New 2011 SOD Confirmations Added to OakMapper!

New SOD Blitz 2011 Data

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. 621 new points collected in 2011 have been added to OakMapper bringing the total number of confirmed SOD locations to 2191. The new data consists of laboratory confirmed cases collected by the annual SOD Blitz campaign of 2011 from the Forest Pathology and Mycology Lab run by Dr. Matteo Garbelotto. 

Click on the image below to view a close-up of the new confirmed SOD data (in green) from the SOD Blitz 2011. 

Explore the new data online here.

OakMapper.org

New IDRISI Selva GIS and Image Processing Software Released

From Clark Labs:Image used with permission from Clark Labs

Clark Labs recently released its newest version of its geospatial and image processing software IDRISI called IDRISI Selva. IDRISI Selva is the 17th version of IDRISI which offers brand new features and significant updates to its predecessor IDRISI Taiga. IDRISI offers a suite of tools for basic and advanced spatial analysis, surface and statistical analysis, change and time series analysis, modeling, and decision support and uncertainty. IDRISI also offers a diversity of image processing tools including a variety of hard and soft classifiers, machine learning algorithms, and image segmentation tools. This latest version adds new tools to the Earth Trends Modeler application for the analysis of patterns and trends in earth observation image time series and new REDD-specific tools to the Land Change Modeler application for the modeling, prediction and impact assessment of land cover change. New analytical techniques and greater import/export support have been added, display and map composition elements have been enhanced and expanded and existing modules have been optimized.

More specifically some changes include:

• Land Change Modeler has been enhanced and new modeling tools have been added such as SimWeight and tools to support modeling and accounting for REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects. An integrated interface to the Maxent software for species distribution modeling has also been added.
• Earth Trends Modeler has been enhanced with new tools for the analysis of coupled systems such as the oceans and atmosphere. These include Extended PCA/EOF, Multi-channel Singular Spectrum Analysis, Extended EOT, Multichannel EOT and Canonical Correlation Analysis.
• New tools have been added such as Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network classifier, Chain Clustering, and Durbin-Watson modules.
• Existing tools such as the distance based modules have been optimized for greater speed and the PCA module has been expanded. In addition, MODIS and Google KML file import and export support has been enhanced.
• New support for image pyramids and large images up to 2 billion rows by 2 billion columns have been added.

For more on IDRISI Selva and specifics on what is new visit their website here or see the resources below:

IDRISI Selva news release 

IDRISI Selva brochure

IDRISI Selva what’s new brochure

Clark Labs is based within the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, MA. The information and images presented are used with permission from Clark Labs.

IDRISI Land Change Modeler (Image used with permission from Clark Labs)IDRISI Earth Trends Modeler (Image used with permission from Clark Labs)

Landsat continues...

Tentatively excited: the Landsat mission will continue (I think). Its new name will be LDCM: Landsat Data Continuity Mission. Tentative launch date in 2013. More information here. The President's recent budget seemed to inlude continued funding for Earth Observation. The news post I read says: Among the other highlights in the White House summary, spending on Earth observation satellites would be maintained at nearly $1.8 billion next year.

Happy Valentine's Day People!

Here is the famous mangrove heart from Yann Arthhus-Bertrand's Earth From Above project. Which now lets you download imagery for free. And if you need more, here is a collection of random (and mostly vegetated) hearts from above.

Farm surveillance for subsidy checking: the case in Europe

Europe's farmers receive payments for maintaining basic standards on the environment, food safety, plant health and animal welfare. In this BBC article "spying on Europe’s farms with satellites and drones" Lawrence Peter discusses the use of UAVs in conjunction with satellite imagery to validate and verify farmers' subsidies without having to send inspectors in person. They are not used everywhere: Austria does not use them, on the grounds that the shadows cast by very mountainous terrain sometimes make satellite images inaccurate. And Scotland, unlike the rest of the UK, decided against satellites because of the difficulty of getting enough clear weather for flyovers.

Notes: 

• Agriculture accounted for 42% of the EU's budget in 2011 - about three-quarters of that went on direct payments to farmers, totalling 44bn euros (£37bn; $58bn)
• In each EU country, at least 5% of farms must be inspected every year - and many check more than 5%
• Satellites carried out about 70% of all inspections in 2010
• Growth of satellite monitoring has cut number of infringements
• EU officials say fraud accounts for only a small fraction of the irregularities - in most cases farmers overclaim because of a miscalculation

New blue marble: history of its development on video

Recently, NASA released a new Blue Marble graphic, from sensors aboard TERRA. The Talk of the Nation Science Friday video of the week tells the story of these NASA's Blue Marble maps.  From the Apollo 8 crew's image from 1968, to the Apollo 17 mission of 1972, through the Voyager image, through modern remote sensing techniques, to 2002's original Blue Marble image (now used as the default background on the iphone), to this new release. They highlight the work of Rob Simmon and Gene Feldman, who discuss the composition of the product, highlighting the art that goes into the scientific product. Very cool! More discussion here.

Make way for the bay! SF Baylands under climate change

From last year's State of the Estuary Conference. Josh Collins from the San Francisco Estuary in his talk "State of the Bay 2011: Baylands" makes an optimistic case for future baylands/wetlands in the bay, as long as we "make way for the bay": meaning, wetlands need to be able to move inland and upstream as sea level rises. He also talks about changes in size classes in marshes across the bay from the 1800s through 2010. We talk about this need for space for wetlands to move in our paper, published last year.

The structure of a city via Twitter

From Mashable Tech.

Check out this gorgeous visualization of NY City's tweetopolis from Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer.

He plots out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

Similar viz of the east bay“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

This might be of use for our mobility project with our space.

More here.

That was fast! Supreme Court rules on GPS & privacy

From the NYTimes today. The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision “is a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.” “Law enforcement is now on notice,” he said, “that almost any use of G.P.S. electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

Previous wrap-up post on the case.

troubling report of OSM vandalism

From Sarah. This is a troubling story from ReadWriteWeb reporting that someone at a range of Google IP addresses in India has been editing the collaboratively made map of the world in some very unhelpful ways, like moving and deleting information and reversing the direction of one-way streets on the map.

Update: Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday morning. "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects."

A Google spokesperson told BoingBoing on Friday that the company was "mortified" by the discovery - but now it appears the same Google contractor may be behind mayhem rippling throughout one of the world's biggest maps. Google says it's investigating these latest allegations.