CPAD 1.4 drops today! California Protected Areas Database

From GreenInfo Network.  The new California Protected Areas Database (CPAD 1.4) has just been released in geodatabase and shape file formats.  Please visit www.calands.org to download.  Updates and improvements to CPAD are described in the CPAD Manual also available on the CALands web site.

WHAT'S NEW IN CPAD 1.4:  CPAD 1.4 contains a number of important data improvements - more coverage of urban parks, more complete alignment to parcels, broader implementation of management designations, and more.

VIEW CPAD DATA ONLINE, REPORT ISSUES:  For those who do not use GIS or prefer to view CPAD via the web, you can do so though a google map overlay at http://www.calands.org/review.php.  We welcome input from the CPAD user community to keep us informed about errors and updates in CPAD.  Please report errors by clicking on the "Report Error" button.

GET NOTIFIED WHEN CPAD IS UPDATED: We encourage you to receive CPAD updates.  You can do this by clicking on the "Receive Update Notification" link on the calands.org homepage.  We will not distribute any of your information or use your email outside of the CPAD mailing list.  Registering helps us better serve the CPAD user community.

Mapping the arctic tern's amazing pole-to-pole flight

After setting out (yellow line) the birds pause in the North Atlantic (red circle) to feed. Going home (orange line), they follow the winds.We still might not know the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow, but now we know the daily flight distance (up to 500km!) of the tiny arctic tern. Reported in the BBC.

Starting in August and September, the small (3.5oz) bird will head from Greenland and fly to the Weddell Sea, on the shores of Antarctica. It will spend about four or five months in the deep south before heading back to the far north, arriving home in May or June.

A team from Greenland, Denmark, the US, the UK and Iceland attached small (0.05oz) geolocating archival light loggers to the birds' legs to find out exactly where they went on this polar round trip. The devices do not rely on satellite navigation, but record light intensity.  This gives an estimate of the local day length, and the times of sunrise and sunset; and from this information it is possible to work out a geographical position of the birds. They banded 50 birds in July 2007 in Greenland, and one year later collected the devices from 10 birds (more birds with loggers were seen in the colony, but these could not be recaptured). More on these cool devices here.  More info on these amazing birds here.

A year in the life of the world's precipitation: video

John Chiang gave the geolunch last week, and discussed the possible changes to tropical rainfall in the future. Tropical precipitation is controlled much differently than precipitation at the mid-latitudes.  To illustrate this, at the begining of his talk he showed us this video from UCAR/NCAR visualization team, which is a simluation for one year from the CommunitA snap from the video showing a Pacific storm about to drench Cali.y Climate System Model (CCSM), a coupled climate model for simulating Earth's climate system using the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), the latest in a series of global atmosphere models developed at NCAR for the weather and climate research communities. Watch storms develop in the mid-latitudes as clear easterly moving systems; in the tropics you have daily convective action governing precipitation. 

Mapping wetlands: the GlobWetland project

A bit late, but a good source of wetland mapping information from the the GlobWetland Symposium: Looking Lake Bogoria in Kenya, Landsatat wetlands from space.  The GlobWetland project was launched in 2003 with the aim of developing and demonstrating earth observation-based information services to support wetland managers and national authorities worldwide in responding to the requirements agreed under the Convention. The project involved 50 different wetlands in 21 countries and relied on the direct collaboration of several regional, national and local conservation authorities and wetland managers. It has now produced a number of standardised information products (e.g. land use and land cover maps, change-detection maps, water cycle regime maps and others) validated over the 50 selected sites by the users themselves, consolidated methods and guidelines for the users to continue the work after the project lifetime.

The GlobWetland Symposium was held in October 2006 in Frascati, Italy to inform the general public and policy makers of the importance of wetlands and to promote their conservation and protection worldwide. The papers in this special issue highlight the major points and recommendations derived from the Symposium while the final conclusions provide a basis for initiating new actions within the ESA in support of the EO requirements of the Ramsar Convention and the wetlands community.

The special issue in Journal of Environmental Management from the conference has many interesting papers on wetlands mapping.

Vast shifts in bird species expected as CA warms: Diana's article

From SF Gate: Because of climate changes in the next few decades, the changes in bird habitats and behavior between now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that normally occur over tens of thousands of years, according to researchers with PRBO, also known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.

"What we found is that not only will species shift and communities change, but the composition of communities in certain places will not resemble anything we see today," said Diana Stralberg, a landscape ecologist and the lead author of the report, "Reshuffling of Species With Climate Disruption: A No-Analog Future for California Birds?" published in PLOS.

From the abstract: By facilitating independent shifts in species’ distributions, climate disruption may result in the rapid development of novel species assemblages that challenge the capacity of species to co-exist and adapt. ...Projections of future no-analog communities based on two climate models and two species-distribution-model algorithms indicate that by 2070 over half of California could be occupied by novel assemblages of bird species, implying the potential for dramatic community reshuffling and altered patterns of species interactions. ...Efforts to conserve and manage biodiversity could be substantially improved by considering not just future changes in the distribution of individual species, but including the potential for unprecedented changes in community composition and unanticipated consequences of novel species assemblages.

New Interface for the Manhatta Project. Check it.

We talked about this before here; and the Manhatta project has a nice new interface for exploring the 1609 map of the island of Manhatta(n), block by block, through time.  I love this project! The combination of mashup, history, design and art are breathtaking.  (And our own Tim Bean worked on reconstructing the early topography! - see his comment below.) Go Fullscreen on your 30"-monitor. I dare you.

“The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future…. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

- from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Get those roofs fixed: El Nino is coming!

From NASA Image of the Day: In July 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center reported that ocean temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific had shifted into El Niño—anomalously warm—conditions. El Niño conditions are evident in this sea surface temperature anomaly image based on data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on July 26. THe current data are compared to long-term average temperatures (1985-1997) measured by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers that have flown on several NOAA missions.

In this map, places where temperatures were near normal are cream-colored, places where temperatures were warmer than normal are red, and places where temperatures were cooler than normal are blue. An area of dark red occupies the eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecaudor (north of Peru), indicating temperatures were much warmer than average. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, ocean temperatures around Indonesia were slightly cooler (light blue) than usual.

Indigenous mapping network at UC Berkeley

Our friends from DataBasin are on campus on Monday. Kai Henifin is a Cultural Ecologist/GIS Analyst with the non-profit organization Conservation Biology Institute, the developers of DataBasin. Kai will be speaking about "Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge to Improve Conservation through Data Sharing" as part of the Berkeley Indigenous Mapping Network. For more info on the event.

We have some interesting cross-overs with CBI and DataBasin: we added our SOD data to DataBasin recently (see image at left); and CBI have a nice modeling project looking at fisher in the southern Sierra that Reg and Rick are using in their SNAMP work.

Interesting sources of data for science: commerce and construction for ecological trend analysis

In the early 1800s, Canadian fur traders began to notice dramatic fluctuations in snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) and Canadian lynx populations (Lynx canadensis). Almost 100 years later, ecological researchers were able to use pelt sale data generated by the Hudson’s Bay Company to document an interrelated rise and fall in hare and lynx populations. Today, we understand even more about this classic and frequently cited example of predator–prey cycles, and have identified large-scale factors, including climate, as playing an important role in regulating these populations and their interactions. But it was the novel use of commercial records that got scientists started on their work. This piece excerpted from our article on webGIS.

Now, in the same spirit, comes this article in PERS recently, and it prompted me to start collecting studies on interesting and non-traditional sources of data for hinting at or validating ecological trends. Download Full Article (members only)

The article: Wal-Mart from Space: A New Source for Land Cover Change Validation by Potere et al. The authors use the location and opening dates for 3,043 Wal-Mart stores as a means for validating land-cover change-related products at medium (28.5 m) to coarse (250 m to 1 km) resolutions throughout the conterminous United States. Since Wal-Marts are large, nearly everywhere, and have been built throughout the remote sensing record (1962 to 2004), they prove to be good data set for examining land cover change. A very interesting and creative approach.

Update on Friday, July 24, 2009 at 8:39AM by Maggi

Add to this list: espionage. Last week, thanks to the U.S. intelligence community, researchers saw pictures that will allow them to model the breakup of sea ice at a level of detail they never imagined. Science article.

Science Editor-in-Chief

I know this is late: blame my routine end-of-semester office paper clean-up (late again). This comes from last year, when Bruce Alberts took over Science. He says in his first editorial: New science will be needed on our crowded planet to protect our environment, to insure our health, and to provide sufficient water and food for humanity.  I think that is true, and sounds a lot like the CNR's mission statement.