UC ANR group wins extension award

Several UC Cooperative Extension and UC scientists have been awarded the Western Extension Directors Association Award of Excellence for work to address the outbreak of sudden oak death in California. Led by Yana Valachovic, the group developed extension programming that achieved outstanding accomplishments, results and impacts in addressing this important issue. We were recognized for: 

• understanding the issue and situation; 
• working with stakeholders;
• having a research base and an extension focus;
• evidencing multidisciplinary and collaborative components;
• incorporating innovative approaches;
• achieving impacts; and
• developing scholarly products. 

The people involved in the group award are: Yana Valachovic, Steve Swain, Matteo Garbelotto, Janice Alexander, Lisa Bell, Bendan Twieg, Dave Rizzo, Steve Tjosvold, David Lewis, Doug McCreary, Katie Palmieri, Kerri Frangioso, Jim MacDonald, Ellie Rilla, Maggi Kelly, Rick Standiford, Chris Lee, Doug Schmidt, Brice McPherson, and Richard Dodd. 

California Water Use Map

In response to Gov. Jerry Brown's announcement yesterday, calling all California residents to reduce water use by 25%, the folks at the New York Times put togther a nice interactive map. The map shows residential water use in California in gallons per day.

Take a look here!

New GIF Director: Nancy Thomas

The GIF welcomes our new Executive Director Nancy Thomas, who joins us Monday November 10th. Nancy comes to us from the Spatial Analysis Center at Stanford. She has over 18 years of experience in managing successful remote sensing and GIS projects in both consulting and academic arenas. She was a early employee of Pacific  Meridian, one of the first remote sensing companies on the west coast. She has extensive experience in the development and analysis of geospatial data to map, monitor, and model land use and land cover for a variety of domestic and international natural resource management applications. She's given numerous presentations and workshops on geospatial technologies, and has facilitated numerous successful collaborations and training of geospatial research methods.

Please stop by the GIF and welcome her to the Berkeley community!

Important proposed legislation limiting UAVs: consider reading this and commenting

AB1327 is a bill that could potentially impact the work that we do in regards to remote sensing and aerial imagery collection, etc… in the near future. See the link below for more detail. The office of the California CIO, Scott Gregory, is in the process of providing the Legislature a summary analysis of the bill. In our analysis we want to highlight civilian use (non-public safety governmental) cases for UAV technology as a rebuttal to some of the limiting language in the bill.

The bill would generally prohibit public agencies from using unmanned aircraft systems, or contracting for the use of unmanned aircraft systems, as defined, with certain exceptions applicable to law enforcement agencies and in certain other cases. The bill would require reasonable public notice to be provided by public agencies intending to deploy unmanned aircraft systems, as specified. The bill would require images, footage, or data obtained through the use of an unmanned aircraft system under these provisions to be permanently destroyed within 6 months, except as specified.

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1327
 
If this bill will affect your organization’s future data collection needs, please provide them a brief summary to be incorporated into the analysis.

Here is what I have sent to Scott Gregory:

Maggi Kelly

Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management

UC Berkeley

The use of civilian accessed UAV technology is commonly used for research purposes to aquire imagery at critical times over inaccessible field sites such as wetlands and forests, or over agricultural fields throught the growing season. This remote data acquisition using UAVs has several advantages: 1) it limits damage of the site, 2) it allows for mutliple returns in a cost-effective way, and 3) it allows for important very high resolution imagery to be collected. Here is a paper where we perfected techniques to find weeds in an agricultural field using UAV imagery. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077151

Basically, they are looking for the organization name, use case and description of that use case. Please circulate to the user community within your respective organizations to solicit feedback. Please email or call if you have any questions. He would like to have these complied by 10am Friday (3/14/14).

Email: Scott Gregory Scott.Gregory@state.ca.gov

Thanks for your help.

Cal Forestry turns 100 this year!

Forestry education at UC Berkeley began in 1914 with the “Division of Forestry” in the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Forestry was established in 1939 and the School of Forestry in 1946. Forest Summer Camp, the hallmark of the undergraduate program, began at Quincy, California, in 1915 and moved to Meadow Valley in 1917.

Today, alumni of Cal’s forestry program hold critical positions for the management of 95% of the industrial forestlands in California. The research of our alumni and faculty has grown knowledge in the areas of fire, remote sensing and GIS, ecology, climate change, forest economics, the social sciences, and numerous others.

Over the past 100 years, the Cal Forestry program has had an impact on every dimension of the field, and has produced the profession’s most influential thinkers and doers.

For more information, please see: http://nature.berkeley.edu/forestry100/about-us

Graduate Certificate in GIS approved for UC Berkeley

 Great news! 

The UC Berkeley Graduate 
Certificate 
in
 Geographic 
Information 
Science 
and
 Technology
 (GIST)
 has been approved. This certificate will provide
 an 
academic
 structure 
for 
an 
interdisciplinary 
exchange 
of
 ideas 
around
 geospatial
 information 
and 
analysis. 

 Certificate
 students 
will
 not 
only
 participate 
in
 a 
cutting‐edge 
program 
and
 receive
 explicit
 recognition
 of 
specialization 
in
 GIST
 by 
virtue 
of
 the
 Graduate
 Certificate 
but
 will 
be
 well
 positioned
 to
compete
 for 
the
 most
 desirable 
jobs 
in 
geospatial
 technology,
 both 
in
 academia
 and 
in 
industry.

Requirements include at
 least 
three 
courses, 
or 
a
 total
 of
 90 
hours
 of
 instruction, 
and
 earn 
a
 minimum 
grade
 of
, and participate in a GIST Roundtable (such as the geolunch series from the GIF). More details to be posted in the spring at GIS@Berkeley.edu.

Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity

From the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/us/study-finds-early-signs-of-creativity-in-adults.html

A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.

Go GIS!

Hey OakMappers! Updated OakMapper available for iPhones and iPads

The new OakMapper logo

We are excited to announce the new version (2.3) of the OakMapper iPhone/iPad App, available to download now for free at the iTunes App Store [link].

In this version of the OakMapper App, the original browse and search functionalities have been retooled to improve the user interface design and user interaction. A new user can sign up for a new OakMapper account directly using the App. Users who has logged into their account can manage their profile, change their password, and submit a SOD point. The submission process has been re-engineered to achieve a better and more intuitive submission workflow. Users can also take a picture of a suspected SOD infected tree and upload it right from their iOS devices.

To explore all the new features of the OakMapper iPhone/iPad App, please install OakMapper from the iTunes App Store [link] now. Please feel free to share this App with your friends. If you like the OakMapper app, please rate the app and leave your comments in the App store. If you should have any questions, please email us at oakmapper@gmail.com.

Enjoy!

OakMapper
Shufei Lei, Web/Mobile App Developer
Maggi Kelly, Principal Investigator
www.oakmapper.org

BAAMA Summer Happy Hour - July 17 2013 - Free!

BAAMA Summer Happy Hour!!!

Free for everyone!

Who: Bay Area GEOSPATIAL Community

All are welcome! If you are OR are not a BAAMA member, love our group, or have never been to an event but want to check out our organization, this is a great gathering for you.  Come and hang out with your fellow spatial sleuths and map lovers.

What:

• Hot dogs, and potato and cole slaw (supplied by Bay Area-vendor Top Dog)
• A large keg of beer and other non-alc beverages (we won't run out this time)
• Cookies
• The outdoors (maybe a little late-afternoon sun)
• Hang out with people you only read about on LinkedIn and Twitter…..
• Offer up your great ideas in the BAAMA Board

When: Wednesday July 17, 2012

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Hot dogs served from 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Where: UC Berkeley, Courtyard behind Mulford Hall

37.87315 -122.26471

map of global routes of ship-borne invasive species

From the BBC. Scientists have developed the first global model that analyses the routes taken by marine invasive species. The researchers examined the movements of cargo ships around the world to identify the hot spots where these aquatic aliens might thrive. The research is published in the Journal Ecology Letters.

Scientists mapped the global routes taken by cargo ships over a two-year period

Marine species are taken in with ballast water on freighters and wreak havoc in new locations, driving natives to extinction.

There has been a well-documented boom in global shipping over the past 20 years and this has led to growing numbers of species moving via ballast tanks, or by clinging to hulls.

Some ports such as San Francisco and Chesapeake Bay have reported several exotic new species arriving every year. Economic estimates indicate that marine invaders can have huge impacts that last for decades.

Now, scientists from the UK and Germany have developed a model that might help curb these unwanted visitors. They obtained detailed logs from nearly three million voyages that took place in 2007 and 2008. The model combines information such as shipping routes, ship sizes, temperatures and biogeography to come up with local forecasts of invasion probabilities.