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.
Here is a funny yet informative film called “Caught Mapping” produced by Chevrolet in 1940 depicting how road maps were made at the time. The film was released by the Prelinger Archive and depicts the entire process of map making from field surveying to map updating.
Click here for the video and for the story in The Atlantic or view below.
Big updates are now available to both ArcGIS and QGIS bringing more power and functionality to desktop GIS users!
ArcGIS 10.1 is now available with lots of new features. Learn more from ESRI.com. The GIF is now testing the updated software and we plan to make it available on lab workstations in the coming weeks.
QGIS 1.8 is also now available, and is free for download. Visit QGIS.org for download instructions and to learn more about the new features available in this release.
At a recent workshop I gave on webGIS, after giving an overview of some of the recent uses of crowdsourced and VGI in disasters (fire in San Diego, earthquake in Christchurch, Ushahidi everywhere...), I was asked about success of these projects. Who used the data? How? (and who funded these websites, but that is another story.) And I had only the vaguest of answers. Here is a thoughful critique on this subject by Paul Currion on MobileActive.org. He examines the use of the Ushahidi project in Haiti. Paul is an aid worker who has been working on the use of ICTs in large-scale emergencies for the last 10 years. He asks whether crowdsourcing adds significant value to responding to humanitarian emergencies, arguing that merely increasing the quantity of information in the wake of a large-scale emergency may be counterproductive. Why? because aid workers need clear answers, not a fire-hose of information. Information from the crowd needs to be curated, organized, targeted for response. He makes the point that since crowdsourced data is going have to be sorted through, and can be biased, and can be temporary, aid agencies are going to have to carry out exactly the same needs assessments that they would done without the crowdsourced information.
Where and when do crowdsourced data add value to a situation or project? How can we effectively deal with the bias in the data that comes naturally? We deal with this all the time in my smaller web-related projects: oakmapper and snamp for example. What is the future role of the web for adaptive forest management for example? How do these new collaborative and extensive tools help us make important decisions about natural resources management in often contentious contexts? More to think about.
NextMap's World 30 DSM is ready. Pricing starts at as low as 1 cent per km2.
ASTER, with some problematic gaps...
NEXTMap, without the gaps
The SNAMP spatial team and the cool lidar work we are doing was recently featured in ANR's Green Blog. The article highlights the work of UC Merced in forest visualization. Currently, most visualization software packages focus on one forest stand at a time (hundreds of acres), but now we can visualize an entire forest, from ridge top to ridge top. The Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP) Spatial Team principle investigators Qinghua Guo and Maggi Kelly, and graduate student Jacob Flanagan and undergraduate research assistant Lawrence Lam have created cutting-edge software that allows us to visualize the entire firescape (thousands of acres).
New software developed by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and INRIA in Paris mines the geotagged imagery in Google Street View to uncover what architectural features distinguish one city from another across the globe. The software is based upon a discriminative clustering algorithm to distinguish features in one picture from another. This research shows that geographically representative image elements can be discovered automatically from Google Street View imagery in a discriminative manner.
Jacob Aron from the New Scientist reports:
"The researchers selected 12 cities from across the globe and analysed 10,000 Google Street View images from each. Their algorithm searches for visual features that appear often in one location but infrequently elsewhere...It turns out that ornate windows and balconies, along with unique blue-and-green street signs, characterise Paris, while columned doorways, Victorian windows and cast-iron railings mark London out from the rest. In the US, long staircases and bay windows mean San Francisco, and gas-powered street lamps are scattered throughout Boston."
"The discovered visual elements can also support a variety of computational geography tasks, such as mapping architectural correspondences and influences within and across cities, finding representative elements at different geo-spatial scales, and geographically-informed image retrieval."
Read the full story by clicking here.
To read the research paper and view the project website click here.
Here is a recent article from the Washington Post examining Philadelphia's Get Healthy Philly initiative. $900,000 from the project is going to be spent on turning 632 corner stores in the city into green grocers. The effort helps these corner stores buy and supply fresh fruits and vegetables and buy the infrastructure needed to store them, such as refrigerators.
This effort goes in hand with a new study in the city that will examine what happens when more nutritious foods are introduced into traditionally underserved neighborhoods. Measuring what people bought before, what they’re eating now, and how health outcomes change. The article also explores other research on food deserts, access to healthy foods, and health outcomes with lessons learned.
For the full article click here.
Former kellylabber Tim De Chant has a nice piece on the upcoming apple mapping software for mobile devices:
Apple announced today that it’s revamping the Maps application on iOS devices—iPhone, iPad, iPod touch—introducing a lot of showy new features like turn-by-turn directions and 3D flyovers. While those make for sexy commercials, they won’t be as impactful as the switch from raster- to vector-based map data. If you’re not sure why you should be excited about the change—and you should be—read on.
Check out his blog post here.
Jonathan Crowe (formerly of The Map Room, now of "My Correct Views on Everything") has a comprehensive post on the subject here.
We mac users are all a-twitter about the news of an impending Apple mapping software. Here is a sample from NPR:
There's been speculation for months that Apple will try to elbow Google's popular Maps app aside on the iPhone and unveil its own map app, and some of the best evidence yet comes from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. The paper looked into the reasons for the impending switch and the broader implications it would have for the smartphone market. The article continues...
The new software is rumored to be leaner, meaner, and packing a rad 3D visualization capability. It will be unveiled as soon as next week at the annual Apple developer conference in San Francisco.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/04/4537900/deal-reached-for-tracking-sierra.html
The U.S. Forest Service and conservation groups have reached an agreement to strengthen monitoring of Sierra Nevada wildlife.
On sunday a solar eclipse will be crossing over the Western United States. This link has a few maps of the path of the eclipse, scroll to the bottom for an animation of the eclipse path.
http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/2012-annular-eclipse-of-the-sun-china-to-texas-in-may
A nice article about SNAMP is now in the recent version of California Agriculture. In the same edition is a great series of articles about the 150 anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act which made higher education available to those in every social class, and brought practical information to a nation that was then more than 50% farmers. Cooperative Extension was born with this Act, and it continues to evolve today. A summary by Janet L. White is here.
California Agriculture 66(2):39-39. DOI: 10.3733/ca.v066n02p39a. April-June 2012.
In 1862, in a nation torn by secession and Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a visionary law that laid the cornerstone of public higher education. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act gave federal public lands to states, allotting 30,000 acres for each Senator and Representative. The total endowment was $7.55 million, then the value of 17.4 million acres. Today, more than 100 land-grant universities serve the nation and the world, including what many believe is the greatest public university in the world, the University of California.
On the 150th anniversary of its passage, we pay tribute to this profoundly democratic law, which made higher education available to those in every social class, and brought practical information to a nation that was then more than 50% farmers. It was followed by other landmark education laws: the 1887 Hatch Act, establishing Agricultural Experiment Stations at universities; a second Morrill Act in 1890, initiating regular funding; the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, establishing Cooperative Extension; and in 1944, the GI Bill. Today, UC's land-grant university thrives as the Agricultural Experiment Stations at UC Berkeley, Davis and Riverside, and in UC Cooperative Extension offices that serve every county.
See see pages 40 to 49 for special coverage of the Morrill Act and its role in building the University of California.
Livehoods is an interesting research project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University which maps social networking activity and patterns using tweets and check-ins to examine the hidden structure of cities and neighborhoods. For example below on the map each point represents a check-in location. Groups of nearby points of the same color represent a Livehood. Within a Livehood statistics are calculated aggregating check-ins overtime and depicts how a place is used. For more information on Livehoods click here.
Livehoods Screenshot
cal-adapt.org is featured in the Spring 2012 BAAMA journal. In an article led by Kevin and Brian, new tools in the cal-adapt.org website are highlighted. For example, one of the most serious threats to the public health of Californians are extreme heat events. Climate models, developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, project that extreme heat events will increase in frequency, intensity, and duration given future climate change. Cal-adapt.org shows future projected number of heat waves, timing of extreme heat days, maximum duration of heat waves, and daily high temperatures. Check out the new tools here.
GIS @ Berkeley
On April 19 the College of Natural Resources and the College of Environmental Design held an informative workshop on Careers in GIS. This workshop covered many aspects of Geographic Information Sciences: resources on the Berkeley campus, options for the new Minor in Geographic Information Science and Technology, and highlighted areas of GIS research. Over 40 people attended, and we had a lively program, including a welcome from Jennifer Wolch (Dean of CED), Doug Richardson (Executive Director of the AAG), Maggi Kelly (Professor in ESPM); Scott Stephens (Professor in ESPM) talked about his work using GIS and spatial data for forest fire modeling, Mei-Po Kwan (Visiting Professor in Geography) discussed GIS Analysis for transportation and health studies, highlighting some of her fascinating work in spatial-temporal analysis of human movement; and Paul Waddell (Professor in CRP) showed highlights of his GIS and urban mapping, including UrbanSim, a very novel open source approach to city planning and accessibility studies. In addition, Jon Ridener from the Earth Sciences and Map Library discussed the GeoData@UCBerkeley, a GIS data portal and repository created by the UC Berkeley Library. Wow! All great stuff.
The event was brought to you by: College of Natural Resources, College of Environmental Design, Geospatial Innovation Facility. For more information on GIS at Berkeley, please see the GIS @ Berkeley website.
resolution elevation data for coastal California and much of San Francisco Bay. LiDAR data were collected between 2009-2011 and cover nearly 3,800 square miles. Data can be download from NOAA Coastal Services Center's Digital Coast website:From the NYTimes. Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool. By ERIC LICHTBLAU, Published: March 31, 2012.
Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
A GPS tracker. The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search (but sidestepepd the question of how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies). The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.
Full waveform lidarOur colleague Bernhard Hofle from the University of Heidelberg will be here next week as part of an international exchange project: Airborne Laser Scanning for 3D Vegetation Characterization: Set-up of an International Signature Database. Bernhard is interested in Open Source GI and Spatial Database Management Systems, Object-based image and point cloud analysis, radiometric calibration of full-waveform airborne LiDAR data, and other topics.
Bernhard is part of a group that now has one of the first Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) systems worldwide with full-waveform recording capability (upgraded Riegl VZ-400). Deeper understanding and substantially improved analysis of the laser shot backscatter of natural objects by having direct access to full-waveform signatures and physical observables are expected. The unique system will be applied in new research projects dealing with the extraction of 3D geoinformation in e.g. precision farming, geoarchaelogy, geomorphology and forestry. Furthermore, an extensive web-based database of reference signatures for known objects will be developed based on calibrated waveform features derived by TLS.
He is a leader in analysis of discrete and waveform lidar data in urban and forest applications and one of the developers of the cool OPALS lidar software. He'll be giving a geolunch and a workshop afterwards on the software. The geolunch is 1-2, then we will stick around and learn about OPALS.
Are you on the hunt for Bay Area or statewide GIS data?
Are you looking for water quality, habitat, or landscape condition data?
Are you interested in the extent of LiDAR available for the Region?
Then you need GeoFetch--the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s online repository of spatial data. Check it out!
Two interesting natural phenomena spatial animations were recently released. The first is from NASA which visualizes ocean surface currents around the world from 2005 to 2007. The animations were generated from data modeled using NASA’s Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II also known as ECCO2. For more information click here. See the video below:
The second is from HINT.FM which visualizes near real time wind movement patterns in the US using data from the National Digital Forecast Database. To see the animation click here. Here is a static screenshot from their website:
HINT.FM Wind Map