southeast Asia, and the Indo‐Pacific archipelagoes.