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

Add this to your GIS bibliography

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Since some readers of this blog entered the fields of GIS and Remote Sensing fairly recently, it's possible that you may have never encountered McNoleg (1996), a keystone paper that even now, 10 years after its initial publication, deserves to be widely cited in the geospatial literature. I strongly recommend that you read it carefully tomorrow (Saturday, April 1st).

McNoleg, O., 1996, "The integration of GIS, remote sensing, expert systems and adaptive co-kriging for environmental habitat modeling of the Highland Haggis using object-oriented, fuzzy-logic and neural-network techniques," Computers & Geosciences 22(5): 585-588. Abstract: A report is given on several major breakthroughs in geomatics, and their application is demonstrated on a particularly difficult habitat modeling exercise...

Read the rest here in pdf format... (I may take this link down within a week or so but fear not - the article is available online through the UCB library).

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.

Sudden Oak Death from Google Earth

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While browsing Karin's sudden oak death KMZ file for Google Earth, I noticed some signs of SOD in Google's images. Take a look at the forest patch just northwest of China Camp State Park around confirmation number 1339597. There are a host of yellow, reddish, and bare crowns surrounding the area. Unfortunately, Google does not release the dates of image acquisition, so we can't use this for any sort of tracking (not sure how we could swing that anyway). On the bright side, this is a very visual and accessible way to show people the impact of sudden oak death in the Bay Area.