mapping for a changing california
Welcome to the Kellylab blog! We post fun facts and things that catch our eye. Occasionally I wax lyrically about a topic of interest.
Apologies to Fergie.
Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, theUniversity of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.
California - 2090 - Annual Average Temperature - High EmissionsThe exciting project the GIF staff have been working on for 9 months is ready to be revealed. Cal-Adapt is a web-based climate adaptation planning tool that will help local governments respond to climate change. The site was developed by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility with funding and oversight from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research Program. The information for Cal-Adapt was gathered from California’s scientific community and represents the most current data available.
“Cal-Adapt will allow people to identify climate change risks in specific areas around the state.” said Secretary for Natural Resources, John Laird. “This tool will be especially beneficial to government agencies and city and county planners, as they will now have access to climate change information in a very user-friendly application.”
Weed Day 2011 comes to UC Davis July 14
The latest developments in weed control will take center stage at UC Davis once again when scores of scientists, students, regulators and more gather July 14 for the 55th annual Weed Day.
“We look forward to another great turnout with a wide range of weed-control demonstrations,” said Cooperative Extension Specialist Brad Hanson from the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, who is chairing this year’s popular event. “Weed Day provides a great opportunity to see, first hand, weed research being conducted on campus and to find out what we are doing throughout the state.”
Among the presentations will be weed control in fresh-market tomato, residual herbicides in almonds and walnut orchards, symptomology of herbicide drift in row crops, thermal soil disinfestation research, weed-risk assessment for the horticulture industry and many more ongoing projects with other crops and non-crops. For a full agenda, click here or visit http://wric.ucdavis.edu.
Weed Day is held each July to give pest control advisors, farm advisors, chemical company cooperators, college faculty, students and regulatory officials the opportunity to learn more about current weed science research at UC Davis. The event begins at 7:30 a.m. with registration and a morning bus tour to the campus research fields to view demonstrations and research in terrestrial and aquatic weed control. Lunch and afternoon presentations will be held indoors and will wrap up by 4:30 p.m. Continuing education credits have been requested from the Department of Pesticide Regulation.
Cost is $65 for those who register and pay before July 6 and $90 for those register after that date. The cost for students with ID is $20. Class size is limited so early enrollment is always a good idea.
Registration is open:
On-line registration (credit card only)
On-line registration (UC recharge number only)
Print registration form to fax or mail.
For more details, see Weed Day 2011.
Yesterday at the annual ASPRS conference in Milwaukee, WI (yes there were sausages shaped like the state), Jack Dangermond announced the release of ChangeMatters, and new Landsat Image Services from ESRI.
ChangeMatters. Working with partners, ESRI developed this web application - ChangeMatters - which allows users throughout the globe to quickly view the GLS Landsat imagery both multi-spectrally (in different Landsat band combinations) and multi-temporally (across epochs), and to conduct simple change detection analysis.
Image Services, with examples of vegetation, false color, land-water band combinations in seamless, color matched Landsat mosaics. Downloads will be available soon. Pretty nice. Website.
Example from ChangeMatters: Las Vegas from 1975 - 2000. Green is increase and red decrease in veg
New confirmed cases of Sudden Oak Death (SOD) (P. ramorum) have been added to OakMapper, a project that tracks the spread of Sudden Oak Death from data collected by citizens and organizations. All official SOD cases are collected and confirmed by the California Department of Food and Agriculture or the University of California. Community SOD cases are submitted by citizens via the OakMapper website and iPhone application. 415 new points collected between 2008 and 2011 have been added to OakMapper bringing the total number of confirmed SOD locations to 1570. The new data consists of laboratory confirmed cases collected by the annual SOD Blitz campaigns of 2008-2010 from the Forest Pathology and Mycology Lab run by Dr. Matteo Garbelotto and also data collected by the California Department of Food and Agriculture between 2008 and 2011.
Click on the images below to view close-ups of the new confirmed SOD data (in green) from the SOD Blitz and California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA).
New SOD Blitz 08-10 Data
New CDFA 08-11 Data
Explore the new data online here
OakMapper.org
The market for geospatial technologies is growing at about 35% a year, studies suggest, and the geospatial industry as a whole is expected to add at least 330,000 jobs between 2008 and 2018, claims recent article in Directions Magazine.
Summary: In this article, Becky Shumate, GISP, discusses the definition of the GIS profession, as well as its potential growth. She cites the Geospatial Workforce Development Center's work, as well as the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration's recently concluded study of the field's potential growth.
Of note: the Dept. of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA) tagged Geospatial Technologies as a "High Growth Industry" in March of 2010. They estimated that the geospatial technology profession will experience a growth of over 330,000 geospatial professionals between 2008 and 2018. This growth figure would bring the number of geospatial professionals to just under 1.2 million and is supported by similar estimates by other geospatial organizations. As quoted by the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA), "uses for geospatial technology are so widespread and diverse, the market is growing at an annual rate of almost 35 percent, with the commercial subsection of the market expanding at the rate of 100 percent each year. "
Here is the report: http://www.careeronestop.org/competencymodel/pyramid.aspx?GEO=Y
Google has officially unveiled Google Earth Builder, a new product aiming to allow users to store and analyze spatial data in the cloud. There are many details of the service yet to be revealed, but it will definitely be interesting to see where this is heading...
Volume 5, Issue 1 - Spring 2011
BAAMA is pleased to announce The BAAMA Journal has been published in conjunction with Earth Day. Special thanks to all our contributing authors and editors. The BAAMA Journal is a publication that highlights Bay Area people and projects that use geospatial technologies.
IN THIS ISSUE:
The London Mapping Festival 2011 – 2012, or LMF for short, is an exciting and unique initiative being launched in June 2011 and will run through to December 2012. It sets out to promote greater awareness and understanding of how maps and digital geographic data are being created and used within the Capital. Through a diverse range of activities LMF will engage with a wide audience of mapping enthusiasts whether they are professionals, enthusiasts or others. We should do something like this for the SF Bay Area. More here.
The only tenuous connection to mapping in this story is that it was in Mrs. Room's class I first fell in love with maps. She had us do an elaborate field mapping project in the school's gardens with hula hoops and such, in kindergarten. One day I will find the result and scan it.
This article from SF Chronicle is about our recent reunion at John Muir School in Berkeley.
Forty-one years ago, in the early days of forced integration, a small group of Berkeley schoolchildren were placed in an experimental class and held together from kindergarten through third grade with the same teacher. On Sunday, they came back to see each other again - and to reminisce about what they saw as an idyllic time. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/10/BAP91ITSUD.DTL#ixzz1JFTvtD7e
This is an exerpt from our recent SNAMP newsletter on our lidar work, written by me, Sam, and Qinghua.
We are using Lidar data to map forests before and after vegetation treatments and measuring forest habitat characteristics across our treatment and control sites. These data will give us detailed information about how forest habitat was affected by fuel management treatments.
Visualizing the forest
The image at left is not a photograph: it is a computer generated image of our SNAMP study area, using only Lidar data. These kinds of visualizations are commonly used in the forestry field for stand and landscape management, and to predict environments into the future. But visualization software packages usually only focus on one stand at a time. Our method allows us to visualize the whole firescape. This is useful for understanding the complexity in forest structure across the landscape, how the forest recovers from treatments, and how animals with large home ranges might use the forest. The UC Merced team created this cutting-edge product.
Finding the trees in the forest
In order to see the trees in the forest, the UC Merced spatial team researchers developed a method to segment individual trees from the Lidar point cloud. The method identifies and classifies trees individually and sequentially from the tallest tree to the shortest tree. We tested this method on our SNAMP Lidar data. These forests are complex mixed coniferous forests on rugged terrain, and yet our method is very accurate at defining individual tree shapes. We are applying the method in both of the SNAMP study areas.
Mapping downed Logs with lidar data
The UC Berkeley spatial team researchers used some new techniques that help distinguish individual features, and mapped the logs, as well as some of the trees in this stand. In the figure at left: red colors are logs, green colors are trees.
More information on these and other projects can be found on the SNAMP website.
the new geoid: yellow is highest and blue lowest gravityNew results from Europe's Goce satellite has rendered a highly detailed map of how gravity varies across the Earth. These kind of measures are important for understanding how gravity shapes some key processes on Earth.
"Chief among these new insights is a clearer view of how the oceans are moving and how they redistribute the heat from the Sun around the world - information that is paramount to climate studies.
Those interested in earthquakes are also poring over the Goce results. The giant jolts that struck Japan last month and Chile last year occurred because huge masses of rock suddenly moved. Goce should reveal a three-dimensional view of what was going on inside the Earth."
The article describing the work, from the BBC, also includes a nice discussion of the concept of the geoid.
This is an exerpt from an older SNAMP newsletter Marek and I wrote describing the use of lidar in our Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project. Originally published November 2008.
Environmental sciences are inherently spatial, and geospatial tools such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and remote sensing are fundamental to these research enterprises. Remote sensing has been used for forest and habitat mapping for a long time, and new technological developments such as LIDAR (light detection and ranging) are making this field even more exciting. Here we briefly describe LIDAR’s basic principles and show some preliminary analyses completed for the SNAMP Project. We are using this data to model detailed topography to help the water team understand runoff in the SNAMP watersheds, to map forest canopy cover and vegetation height as inputs to the fire and forest health team’s detailed fire models, and to derive important forest habitat characteristics for the spotted owl and fisher teams.
We contracted with the National Center for Airborne LIDAR Mapping (NCALM) for our data. They flew the GEMINI instrument at approximately 600 m above ground level, with 67% swath overlap. The instrument collected 4 discrete returns per pulse at 125kHz, and the data has a final
density of 9 points per m2.
Raw Data: LIDAR data is typically delivered as a “point cloud,” a collection of elevations and their intensities that can be projected in a three-dimensional space. In Figure 2 (right) we show this “point cloud” concept. There are thousands of individual points in the image, each colored according to its height (magenta and red are high, orange and yellow are low).
Bare Earth: Once the data is collected, the first step is to transform the data into a “bare earth” model; which is an approximation of the ground if all objects above surface are removed. We use the “Last Return” data (see Figure 1 above) to generate this model of the bare earth. These are typically very detailed products (with a small footprint on the ground) and provide much more topographic information than from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) that were derived from topographic maps. Our DEM has a ground resolution of under 1m.
Forest Structure: Another typical step in processing LIDAR data is to examine individual trees and forest structure. An example of a forest stand is shown in Figure 4. These and other products help us understand how the forest influences surface hydrology, how a patch of forest might provide habitat for a fisher and how a forest might burn given certain weather and wind patterns.
Future Analyses: We are in the process of linking the forest parameters gathered by the Fire & Forest Ecosystem Health Team in summer 2008 with the LIDAR-derived data to help scale-up forest variables to the fireshed scale. For example, tree height, tree DBH (diameter-at- breast-height) and canopy cover have been successfully modeled using LIDAR data in other studies, and there is active research linking field-based and LIDAR-based fire-related measures such as canopy base height and ladder fuels, and wildlife-related measures such as vertical structure.
example from orange countyThe City Project has released a report for California analyzing access to green space. The report uses geographic, demographic, economic and historical data to map and analyze access to the region's green space. In addition, the report examines access to green space based on income, race or ethnicity.
The report's GIS maps were produced by GreenInfo Network and help illustrate unfair disparities in park access.
The areas that are symbolized with red and crosshatching indicate areas that are park poor (less than 3 acres of parks per 1,000 residents) and income poor (below $47,331 median household income), and disproportionately populated by people of color.
Changing land use is one of the most important issues facing California. ANR programs and personnel can help decision makers and land owners make land use decisions that benefit agricultural, natural, and human resources. Our focal areas include land use change, water quality and watershed management, habitat conservation, preservation of working landscapes, and managing growth. This workgroup provides ANR resources to interested clientele. We also identify gaps in our existing knowledge and in our extension materials and work to fill these gaps. We increase communication among our various members and collaborators, both within and beyond DANR and UC. Please see our Land use change website.
California’s two nuclear power plant locations: Diablo Canyon and San OnofreUpdated satellite photos from Japan, before and after the earthquake, including the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. From the NY Times. Imagery from GeoEye and Digital Globe. FYI, California’s two nuclear power plants, the dual-unit Diablo Canyon and dual-unit San Onofre systems, produce about one-fifth of the state’s total electricity generation. San Onofre is featured in a number of films, including Naked Gun. Both are apparently designed to withstand earthquakes of 7 or 7.5 magnitude, depending on who you ask.
From Marek. Really nice example of Google's newish data delivery scheme: on the fly graph of fires in the Tahoe area in the last 100 years. I am not completely sure where the original data comes from; the earlier stuff looks to be drawn from scanned news. We'll do some more sleuthing. Still, pretty amazing yield of data.
From Mark. Animation of the tsunami moving across the Pacific, from noaa.
From the East Bay Express: a nice article by Caitlin Esch about mobile apps, citizen science and environmental science. The article features the OakMapper, and ken-ichi ueda's iNaturalist, and UC Davis' Roadkill Observation System. The article includes a nice history of the OakMapper, including our early days wrangling faxes and hand-drawn maps, and the early inspiration for the site: the USGS Earthquake Mapper.
The California Academy of Sciences has just published a video about the oakmapper website and iphone app! The video features Maggi Kelly and Shufei Lei, and will be running on the floor of the Cal Academy, and on their website. Check it out!
