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.

Location, location, location

Two interesting articles from Wired via the Map Room.

1. Wired magazine's tips on getting better GPS reception.
2. Clive Thompson's article Future of the Web: Location, Location, Location asks: How is the return of geography (via location-aware cell phones et al) going to change our lives?

iPhone apps for environmental science

Having just set up a HOBO weather station over the weekend (ain't she pretty?), and being dismayed at having to use my windows computer to control it, I wondered about other ways to monitor the environment.  Amazingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there are many new iPhone apps out there for us to investigate. 

For example: the recent NPR study about soil moisture monitoring via the iPhone is interesting. The sensors themselves are very expensive, but are monitored via an iPhone app.

Also: this new Wind Meter app, which I am going to test at lunch today. Seems fun, but a far cry from a real anemometer.

And of course: we will soon be releasing our OakMapper iPhone app.

Anglo-television-carto-philes rejoice!

From Meg Pickard's photostream (which shows pictures of her needlepoint maps): a map showing the locations of UK's TV shows.

Ghost Maps

There are over 35 million geotagged, time-stamped photos on flickr now. That's enough to start doing some pretty interesting analyses, including this one from Crandall, et al., at Cornell (presented at the WWW 2009 conference, "Mapping the World's Photos" [PDF]).  Not only is it possible to map hot spots of world tourism, but by incorporating the time stamps to map the routes people are taking, you can make out individual streets. As suggested by the Information Aesthetics blog, you could even design popular walking tours.

Once GPS-enabled cameras represent a larger share of the market, flickr may provide data for all sorts of important analyses: tracking SOD, the migration of an endangered song bird, or estimating the "desolation" of a place: the world heat map that the Cornell group presents looks shockingly like the lights at night. The machine... it's ALIVE!!!

iPhone SDK 3.0 Previewed

Among all the cool things that you can do with the new iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) and OS 3.0, I am particularly excited about the release of the Google Map API in the SDK. This will help with webGIS mobile development on iPhone. Check out other features at the iPhone development site. I can't wait to work with the Map Kit framework. I hope it will provide the ability to create markers.

I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

Matthew Honan's I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle article in the Wired Magazine details his experiment with geo applications on his location-equipped mobile devices (iPhone and Android):

I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible.

From this experience, he highlights some of the social and security issues that confronts a person who is very "geo-online." The article has references to various geo-applications for the web and mobile devices. It's a good reference article in the proliferation of geo-applications.

Georeferenced historic photos in Yosemite

I saw this guy present his project about revisiting sites of historic  photography in Yosemite (1980's and 1910's,1920's).  Obviously, it reminded me of our own VTM project.

OakMapper 2.0 released

Hi y'all. The new OakMapper 2.0 is up and running, and we'd like your help in mapping areas of oak mortality around the state. Version 2.0 improves upon the website's prior version with increased functionality and additional tools within an easily navigated interface.  Launched by the UC Berkeley Kelly lab in October, OakMapper 2.0 makes it easier for users to explore data, download maps, look at images of oak mortality, and submit suspected locations of oak mortality that may be associated with SOD.  The new interface utilizes the familiar background layers and navigation tools from Google Maps.  Users are able to draw points and polygons directly on the map as well as attach photos to specific points.  The Kelly lab encourages the public to use this site to map suspected cases of SOD and to track their submission by signing up for an account with OakMapper.  Registered users of the site can update their information and make comments on other users' points.  Official confirmations of P. ramorum are clearly separated from community-submitted points and either set of points can be filtered out.The new OakMapper is found at oakmapper.org.  Please consider signing up to be an OakMapper user! The OakMapper was recently featured in the recent journal of the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association

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Source of Sudden Oak Death?

We found it? Featured in SF Chronicle, this article describes Garbelotto's recent pub. Front page.