Land Change Science Position Open!

We are very excited to have open a new Cooperative Extension specialist position in Land Change Science. The successful Land Change CE specialist will have a PhD, and will develop a vibrant applied research program, primarily based in California. There are no formal teaching duties with this position, instead, the incumbant will have outreach and extension duties.

We are searching for someone who can help us understand, predict and plan for the complexities of land use change in California. This might be someone from geography, landscape ecology, sociology, or economics, for example, and might focus on planning, modeling or observations of land change, biophysical feedbacks from land change, or spatial analysis. But they must be an adept and capable communicator who can speak to diverse audiences, from landowners, to politicians, to farmers, to scientists, to planners, to citizens.

The Specialist would provide science-based solutions and bridge conflicting interests with knowledge, targeted research, and local education regarding the relationships between expanding population and climate change, and the remaining matrix of wild landscapes, urban areas, working landscapes and agriculture.

The Specialist would provide resources for county-based Cooperative Extension personnel, including learning from UCCE personnel about the needs of decision makers at the local level, and acting as a information and training resource for the use of new tools (GIS, remote sensing, smart phone applications, etc.) for land use analysis.

Please consider applying if this fits you! I will be happy to answer questions.

Pre-development Delta report from SFEI

The San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center is pleased to announce the publication of its latest report, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Historical Ecology Investigation: Exploring Pattern and Process. The report is the culmination of several years of research synthesizing thousands of pieces of historical evidence with contemporary scientific understanding. The report provides new information about how the Delta functioned to provide habitat for native species and includes dozens of rarely seen historical accounts, maps, and photographs. For more information, please see today's press release.

The report and Geographic Information System (GIS) data are available for download here. Printed copies of the report will be available in several weeks, at a cost of $75 each (plus tax/shipping).

Media Contacts:
Robin Grossinger, Senior Scientist, San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center, (510) 746-7380 (office), 510 326 3732 (cell), or robin@sfei.org

Carl Wilcox, Policy Advisor to the Director for the Bay-Delta, California Department of Fish and Game, (707) 738-4134, or cwilcox@dfg.ca.gov

Welcome to Columbus, OH! GIScience in the heartland

Welcome to Ohio! When I arrived, Columbus was cloudy and warm, with the city in a buzz from a visit from President Obama.

GIScience 2012 was an amazing conference: small (~300 people) and focused, with a terrific program: 2 keynotes each morning, sessions through the day and a panel session of 6 speakers in the evenings. I went to sessions on spatial uncertainty, the geoweb (where Renee Sieber gave a terrific talk on the challenges of participation in webGIS (I learned a ton!)), and big data among others, and Thomas Blaschke and I organized a workshop on obia. The keynotes were especially satisfying: big picture, often provocative talks from gifted speakers. Helen Couclelis talked about her vision of GIScience as a meta science: an "information oriented, context sensitive, spatially referenced, method of representing the real world". I loved the discussion of intentionality and context in her talk, and overall it gave me so much to think about. Noel Cressie showed his group's work modeling uncertainty in a North American regional climate change model: summer is going to be hotter in the North American south, and winter is going to be warmer in the Canadian north, no matter how you slice it. Jack Dongarra gave a riveting talk on the future of supercomputing: he walked us through the building of a supercomputer from an individual core, and made clear the power, software and hardware requirements of these machines. Doug Richardson presented his high level perspective on GIS and health; he and the AAG have been working hard to make geoinformatics more evident in public health research through workshop, grants and tireless lobbying. Also a great treat was my visit with Desheng Liu, former lab member, who is now Associate Professor of Geography and Statistics at Ohio State University. We spent some time walking around the lovely campus and catching up. I also got to visit, very briefly, the Thurber House, home of one of my favs James Thurber, who went to OSU and lived in Columbus. Great stuff! As for our workshop, here are the key items the participants were interested in (in order of popularity): terminology, the future of geobia, integration with GIS, semantics, accuracy, change, standards, learning from the past.

New study on diabetes risk and neighborhood walkability

The reading for this week's GIS class on vector analysis discussed network buffer measures of neighborhood walkability, and the class came up with numerous components of the built and social environment that the authors didn't include in their land-use based walkability measure that also likely influence people's walking behaviors (e.g. destinations to walk to, crime/safety, trees and greenness, sidewealk quality and ramps, traffic, disincentives from parking costs, etc.). It was a great discussion! I just came acrosos this write-up about a recent article in the journal Diabetes Care that finds a strong relationship between neighborhood walkability and diabetes risk, especially for low-income immigrants. The UC Library doesn't have online access to the most recent one month of articles for this journal, so I haven't been able to look at the full methodolgy for their walkabilty measure. But, I wanted to note it here and will follow-up later with details. Or, if anyone finds access to the full article, please let me know!

Cool cartography--Risk mapping at a broad view

I came across this short blurb by  on some tricks for catchy large-scale maps. The bullet-points include:

• Interesting Topic.  The subjects of these maps inherently represent risk, which we want to understand.
• Unexpected Scope.  A forest view of something that’s usually seen at the tree-level offers satisfying perspective.
• Big and Clear.  A single dataset is conceptually simple, and when large enough, it provides its own context-promoting conversation in the wild.
• Sharable.  A static image is portable and paste-able, easily nestling into articles, blogs, tweets, and PowerPoints.
• Attractive.  The currency of design buys a second or third look.

There is often a push to make large datasets available through interactive webGIS portals, but I think this makes a good case that there is still also a role for skilled cartography to present information in captivating ways. 

Below is an example of one of the author's (John Nelson) maps, and more can be found here. 

San Francisco Bay fog viewed from space

Here is a neat satellite image released by NASA Earth Observatory of fog rolling into the San Francisco Bay. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired this image on August 16, 2012. For more information on the image and the story behind click here.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory: Advanced Land Imager (ALI) August 16, 2012

One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago

Gabriel Ahlfeldt, from the London School of Economics, presents in a video in the link below on an interesting project that digitized Olcott's Blue Books, a unique dataset of historical land values, land uses, building heights, and other information in Chicago and its suburbs, published annually between 1900 and 1990. The digitized information from the Blue Books allows for detailed historical statistical and geospatial analyses. The visualization of the data is presented in the video using GIS software.

View the video on youtube by clicking here.

1906 Earthquake & Present Day Photo Mashup

Shawn Clover recently released part 2 of his “1906 + Today: The Earthquake Blend” series which is a mashup of 1906 earthquake aftermath photos in San Francisco with present day photos at the same location. The photos are blended creating a seamless image of the past superimposed on the present.

View part 1 of the series here from 2010 and part 2 of the series here from 2012.

Credit: shawnclover.com

Bing Maps completes Global Ortho project for US

The Bing Maps team has anounced the completion of the Global Ortho Project for the US.  The project provides 30cm resolution imagery for the entire US, all acquired within the last 2 years.  You can access all of the imagery now through Bing Maps, it is pretty amazing to see such detail for all of the far off places that typically don't get high resolution attention. 

Find out more about the project from the Bing Maps Blog, or view the data for yourself.

Tag clouds from Fall 2012 GIS class

In class today, I asked everyone to share what they thought of as the 2 big challenges facing the world, 2 possible GIS-related methods that could be used to examine the challenges, and 2 possible data products or output products that might be used in the process. Here are the results!

Challenges facing us in the 21st century:

biodiversity biodiversity loss climate adaptation climate change disease ecosystem integrity energy environmental degradation food production food security globalization habitat loss human nature reconciliation income inequality infrastructure mass incarceration obesity overpopulation political division resource scarcity salinity management scarce resources sustainable communities technology transportation unemployment urban sprawl urbanization water availability water scarcity

created at TagCrowd.com

Analyses needed:

access buffers cartography climate models cluster analysis connectivity density distance geocoding hydrologic networks land use change land use mapping network analysis networks overlays pattern analysis point pattern polygon analysis proximity random sampling raster analysis spatial analyses spatial analysis spatial statistics species distribution models statistics vector analysis vegetation change watershed analysis

created at TagCrowd.com

Data used and products created:

air quality atmospheric biodiversity hotspots blogs cell phone participation census climate layers climate predictions dem ecosystem threats food environment forests gdp groundwater conductivity income land use lidar population population demography population density precipitation property boundaries remote sensing residences risk zones socio economic data species distributions storms streets surveys temperature threat map tweets unemployment data urban development vegetation water sources webgis wetlands youth mapping

created at TagCrowd.com

Cool stuff! On with GIS Fall 2012.