geospatial matters
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Monday, April 2, 2012 at 2:21PM Are you on the hunt for Bay Area or statewide GIS data?
Are you looking for water quality, habitat, or landscape condition data?
Are you interested in the extent of LiDAR available for the Region?
Then you need GeoFetch--the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s online repository of spatial data. Check it out!
Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 3:12PM Two interesting natural phenomena spatial animations were recently released. The first is from NASA which visualizes ocean surface currents around the world from 2005 to 2007. The animations were generated from data modeled using NASA’s Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II also known as ECCO2. For more information click here. See the video below:
The second is from HINT.FM which visualizes near real time wind movement patterns in the US using data from the National Digital Forecast Database. To see the animation click here. Here is a static screenshot from their website:
HINT.FM Wind Map
Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 9:22AM 
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.
Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 3:35PM 
ASPRS 2012, held in Sacramento California, had about 1,100 participants. I am back to being bullish about our organization, as I now recognize that ASPRS is the only place in geospatial sciences where members of government, industry, and academia can meet, discuss, and network in a meaningful way. I saw a number of great talks, met with some energetic and informative industry reps, and got to catch up with old friends. Some highlights: Wednesday's Keynote speaker was David Thau from Google Earth Engine whose talk "Terapixels for Everyone" was designed to showcase the ways in which the public's awareness of imagery, and their ability to interact with geospatial data, are increasing. He calls this phenomena (and GEE plays a big role here): "geo-literacy for all", and discussed new technologies for data/imagery acquisition, processing, and dissemination to a broad public(s) that can include policy makers, land managers, and scientists. USGS's Ken Hudnut was Thursday's Keynote, and he had a sobering message about California earthquakes, and the need (and use) of geospatial intelligence in disaster preparedness.
Berkeley was well represented: Kevin and Brian from the GIF gave a great workshop on open source web, Kevin presented new developments in cal-adapt, Lisa and Iryna presented chapters from their respective dissertations, both relating to wetlands, and our SNAMP lidar session with Sam, Marek, and Feng (with Wenkai and Jacob from UCMerced) was just great!
So, what is in the future for remote sensing/geospatial analysis as told at ASPRS 2012? Here are some highlights:
Friday, March 16, 2012 at 7:45AM 
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.
Maggi | in Landsat, cartography, conferences, cool old maps, land use, remote sensing, vtm, webgis | Share Article Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 4:32PM 
This new interactive website SurgingSeas, a project of Climate Central, lets you see the combined coastal flood threat from sea level rise and storm surge, town by town and city by city from coast to coast. Type in your Zip code or the name of your community, choose a water level anywhere from 1 to 10 feet above the current high-tide line, and you can see what areas might be at risk of flooding from water that high. You can also go to any one of 55 tide gauges we studied around the country, and see the odds we’ve calculated for how soon flood waters may reach different elevations as the sea continues to rise. There are gauges close to most major coastal cities. If you want to embed the map in your own blog or website, there’s a widget for that, and you can make any view your default — not just the national one. - Michael D. Lemonick
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 at 3:08PM NASA recently released a time-lapse video of false-color Landsat imagery from 1972-2010 for Las Vegas showing the city’s sprawling growth. For more on the video and data click here.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 12:40PM Great news!! The Minor in Geospatial Information Science and Technology has been approved in 2 departments at UC Berkeley! Environmental Science, Policy and Management (in the College of Natural Resources), and the Department of City and Regional Planning in the College of Environmental Design now have Minors in Geospatial Information Science and Technology and includes courses across campus. These programs would serve students in geography and other social sciences, archeology, environmental science, policy and management, city and regional planning, humanities, architecture, landscape architecture and environmental planning, civil and environmental engineering, public policy, and environmental public health. The Minor will help prepare graduates for a workplace in public and private sectors with increasing need for geospatial expertise. In 2010, the Dept. of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA) tagged Geospatial Technologies as a "High Growth Industry". The Minor is open to all majors at UC Berkeley.
Please see GIS@Berkeley for more info.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 9:47AM OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive. The lightening overview introduces all these applications, and hence provides a comprehensive introduction to the breadth of Geospatial Open Source.
http://live.osgeo.org
Highlights
50 Quality Geospatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured
Quality free world maps and geodata
One page overviews and quick start guides for all applications
Overviews of key OGC standards
Translations for Greek, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese
Contents
Browser Clients
Crisis Management
Databases
Desktop GIS
Navigation and Maps
Spatial Tools
Web Services
Data
Geospatial Libraries
Other software of interest (not available Live)
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 9:33AM 
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.