New digitization project: Soil-Vegetation Map Collection

Between the years 1949-1979 the Pacific Southwest research station branch of the U.S. Forest service published two series of maps: 1) The Soil-Vegetation Maps, and 2) Timber Stand Vegetation Maps. These maps to our knowledge have not been digitized, and exist in paper form in university library collections, including the UC Berkeley Koshland BioScience Library.

Index map for the Soil Vegetation MapsThe Soil-Vegetation Maps use blue or black symbols to show the species composition of woody vegetation, series and phases of soil types, and the site-quality class of timber. A separate legend entitled “Legends and Supplemental Information to Accompany Soil-Vegetation Maps of California” allow for the interpretation of these symbols in maps published 1963 or earlier. Maps released following 1963 are usually accompanied by a report including legends, or a set of “Tables”. These maps are published on USGS quadrangles at two scales 1:31,680 and 1:24,000. Each 1:24,000 sheet represents about 36,000 acres. 

The Timber Stand Vegetation Maps use blue or black symbols to show broad vegetation types and the density of woody vegetation, age-size, structure, and density of conifer timber stands and other information about the land and vegetation resources is captured. The accompanying “Legends and Supplemental Information to Accompany Timber Stand-Vegetation Cover Maps of California” allows for interpretation of those symbols. Unlike the Soil-Vegetation Maps a single issue of the legend is sufficient for interpretation. 

We found 22 quad sheets for Sonoma County in the Koshland BioScience Library at UC Berkeley, and embarked upon a test digitization project. 

Scanning. Using a large format scanner at UC Berkeley’s Earth Science and Map library we scanned each original quad at a standard 300dpi resolution. The staff at the Earth Science Library completes the scans and provides an online portal with which to download. 

Georeferencing. Georeferencing of the maps was done in ArcGIS Desktop using the georeferencing toolbar. For the Sonoma county quads which are at a standard 1:24,000 scale we were able to employ the use of the USGS 24k quad index file for corner reference points to manually georeference each quad. 

Error estimation. The georeferencing process of historical datasets produces error. We capture the error created through this process through the root mean squared error (RMSE). The min value from these 22 quads is 4.9, the max value is 15.6 and the mean is 9.9. This information must be captured before the image is registered. See Table 1 below for individual RMSE scores for all 22 quads. 

Conclusions. Super fun exercise, and we look forward to hearing about how these maps are used. Personally, I love working with old maps, and bringing them into modern data analysis. Just checking out the old and the new can show change, as in this snap from what is now Lake Sonoma, but was the Sonoma River in the 1930s.

There are also challenges. Like where do I put my tie-point for this corner?

Here is the final mosaiced product. 

Thanks Kelly and Shane for your work on this!

ISECCI historical ecology working group wrap-up

Last week Kelly and I with others travelled to the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab (SNARL) in the eastern Sierra Nevada, just south of Mono Lake for a research retreat. SNARL is part of the UC's Natural Reserve System, which is comprised of nearly 40 properties across the state. These are preserves that foster research, education and collaboration. They have much in common with ANR's REC system. I've been to a few of them now, and am very pleased to make more visits. I love the east side of the Sierra, and that iconic Highway 395. 

This trip was a retreat for the ISECCI historical ecology working group, led by the inspirational Peter Alagona from UCSB. We discussed our existing projects, including the VTM work (see figure below), and talked about potentials for more collaborative research and further integration between NRS and ANR. We have a list of wishes for digitization, and if anyone out there has ideas about pitching these to donors, please let me know. For example: 

• Kelly and I want to digitize the Leiburg maps from the northern Sierra to add to the VTM stack;
• We want to find a better way to index and view historical aerial photography state-wide. Something like this for historical maps: http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/TopoView/help/

• Some of the Channel islands have boxes of historical maps and data that can be digitized; 
• We still face all the challenges with archiving and digitizing the paper research records that come from the RECs and NRS. We've made some progress on this topic (see PA's great site on NRS archives), but there is much more to be done. 
• Other examples: A spatial approach to California herbarium collections and botanist: Jon Christensen
• http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=17
• http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/page.php?id=93
• http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=19

And we had a field trip looking at Mono Lake water issues. Great time spent!

Density of VTM features across the collections

Wolf Hall meets GIS: Mapping musings for the holidays

The great Mark Rylance in character of Thomas Cromwell, from the BBC. I realize this is not the real Cromwell, but Rylance is way easier on the eyes.There are so many reasons I keep returning to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. The book to me seems infinitely revealing, I keep hearing new details. I also managed to use a quote from the book's dialogue in a faculty meeting this year, so there. She comments on history, art, science, collaboration, violence, power, love, politics, craft, cooking, and family. And of course, also mapping. Maps are mentioned many times through the book. At the end, Mantel has Thomas Cromwell say:

"But the trouble is, maps are always last year's. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move..."

Lovely stuff! and a great holiday read (or re-read, or re-listen). It reminds us that mapping is a continual effort, a continuous process. All that we map changes: crops are harvested and fields are replanted, cities evolve, forests burn and re-grow, and people move across the face of the earth leaving traces. Our task is to capture in virtual space the key functional elements of space and time - through maps, through spectral reflectance and lidar, through text and discussions - so that we can find answers to to the key questions facing society today. It can also be very personal effort: mapping is mostly concerned with finding the best way to represent and describe a landscape or process that we love and want to understand better. 

Excerpt From: Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. Henry Holt and Company, 2009. iBooks.

A great week for radio

What a great week for radio and matters geospatial+web. On Wednesday last week we finished out our GIS class with a talk about the geoweb and issues of access, bias, motivation, control, and of course privacy. I used alot of William Gibson's previous writings about Google (posted here earlier) in that lecture. Yesterday TTBOOK re-aired a great interview with Gibson, on the topic of writing, but also about the internet. I recommend it. Additionally, last week Talk of the Nation had a interesting interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book "A History of the World in Twelve Maps"; the interview touched on Google Earth and representation, why north is up, and many other fantastic questions raised through the history of cartography. Check them out!

Pre-development Delta report from SFEI

The San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center is pleased to announce the publication of its latest report, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Historical Ecology Investigation: Exploring Pattern and Process. The report is the culmination of several years of research synthesizing thousands of pieces of historical evidence with contemporary scientific understanding. The report provides new information about how the Delta functioned to provide habitat for native species and includes dozens of rarely seen historical accounts, maps, and photographs. For more information, please see today's press release.

The report and Geographic Information System (GIS) data are available for download here. Printed copies of the report will be available in several weeks, at a cost of $75 each (plus tax/shipping).

Media Contacts:
Robin Grossinger, Senior Scientist, San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center, (510) 746-7380 (office), 510 326 3732 (cell), or robin@sfei.org

Carl Wilcox, Policy Advisor to the Director for the Bay-Delta, California Department of Fish and Game, (707) 738-4134, or cwilcox@dfg.ca.gov

Old SF Interactive GeoPhoto Map

Check out Old SF, an interactive map of about 13,000 geocoded historical images of the city from The San Francisco Public Library's Historical Photograph Collection. Created by Dan Vanderkam and Raven Keller, the site includes photos as far back as 1850, whick you can select for via a sliding scale. 

AAG 2012 Wrap-up

NY skyline from Tim DeChant's blogAAG was a moderately large conference (just under 9,000) this year, held in mid-town NY. It was a brief trip for me, but I did go to some great talks across RS, GIScience, cartography, and VGI. I also went to a very productive OpenGeoSuite workshop hosted by OpenGeo. Some brief highights from the conference: Muki Hacklay discussed participation inequities in VGI: when you mine geoweb data, you are mining outliers, not society; there are biases in gender, education, age and enthusiasm. Agent-based modeling is still hot, and still improving. I saw some great talks in ABM for understanding land use change. Peter Deadman showed how new markets in a hot crop (like Acai) can transform a region quite quickly. Landsat 8 will likely be launched in early 2013, but further missions are less certain. My talk was in a historical ecology session, and Qinghua Guo and I highlighted some of the new modeled results of historic oak diversity in California using VTM data and Maxent.

Saturday evening I had the great pleasure of being locked in after hours at the NY Public Library for a session on historic maps. David Rumsey, with Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) and Petr Pridal (Moravian Library) led a presentation introducing a new website: oldmapsonline.org. The website's goal is to provide a clearer way to find old maps, and provide them with a stable digital reference. 

Finding old maps online: new resource now available

David Rumsey, with Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) and Petr Pridal (Moravian Library) led a presentation at AAG introducing a new website: oldmapsonline.org. The website's goal is to provide a clearer way to find old maps, and provide them with a stable digital reference. As David says: hundreds of thousands of historical maps have now been scanned and made available on-line by libraries around the world, and this has been a great boon to anyone interested in the history of cartography. However, those interested in the history of the places shown on maps have been less well served: just because a map is "on the web" does not mean we can find the relevant library web site, and even when we find the site the available catalogues are little help in finding maps covering particular places.  A further problem is that even when digitized historical maps have been made available via geo-spatially aware online systems, the resulting references,i.e. the Uniform Resource Locators for accessing the maps, are generally very technology-dependent and unlikely to work even a few years later. The Old Maps Online project provides a universal search portal for historic maps designed to complement rather than compete with libraries' own search interfaces, and also developing best practices for defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers for historic maps - URIs not URLs.

GIS and historical analysis: a good mix

In the new NYT artilce "Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land," Patricia Cohen discusses the new academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

“Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.”

Fun stuff!

London Mapping Festival: 18 months of all things maps + london. Sign me up.

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.