New SOD Confirmations Added to OakMapper!

New confirmed cases of Sudden Oak Death (SOD) (P. ramorum) have been added to OakMapper, a project that tracks the spread of Sudden Oak Death from data collected by citizens and organizations. All official SOD cases are collected and confirmed by the California Department of Food and Agriculture or the University of California. Community SOD cases are submitted by citizens via the OakMapper website and iPhone application. 415 new points collected between 2008 and 2011 have been added to OakMapper bringing the total number of confirmed SOD locations to 1570. The new data consists of laboratory confirmed cases collected by the annual SOD Blitz campaigns of 2008-2010 from the Forest Pathology and Mycology Lab run by Dr. Matteo Garbelotto and also data collected by the California Department of Food and Agriculture between 2008 and 2011.

Click on the images below to view close-ups of the new confirmed SOD data (in green) from the SOD Blitz and California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA).

New SOD Blitz 08-10 Data

New CDFA 08-11 Data

Explore the new data online here

OakMapper.org

Google Earth Builder announced, GIS in the cloud

Google has officially unveiled Google Earth Builder, a new product aiming to allow users to store and analyze spatial data in the cloud.  There are many details of the service yet to be revealed, but it will definitely be interesting to see where this is heading...

GovMaps.org Launches

This new website, GovMaps.org, offers yet another easy way to stream useful GIS data right into ArcGIS. NWI, historical fire data, zip codes, etc. are only a click away!

Open Street Map's further integration into commercial mapping products

MapQuest has recently announced the opening of a secondary beta open source mapping website based on the Open Street Maps engine where community members can post and edit map data that will then be integrated into Open Street Maps and MapQuest products. The announcement also indicates MapQuest may in the near future merge this beta open source map portal with their commercial map portal. The integration of community based map editing and open source data in commercial products has started to become a trend in the commercial mapping world. Other commercial map products such as Microsoft Bing and commercial mapping applications such as ESRI ArcGIS 10 base maps already offer Open Street Map as a product to view alongside their propriety map data. Community led commercial map editing is not entirely new as Google and other map services already allow account members to point out errors and make corrections. What is different in the case of MapQuest is the integration of open source data with commercial data. This continues to push the boundaries of community led mapping and the further proliferation of open source data products in the commercial and public spheres.

Read the full article here.

Open MapQuest Beta

Google Earth Engine Debuted at the International Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico

Google.org introduced a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts petabytes of satellite imagery and data from the past 25 years online, many of which have never been seen, much less analyzed. The platform will enable scientists around the world to use Google’s cloud computing infrastructure to implement their applications. For example, creating a detailed forest cover and water map of Mexico, a task that would have taken 3 years on one computer, was accomplished in less than a day.

Google Earth Engine can help scientists track and analyze changes in Earth’s environment  and can be used for a wide range of applications—from mapping and monitoring water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. The idea is to enable global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment by providing scientists a vast new amount of data and powerful computing resources.

Read more at Introducing Google Earth Engine or watch Google Earth Engine Overview videos.

walkscore & transitscore maps & methodologies

Following up on our lab discussion today about connectivity, here are the links for walkscore.com and the new transitscore site. Also, there is a walkscore wiki that details how the scores were calculated and rendered.

National Map of Food Deserts

I live in a Low Access Area! According to a new food desert webGIS, my neighobrhood around 58th & Shattuck doesn't have access to a full-service grocery store, has low car ownership, and low median household income. I have never considered my self to live in a food dessert because I go to Berkeley Bowl at least once a week on my bike ride home from campus, but according to these combined metrics I am more underserved by full-service food stores than most other neighborhoods. I think this is a really neat tool to start a broader conversation about how to measure and evaluate food access and what it means for individual and community health.

As Grist writes...."The point of the project isn't just to map food deserts, it's to help TRF and other investors, as well as policymakers, calculate how much money is "leaking" from an area (being spent elsewhere), so as to evaluate whether a loan for a new supermarket is a good idea -- financially, presumably. As Stephanie covered in her piece, food-justice advocates disagree on whether small, independently owned but somewhat limited food stores are the answer, or chain stores such as a Safeway or Walmart.

Alas, the tool does not include data for health care expenditures or obesity rates in these areas, which would be interesting comparisons to see."

Mapping Traffic’s Toll on Wildlife

Roadkill and participatory GIS (two of my favorite topics) make it mainstream! A recent article from the New York Times describes a project out of UC Davis using citizen observers to map roadkill.

"Volunteers comb the state’s highways and country roads for dead animals, collecting GPS coordinates, photographs and species information and uploading it to a database and Google map populated with dots representing the kills. The site’s gruesome gallery includes photos of flattened squirrels or squashed skunks."

The project website can be found here: http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/california/

Read the NY times article here.

ArcGIS.com online mapping now available

ESRI has just launched a public beta version of their online mapping service on arcgis.com. 

At the ArcGIS.com site, you can browse featured ArcGIS Online content such as maps and applications published by ESRI and the ArcGIS community, and add comments and ratings. You can upload and share your own items, either with specific groups that you created or are a member of, or you can share your items publicly. Use the newly designed Web Mapping application to quickly create online mashups that you can also share with others.

The design and interface is nicely done, and includes easy access to many of ESRI's online basemaps.  This site launch coencides with a greatly updated version of ArcGIS Explorer which provides a much improved free GIS viewer, tightly integrated with ArcGIS desktop layers and outputs.

Google Map of Red Shirt Conflict in Bangkok

This upto-date Google map of red shirt conflict in Bangkok gives an interesting spatial perspective on the events taking place. Travelling here, it's also a helpful navigation tool to get around the city. I write this from an apartment marked by the red teardrop just to the right of the action.

Link to Google Map Here