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It was an unconventional approach to intelligence-gathering and -analysis, to say the least. More than two years ago, a group of UCLA geography professors and their undergraduate students used “biogeographic theories” to pinpoint the region that includes Abbottabad, Pakistan, as the likely location of Osama bin Laden’s hideaway.

A technical paper describing the project can be found in the February 2009 issue of MIT International Review. According to the abstract, the project’s participants used: “biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction (distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics) and remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird) over three spatial scales (global, regional, local) to identify where bin Laden is most probably currently located.”

A more layman-friendly write-up was recently published in Homeland Security Newswire, which noted “the group predicted that bin Laden was hiding in the Pakistani city of Parachinar, a town not unlike Abbotabbad (the model predicted that there was a 100 percent likelihood that bin Laden was in Parachinar, and 80.9 percent that he was in Abbottabad).” A similar synposis can be found in Science, a journal of the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

(Image courtesy of MIT International Review)

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