Reforestation in Niger!!!

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I am not sure why the last post came out empty...very strange. This article is great "In Niger, trees and crops turn back to desert" NY Times: 2/11/07 This community planted trees to combat desertification and have shown success... It has a nice figure showing (reforestation) land use and land cover change using aerial photographs and a cool video! http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/africa/11niger.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Read this! Lawsuit: MAPPS v. U.S.

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The front page of the AAG.org site has news about an ongoing case in federal court that relates to the GIS industry in the US. MAPPS has sued the federal government to exclude everyone but licensed engineers and surveyors from federal government contracts for “mapping” services of every sort and description – not just those mapping services traditionally performed by surveyors. This is from the AAG legal background paper: "If this claim prevails, it could affect not only GIS but also other mapping activities, potentially including GIS field data collection, internet mapping activities, geospatial data analysis, remote sensing, cartographic services, and map creation of almost any type. This is because the Brooks Act effectively restricts the award of all federal contracts for “architectural and engineering” services to firms licensed to practice either architecture or engineering. In short, the lawsuit threatens to hijack the GIS and related industries by excluding anyone and everyone other than licensed engineers or surveyors from receiving any type of federal mapping contract. " (bold emphasis mine.) Stay tuned on the AAG website.

the YouTube of data and graphs, Swivel

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Swivel offers free, public and private, data hosting. You can create nice graphs with your data but also search for other people's data. For now this is not entirely geospatial, but when the api is opened up or they update the service, a geospatial component could be added. For now I would seriously question the reliability and accuracy of any data posted there. Below is an example of a graph made with Swivel.

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Geo Work Group

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hi, starting thursday at 4 in the GIIF, we're trying to start up a weekly "geo work-group". it's still open as to what that means so come this thursday if you want to help decide. the basic idea is that we have a lot of people around here with diverse knowledge and skillsets so this will be a venue to share the knowledge and (to quote maggi) "develop a community of practice". potential happenings are: 1. people bring GIS/RS related projects they want some insight on and get help from appropriate people. 2. a large group project that will lead to a poster or paper. 3. short presentations or how-to's focused on the more technical aspects of software and what not. etc. so bring any ideas to the giif 4pm thursday. and to sweeten the deal, casey will give a demo on how to find the extents of a shapefile using a python script.

Imaging Environment: Maps, Models, and Metaphors

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This is a free conference Nov. 8-10 down at Stanford, and the speakers / schedule sounds pretty cool. I probably can't make the Thursday talks, but is anyone interested in going down on the Friday? From the description:

The effects of globalization on the natural environment and its representations confront academic disciplines with the task of finding new approaches to charting the present and shaping the future. This conference will take on this challenge by reaching beyond disciplinary specificity to interrogate the very ways we figure the natural world, and the consequences of these figurations for our actions in the global environment.

Seeing Global Warming: The North Pole Thaws

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Recent imagery from ESA satellites reveal a thawing of ice around the North Pole so dramatic that a ship could have theoretically sailed from the Norwegian islands of Svalbard directly to the Pole. From the ESA press release:

Observing data from Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument and the AMSR-E instrument aboard the EOS Aqua satellite, scientists were able to determine that around 5-10 percent of the Arctic’s perennial sea ice, which had survived the summer melt season, has been fragmented by late summer storms. The area between Spitzbergen, the North Pole and Severnaya Zemlya is confirmed by AMSR-E to have had much lower ice concentrations than witnessed during earlier years.

Via Slashdot

GISC: Towards Uncharted Ground: Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future

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"Towards Uncharted Ground Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future" Date: Friday, September 29 Time: 9 am to 12 pm Location: 112 Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley campus Geographic information systems have become pervasive across academia, government, and industry. Much GIS data have long-term or permanent value, but little has been done to assure their longevity. Compared to traditional cartography, geographic data can encode more complex spatial information and are much more accessible. But data are also far more mutable and subject to loss. This meeting brings together a panel of experts for an informal discussion of the problem of managing the persistence of geographic information. * John Radke, UC Berkeley Geographic Information Science Center * Richard Marciano, San Diego Supercomputer Center * Dyung Le, National Archives and Records Administration * Steve Morris, North Carolina State University * Barry Napier, US Forest Service * Ray McDowell, State of California Spatial Information Library * John Wiezcorek, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Presented by: National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region Geographic Information Science Center, University of California For more information go to: http://www.gisc.berkeley.edu Or contact david.piff@nara.gov (650) 238-3468 or ccary@berkeley.edu Free and open to the public.

Flickr Finally Does Geotagging Right

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I don't know how I missed it but Flickr finally added their own geotagging interface. It's built with Flash and based on Yahoo Maps (naturally), but it works pretty well. If you've already geotagged some of your photos, you can automatically add them to your map. Otherwise, you just drag them on, placing them wherever you took them. I think the coolest part is how it lumps together nearby photos at larger scales into larger and larger icons. Totally sweet. Check out everyone's photos, or, to really blow your mind, read up on some more of the details, including spatial updates to the Flickr API and tools for autogeotagging cell phone pics and automatically associating them with nearby events listed at Upcoming.org. Struggling . . . to comprehend . . . coolness!

GIS, Public Participation, and Marine Conservation

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NYtimes has a very cool article about environmental groups working with California fishermen to establish "no-trawl zones." Apparently the group Oceana sued the National Marine Fisheries Service for not setting aside adequate habitat for some bottom-dwelling species, which resulted in a court-ordered release of specific geographic fishing data. From the article,

When it was accepted as the preferred alternative, the court granted the environmental groups access to proprietary information about the trawl tracks that fishermen follow. Fishing captains are required to record their exact locations using global positioning system monitors from the moment they lower their nets until they haul them back onboard. Often covering up to 20 miles in a 6-to-10-hour tow, those tracks provided a precise picture of fishing and a key to the solution the National Research Council had recommended. Scientists at the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense overlaid the tracks on maps of underwater features like canyons and ridges, home to a wide variety of species vulnerable to nets.

Apparently environmental groups used this data along with data collected from interviews with the fishermen themselves, to create new conservation zones that would both preserve critical habitat without excluding fishermen from their livelihood. I think this is a neat story in a number of ways. The use of GIS for for conservation in the real world is exciting, as is the power of private organizations and private money in effecting large scale change in land management. Can anyone dig up any more papers on this? The NYTimes doesn't really cite its sources. Here's a related NPR story, and a Nature Conservancy press release. Oh, and a map!

no_trawl_map.jpg

NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

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Here's the article that Maggi emailed out to us this weekend: The following article was published in the New York Times yesterday - "NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet" by Andy Revkin This is a topic that should be important to all ESSN members, so a discussion thread has been initiated on the ESSN website (http://www.earthsystemscholars.org). Please login and share your thoughts and insights on this matter.

Bush-Interrpution?

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marchcover.jpg In reply to Esther's posting a while back, there was an article published in the March Ed. of 'Geospatial Soultions' about the Bush Administration's budget reguest for 2007. Most of us could probably guess as to what the administration wants to spend it's/our money on, so, I guess the article isn't too insightful in that regard. Be that it may, it took me 10 min. or so to scan the article so I ask that somebody out there glance it over. Here's the PDF Spatial Programs Just for good humor, go ahead and post a comment as to what you think the Bush. Admin might spend it's money on next year. Go ahead and be creative... you know they always are.

Affinity for London

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Fitzroofsm.jpg Digitally Distributed Environments is a great blog for all sorts of goodies that revolve around the visualization of London. There are a number (46 and counting) of panarama's that can be viewed w/ your quicktime browser plugin (shift zooms in, ctrl zooms out, and left-click drag pans the image). There are also a number of .kmz's and .kml's that you can download for google earth, and a recently posted Lidar movie as well. If you use a news aggregator, just subscribe to http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/atom.xml for all the latest syndications.

Landsat-interruption?

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I was reading this article today that my 92 year old grandma saved for me, in El Nuevo Herald (its in Spanish) -March 16th. It discussed how the Bush administration has cut funding for NASA and its corresponding satellites, such as Landsat. EOS stated that Landsat is in risk of interruption. Has anyone else run across articles discussing this? Also, I agree with Abe that google instant messenger would be a good idea.

Public geodata under threat in Europe

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Via BoingBoing (of all places), recent moves by the European Commission to orchestrated sharing of government-collected geodata between member nations are become increasingly embroiled with licensing and copyright issues that may limit or completely illiminate public access to the data, data collected using public funds. Now I confess I know next to nothing about this situation (I don't even really know the difference between the EC and the EU), but I understand that public geodata is already a scarce commodity in Europe, so this is probably bad news for Europeans or anyone doing research in Europe.