Landsat Seen as Stunning Return on Public Investment

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Undersanding the value of Landsat program to the U.S. economy has been the ambitious goal of the Landsat Advisory Group of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee. This team of commercial, state/local government, and NGO geospatial information experts recently updated a critical review of the value of Landsat information that has recently been released to the public.

They found that the economic value of just one year of Landsat data far exceeds the multi-year total cost of building, launching, and managing Landsat satellites and sensors.  This would be considered a stunning return on investment in any conventional business setting.

Full article by Jon Campbell, U.S. Geological Survey found here.

Croudsourced view of global agriculture: mapping farm size around the world

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From Live Science. Two new maps released Jan. 16 considerably improve estimates of the amount of land farmed in the world — one map reveals the world's agricultural lands to a resolution of 1 kilometer, and the other provides the first look at the sizes of the fields being used for agriculture.

The researchers built the cropland database by combining information from several sources, such as satellite images, regional maps, video and geotagged photos, which were shared with them by groups around the world. Combining all that information would be an almost-impossible task for a handful of scientists to take on, so the team turned the project into a crowdsourced, online game. Volunteers logged into "Cropland Capture" on a computer or a phone and determined whether an image contained cropland or not. Participants were entered into weekly prize drawings.

Satellite images of Nigerian towns attacked by Boko Haram

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Amnesty's before and after satellite images were taken on 2 January and 7 January. Healthy vegetation is shown in red on the graphics.This is related to the paper that Alice and I just published on the use of remote sensing for crime. In that paper, we make it clear that estimates of crime from remote sensing are very difficult to validate; however, these important efforts continue to expand. Case in point from the BBC: Satellite images of Nigerian towns attacked by Boko Haram show widespread destruction and suggest a high death toll, Amnesty International says.

The images show some 3,700 structures damaged or destroyed in Baga and Doron Baga this month, Amnesty said. This is in stark contrast with goverment estimates of destruction.

The BBC's Will Ross says that while the images show the destructive nature of Boko Haram, they do not help establish just how many people were killed.

Last week, Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, said that fleeing residents told him that Baga, which had a population of about 10,000, was now "virtually non-existent".

NASA NEX wins the 2014 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Award

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Congratulations to the NASA NEX Team! They have won the 2014 HPCwire Readers’ & Editors’ Choice Award for the Best Data-Intensive System (End User focused).  See the article here: NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) Platform supports dozens of data-intensive projects in Earth sciences.

The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform supports dozens of data-intensive projects in Earth sciences, bringing together supercomputers and huge volumes of NASA data, and enabling scientists to test hypotheses and execute modeling/analysis projects at a scale previously out of their reach. NEX-supported applications range from modeling El Niño, creating neighborhood-scale climate projections, assisting in crop water management, and mapping changes in forest structure across North America, to mapping individual tree crowns at continental scale as a foundation for new global science at unprecedented spatial resolution. NEX’s OpenNEX challenge ties in to White House initiatives, including Open Data, Big Data and Climate Data, which advance national goals to address climate change impacts and include competitions and challenges to foster regional innovation.

The GIF has been partnering with NASA NEX, and developing a framework to bring NEX data and analytical capabilities into HOLOS.

WorldView-3 launched August 13 2014

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Worldview-2 has been a very useful sensor; we've used it for some of our wetlands work. On August 13th of this year DigitalGlobe launched WorldView-3 spacecraft. It will provide a 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, with an average revisit time of <1 day.

From the Digital Globe website:

Introducing WorldView-3, the first multi-payload, super-spectral, high-resolution commercial satellite. Operating at an expected altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution, and 30 m CAVIS resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of <1 day and is capable of collecting up to 680,000 km2 per day, further enhancing the DigitalGlobe collection capacity for more rapid and reliable collection. Launching in 2014, the WorldView-3 system will allow DigitalGlobe to further expand its imagery product offerings.

Here is their spec-sheet.

Web mapping of high res imagery helps conservation

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One of our collaborators on the Sonoma Vegetation Mapping Project has sent work on how web mapping and high resolution imagery has helped them do their job well. These are specific comments, but might be more generally applicable to other mapping and conservation arenas.

  1. Communicating with partnering agencies.
    • In the past year this included both large wetland restoration projects and the transfer of ownership of several thousands of acres to new stewards.
  2. Articulating to potential donors the context and resources of significant properties that became available for purchase.
    • There are properties that have been identified as high priority conservation areas for decades and require quick action or the opportunity to protect would pass.
  3. Internal communication to our own staff.
    • We have been involved in the protection of over 75 properties, over 47,000 acres. At this time we own 18 properties (~6500 acres) and 41 conservation easements (~7000  acres). At this scale high quality aerial imagery is essential to the size of land we steward and effective broad understanding. The way it is served as a seamless mosaic means it is available to extremely experienced and intelligent people who find the process of searching and joining orthorectified imagery by the flight path and row cumbersome or inefficient.
  4. Researching properties of interest.
    • Besides our own internal prioritization of parcels to protect, I understand that we receive a request a week for our organization’s attention towards some property in Sonoma. Orienting ourselves to the place always includes a map with the property boundary using the most recent and/or high quality imagery for the parcel of interest and its neighbors.  This is such a regular part of our process that we created a ArcGIS Server based toolset that streamlines this research task and cartography. The imagery service we consume as the basemap for all these maps is now the 2011 imagery service.  This imagery is of high enough resolution that we can count on it for both regional and parcel scale inspection to support our decisions to apply our resources.
  5. Orienting participants to site.
    • Our On the Land Program uses the imagery in their introduction maps to help visitors on guided hikes quickly orient to the place they are visiting and start folding their experience and sense of place into their visit.
  6. Complementing grant applications.
    • Grants are an important part of the funding for major projects we undertake. High quality imagery facilitates our ability to orient the grant reviewer and visually support the argument we are making which is that our efforts will be effective and worthy of funds that are in short supply.
  7. Knowing what the resources on a property are is an essential part of thoughtfully managing them.
    • In one example we used the aerial imagery (only a year old at the time) as a base map for botanists to classify the vegetation communities. These botanists are not experts in GIS, but by using paper maps with high resolution prints in the field they were easily able to delineate what they were observing on the ground on features interpreted in the photo.  We then scanned and confidently registered their hand annotations to the same imagery, allowing staff to digitized the polygons that represent the habitat observed. These vegetation observations are shared with Sonoma County and its efforts to map all the vegetation of Sonoma County.
  8. Conservation easement monitoring makes extensive use of aerial imagery.
    • In some cases we catch violations of our easements that are difficult to view on the ground, for example unpermitted buildings by neighbors on the lands we protect, illegal agriculture or other encroachment. It is often used to orient new and old staff to a large property before walking their and planning for work projects that might be part of prescribed management.
  9. The imagery helps reinforce our efforts to communicate the challenge to preserve essential connectivity in the developed and undeveloped areas of Sonoma County.
    • In the Sonoma Valley there is a wildlife corridor of great interest to us as conservation priority. Aerial imagery has been an important part of discussing large land holdings such as the Sonoma Developmental Center, existing conserved land by Sonoma Land Trust and others, and the uses of the valley for housing and agriculture.
  10. Celebration of the landscape cannot be forgotten.
    • We often pair this high quality aerial imagery with artful nature photography. The message of the parts and their relation to the whole are succinctly and poetically made. This is essential feedback to members and donors who need to see the numbers of acres protected with their support and have the heartfelt sense of success.

We look forward to the continued use of this data and the effective way it is shared.
 
We hope that future imagery and other raster or elevation data can be served as well as this, it would benefit many engaged in science and conservation.

Thanks to Joseph Kinyon, GIS Manager, Sonoma Land Trust

Cropland Data Layer (CDL) and National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD): new versions released this year

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Both the NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL) and the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) released new versions in early 2014. Links for download are here:

Important proposed legislation limiting UAVs: consider reading this and commenting

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AB1327 is a bill that could potentially impact the work that we do in regards to remote sensing and aerial imagery collection, etc… in the near future. See the link below for more detail. The office of the California CIO, Scott Gregory, is in the process of providing the Legislature a summary analysis of the bill. In our analysis we want to highlight civilian use (non-public safety governmental) cases for UAV technology as a rebuttal to some of the limiting language in the bill.

The bill would generally prohibit public agencies from using unmanned aircraft systems, or contracting for the use of unmanned aircraft systems, as defined, with certain exceptions applicable to law enforcement agencies and in certain other cases. The bill would require reasonable public notice to be provided by public agencies intending to deploy unmanned aircraft systems, as specified. The bill would require images, footage, or data obtained through the use of an unmanned aircraft system under these provisions to be permanently destroyed within 6 months, except as specified.

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1327
 
If this bill will affect your organization’s future data collection needs, please provide them a brief summary to be incorporated into the analysis.

Here is what I have sent to Scott Gregory:

Maggi Kelly

Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management

UC Berkeley

The use of civilian accessed UAV technology is commonly used for research purposes to aquire imagery at critical times over inaccessible field sites such as wetlands and forests, or over agricultural fields throught the growing season. This remote data acquisition using UAVs has several advantages: 1) it limits damage of the site, 2) it allows for mutliple returns in a cost-effective way, and 3) it allows for important very high resolution imagery to be collected. Here is a paper where we perfected techniques to find weeds in an agricultural field using UAV imagery. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077151

Basically, they are looking for the organization name, use case and description of that use case. Please circulate to the user community within your respective organizations to solicit feedback. Please email or call if you have any questions. He would like to have these complied by 10am Friday (3/14/14).

Email: Scott Gregory Scott.Gregory@state.ca.gov

Thanks for your help.

Happy Valentine's Day Landsat 8!

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It's meta-gorgeous, and better than spy vs spy: Landsat 8 catches a glimpse of its older, retired uncle Landsat 5. From NASA:

Feb 14, 2014 • Eight months ago, on June 5, 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey decommissioned the venerable Landsat 5 satellite. That day, the USGS Landsat Flight Operations Team transmitted the last command to Landsat 5, effectively terminating the mission and leaving it in a disposal orbit.

This week, Landsat 8 overflew the defunct Landsat 5, and thanks to some clever work by Mike Gartley, a Research Scientist with the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing group at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)—a group that has long participated in Landsat calibration and validation—Landsat 5 was seen in an image taken by Landsat 8.

In these images, the satellite is seen as a streak of pixels (dark or light depending on the spectral band). There is one image from each of Landsat 8′s OLI bands, except for Band 7, or SWIR-2, where she blended into the clouds and was impossible to distinguish. In these images Landsat 5 is much closer to Landsat 8 than she is to the Earth. More here.

Musings about Robert N. Colwell

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I am working on a retrospective of remote sensing of forests in California for the centennial. I am trying to highlight some of the pioneering work done by remote sensors that focused on Californian forests from the 1960s through the use of lidar today.

Oblique aerial view of Berkeley Campus of University of California taken with Camouflage Detection film. Robert N. Colwell

Of course with this topic you must begin with Robert N. Colwell. Dr. Colwell was an internationally renowned remote sensing scientist; he was former associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the UC Berkeley, and he was the instructor of remote sensing in our own Mulford Hall from 1947 until his retirement in 1983. He was NASA co-investigator for Apollo IX, and his research in the 1960s on reflectance and multispectral reconnaissance were the primary basis for selecting the type of sensors and the spectral bands implemented in Landsat. Neat guy, and we all benefit from his intellectual legacy.

Anyway, for this paper, I am going through some of his work as he transitioned from aerial photography to digital imaging, and I came across this picture. Mulford is just off the scene in the upper left corner, and Hearst Gym pool is visible in lower part. In his caption he says:

"Oblique aerial view of Berkeley Campus of University of California taken with Camouflage Detection film." (That is what they used to call color infrared.) "Such photography is superior to any other for certain photo interpretation purposes as indicated by some of the preceding examples. Note in this photo how color values for each species of tree tend to remain uniform from foreground to background because of the superior haze penetration offered by this film. The relatively long wavelengths to which this infrared-sensitive film reacts are scattered but very little by atmospheric haze particles, thus accounting for the uniform color values and for excellent image sharpness." I dig this part: "The original color transparencies have the same color values as seen here and consequently make very attractive panels for lamp shades, although certain of their colors fade upon prolonged exposure to light."

The trend for using map products as kitchy home decorations PRE-DATES 1970! Take that hipsters!

Article source: Colwell, R.N. 1964. Aerial photography - A valuable sensor for the scientist. American Scientist, Vol. 52, No. 1 (MARCH 1964), pp. 16-49

Some more about him here: http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/inmemoriam/robertcolwell.htm

Help to Validate Global Land Cover with GeoWiki and Cropland Capture

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Courtesy of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

This creative project from GeoWiki seeks to get croudsourced feedback on crop types from participants around the world. They say: 

By 2050 we will need to feed more than 2 billion additional people on the Earth. By playing Cropland Capture, you will help us to improve basic information about where cropland is located on the Earth's surface. Using this information, we will be better equipped at tackling problems of future food security and the effects of climate change on future food supply. Get involved and contribute to a good cause! Help us to identify cropland area!

Oh yeah, and there are prizes!

Each week (starting Nov. 15th) the top three players with the highest score at the end of each week will be added to our weekly winners list. After 25 weeks, three people will be drawn randomly from this list to become our overall winners. Prizes will include an Amazon Kindle, a brand new smartphone and a tablet.

Global forest change from Landsat and Google

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The video describing the partnership and the product is available now.

A new high-resolution global map of forest loss and gain has been created with the help of Google Earth. The interactive online tool is publicly available and zooms in to a remarkably high level of local detail - a resolution of 30m. Snapshot of Russia here (green = forest, blue = gain, red = loss):

Russia has much forest activity

Results from time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat images from 2000–2012 characterize forest extent and change. Between 2000 and 2012, according to this analysis, the Earth lost a combined "forest" the size of Mongolia. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934790

Here is the abstract from the accompanying paper in Science:

Quantification of global forest change has been lacking despite the recognized importance of forest ecosystem services. In this study, Earth observation satellite data were used to map global forest loss (2.3 million square kilometers) and gain (0.8 million square kilometers) from 2000 to 2012 at a spatial resolution of 30 meters. The tropics were the only climate domain to exhibit a trend, with forest loss increasing by 2101 square kilometers per year. Brazil’s well-documented reduction in deforestation was offset by increasing forest loss in Indonesia, Malaysia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Zambia, Angola, and elsewhere. Intensive forestry practiced within subtropical forests resulted in the highest rates of forest change globally. Boreal forest loss due largely to fire and forestry was second to that in the tropics in absolute and proportional terms. These results depict a globally consistent and locally relevant record of forest change.

Hansen, M.C.; Potapov, P.V.; Moore, R.; Hancher, M.; Turubanova, S.A.; Tyukavina, A.; Thau, D.; Stehman, S.V.; Goetz, S.J.; Loveland, T.R.; Kommareddy, A.; Egorov, A.; Chini, L.; Justice, C.O.; Townshend, J.R.G. High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change. Science 2013, 342, 850-853

NASA shares satellite and climate data on Amazon’s cloud

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NASA has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services that the agency hopes will spark wider collaboration on climate research. In an effort that is in some ways parallel to Google's Earth Engine, NASA has uploaded terabytes of data to Amazon's public cloud and made it available to the anyone. 

Three data sets are already up at Amazon. The first is climate change forecast data for the continental United States from NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) climate simulations, scaled down to make them usable outside of a supercomputing environment. The other two are satellite data sets—one from from the US Geological Survey's Landsat, and the other a collection of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data from NASA's Terra and Aqua Earth remote sensing satellites.

More Here

FUEGO — A concept for a fire detection satellite

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A nice press release about our new paper on the concepts behind a fire detection satellite with perhaps the coolest acronym yet: FUEGO — Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit. From Bob Sanders.

Artist's conception of the FUEGO satellite

Current and planned wildfire detection systems are impressive but lack both sensitivity and rapid response times. A small telescope with modern detectors and significant computing capacity in geosynchronous orbit can detect small (12 m2) fires on the surface of the earth, cover most of the western United States (under conditions of moderately clear skies) every few minutes or so, and attain very good signal-to-noise ratio against Poisson fluctuations in a second. Hence, these favorable statistical significances have initiated a study of how such a satellite could operate and reject the large number of expected systematic false alarms from a number of sources. We suggest a number of algorithms that can help reduce false alarms, and show efficacy on a few. Early detection and response would be of true value in the United States and other nations, as wildland fires continue to severely stress resource managers, policy makers, and the public, particularly in the western US. Here, we propose the framework for a geosynchronous satellite with modern imaging detectors, software, and algorithms able to detect heat from early and small fires, and yield minute-scale detection times. Open Access Journal Link. Press Release. KPIX spot.

Post American fire imagery

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Check out these images from after the American fire, from the WorldView 2 satelllite from our northern SNAMP site. The blue boundary is our SNAMP site.  This background imagery is a pan-sharpened WV2 image (0.5 meters, channels 7, 5, 3). The red color depicts alive vegetation (at least for the time being) and green-blue is post-fire NPV (non-photosynthetic veg).  Thanks to Carlos Ramirez for the images.

 The post-fire imagery shows the heterogeneity of this fire - some spots burned all the vegetation, some spots have standing trees remaining.

American fire burns into SNAMP sites

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American fire perimeter (red) as of 8-20-13The American fire is burning into our SNAMP study areas as of yesterday. Here is a snapshot of our study site and the fire perimeter (red) as of today (8-19-13 perimeter in orange). SNAMP control (yellow) and treatment (purple) watersheds are shown.

All SNAMP field crews are safely evacuated, with almost all field work completed for the year.

From the Incident Report: "The American Fire burning in heavy fuels on extreme slopes about 10 air miles northeast of the community of Foresthill, California, and eight air miles south of Interstate 80 has grown to 14,765 acres. While the fire is predominantly SimTable animation of American fire spread - modeled thru 8-14 I am guessingburning on the Tahoe National Forest within the North Fork of the Middle Fork American River drainage, there is a potential, given changes in weather or fire behavior, for the fire to threaten areas near Foresthill.

Active fire behavior continues on the eastern and southern flanks of the fire. Overnight, crews continued to build hand and dozer line to contain the active fire while evaluating future containment options. Firefighters will mop up and patrol containment line along Deadwood Road and Foresthill Divide Road south to the dozer line. Indirect line construction and mop up will continue down Deadwood Ridge. On the east side near Antoine, Manila and Screwauger Canyons, American fire as of 8-20-13 from ESRI onlinedirect and indirect line construction will continue, with support of retardant drops.

Active fire behavior and roll out of burning material continue to be of concern, and will be closely monitored. Strong, erratic outflow winds and lightning may occur today, as the National Weather Service’s Red Flag Warning remains in effect until 11 p.m. Wednesday.

Active fire behavior in very steep, inaccessible terrain makes preparation of contingency lines critical. Indirect attack is the safest way to manage fire in areas of steep and difficult terrain."

In the images to the left, both from ESRI online, there are a number of thermal hotposts in SNAMP territory American fire as of 8-21-13 from ESRI online(the red dots outside of the fire boundary) that were detected as of 10:30am 8-20-13 (upper image). As of 8-21-13 the MODIS hotspots indicate possible fire movement along Foresthill Rd to the east, and into the SNAMP control study area.

 

 

 

 

 

  Some resources:

We will keep you posted.

For more on the SNAMP project see: http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/

This was originally posted on /.

Workshop wrap up: Google Earth Higher Education Summit 2013

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For three days in late July 2013 Kevin Koy, Executive Director of the GIF and Maggi spent time at Google with 50+ other academics and staff to learn about Google Earth's mapping and outreach tools that leverage cloud computing. The meeting was called Google Earth for Higher Education Summit, and it was jam packed with great information and hands-on workshops. Former Kellylabber Karin Tuxen-Bettman was at the helm, with other very helpful staff (including David Thau - who gave the keynote at last year's ASPRS conference). Google Earth Outreach has been targeting non-profits and K-12 education, and are now increasingly working with higher education, hence the summit. We learned about a number of valuable tools for use in classrooms and workshops, a short summary is here.  

Google Mapping Tools - the familiar and the new

  • Google Earth Pro. You all know about this tool, increasing ability to plan, measure and visualize a site, and to make movies and maps and export data.
  • Google Maps Engine Lite. This is a free, lite mapping platform to import, style and embed data. Designed to work with small (100 row) spreadsheets.
  • Google Maps Engine Platform. The scaleable and secure mapping platform for geographic data hosting, data sharing and map making. streamlines the import of GIS data: you can import shapefiles and imagery. http://mapsengine.google.com.
  • Google Earth Engine. Data (40 years of global satellite imagery - Landsat, MODIS, etc.) + methods to analyze (Google's and yours, using python and javascript) + the Cloud make for a fast analytical platform to study a changing earth. http://earthengine.google.org/#intro
  • TimeLapse. A new tool showcasing 29 years of Landsat imagery, allows you to script a tour through a part of the earth to highlight change. Features Landsat 4, 5 7 at 30m, with clouds removed, colors normalized with MODIS. http://earthengine.google.org/
  • Field Mobile Data Collection. GME goes mobile, using Open Data Kit (ODK) - a way to capture structured data and locate it and analyze after home.
  • Google Maps APIs. The way to have more hands-on in map styling and publishing. developers.google.com/maps
  • Street View. They have a car in 32 countries, on 7 continents, and are moving into national parks and protected areas. SV is not just for roads anymore. They use trikes, boats, snowmobiles, trolleys; they go underwater and caves, backpacks.

Here are a couple of my first-cuts:

Proba-V, SPOT replacement is cranking

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An update from Mark about the Proba satellite: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/new-global-vegetation-map/.

Proba-V is a Belgian-built satellite - the latest in the European Space Agency’s PROBA series of small satellites and will take over vegetation monitoring duties from the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites, which are at the end of a 15-year mission. The Proba-V satellite is barely bigger than a washing machine. It was launched just two months ago has already made a wall-to-wall map of the world’s vegetation.

It orbits the Earth 14 times a day, covering the entire globe every two days with 100m resolution imager. Every 10 days, a new 200,000 megapixel image of the world’s vegetation is produced.

Background: the current Vegetation-1 and Vegetation-2 instruments onboard the SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 satellites will only be available till May 2014. For almost 15 years now, these instruments have daily monitored and mapped the worldwide vegetation, thus providing essential information on crop yields, droughts, desertification, changes in the type of vegetation, deforestation, etc. to an ever extending user community.

Go Proba-V!