Weed Day 2011 comes to UC Davis July 14

Weed Day 2011 comes to UC Davis July 14

The latest developments in weed control will take center stage at UC Davis once again when scores of scientists, students, regulators and more gather July 14 for the 55^th annual Weed Day. 

“We look forward to another great turnout with a wide range of weed-control demonstrations,” said Cooperative Extension Specialist Brad Hanson from the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, who is chairing this year’s popular event. “Weed Day provides a great opportunity to see, first hand, weed research being conducted on campus and to find out what we are doing throughout the state.”

Among the presentations will be weed control in fresh-market tomato, residual herbicides in almonds and walnut orchards, symptomology of herbicide drift in row crops, thermal soil disinfestation research, weed-risk assessment for the horticulture industry and many more ongoing projects with other crops and non-crops. For a full agenda, click here or visit http://wric.ucdavis.edu.

Weed Day is held each July to give pest control advisors, farm advisors, chemical company cooperators, college faculty, students and regulatory officials the opportunity to learn more about current weed science research at UC Davis. The event begins at 7:30 a.m. with registration and a morning bus tour to the campus research fields to view demonstrations and research in terrestrial and aquatic weed control. Lunch and afternoon presentations will be held indoors and will wrap up by 4:30 p.m. Continuing education credits have been requested from the Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Cost is $65 for those who register and pay before July 6 and $90 for those register after that date. The cost for students with ID is $20. Class size is limited so early enrollment is always a good idea.

Registration is open:

On-line registration (credit card only)
On-line registration (UC recharge number only)
Print registration form to fax or mail.

For more details, see Weed Day 2011.

ESRI's ChangeMatters and New Landsat Image Services

Yesterday at the annual ASPRS conference in Milwaukee, WI (yes there were sausages shaped like the state), Jack Dangermond announced the release of ChangeMatters, and new Landsat Image Services from ESRI.

ChangeMatters. Working with partners, ESRI developed this web application - ChangeMatters - which allows users throughout the globe to quickly view the GLS Landsat imagery both multi-spectrally (in different Landsat band combinations) and multi-temporally (across epochs), and to conduct simple change detection analysis.

Image Services, with examples of vegetation, false color, land-water band combinations in seamless, color matched Landsat mosaics. Downloads will be available soon. Pretty nice. Website.

Example from ChangeMatters: Las Vegas from 1975 - 2000. Green is increase and red decrease in veg

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

Growth in geospatial jobs & need for training

The market for geospatial technologies is growing at about 35% a year, studies suggest, and the geospatial industry as a whole is expected to add at least 330,000 jobs between 2008 and 2018, claims recent article in Directions Magazine.

Summary: In this article, Becky Shumate, GISP, discusses the definition of the GIS profession, as well as its potential growth. She cites the Geospatial Workforce Development Center's work, as well as the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration's recently concluded study of the field's potential growth.

Of note: the Dept. of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA) tagged Geospatial Technologies as a "High Growth Industry" in March of 2010. They estimated that the geospatial technology profession will experience a growth of over 330,000 geospatial professionals between 2008 and 2018. This growth figure would bring the number of geospatial professionals to just under 1.2 million and is supported by similar estimates by other geospatial organizations. As quoted by the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA), "uses for geospatial technology are so widespread and diverse, the market is growing at an annual rate of almost 35 percent, with the commercial subsection of the market expanding at the rate of 100 percent each year. "

Here is the report: http://www.careeronestop.org/competencymodel/pyramid.aspx?GEO=Y

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...

New BAAMA Journal Published

Volume 5, Issue 1 - Spring 2011

BAAMA is pleased to announce The BAAMA Journal has been published in conjunction with Earth Day.  Special thanks to all our contributing authors and editors.  The BAAMA Journal is a publication that highlights Bay Area people and projects that use geospatial technologies.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Building Virtual San Francisco: Growing Up With GIS
• DPW Uses LiDAR and a Custom Algorithm for Delineating Drainage Catchments and Hydrologic Modeling
• Preparing Historical Aerial Imagery of Southern California Deserts for use in LADWP's GIS
• Where in the Bay Area

London Mapping Festival: 18 months of all things maps + london. Sign me up.

The London Mapping Festival 2011 – 2012, or LMF for short, is an exciting and unique initiative being launched in June 2011 and will run through to December 2012. It sets out to promote greater awareness and understanding of how maps and digital geographic data are being created and used within the Capital.   Through a diverse range of activities LMF will engage with a wide audience of mapping enthusiasts whether they are professionals, enthusiasts or others. We should do something like this for the SF Bay Area. More here.

A personal note: "Berkeley class recalls integration 41 years later"

The only tenuous connection to mapping in this story is that it was in Mrs. Room's class I first fell in love with maps. She had us do an elaborate field mapping project in the school's gardens with hula hoops and such, in kindergarten. One day I will find the result and scan it.

This article from SF Chronicle is about our recent reunion at John Muir School in Berkeley.

Forty-one years ago, in the early days of forced integration, a small group of Berkeley schoolchildren were placed in an experimental class and held together from kindergarten through third grade with the same teacher. On Sunday, they came back to see each other again - and to reminisce about what they saw as an idyllic time. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/10/BAP91ITSUD.DTL#ixzz1JFTvtD7e

New SNAMP spatial newsletter on lidar posted

This is an exerpt from our recent SNAMP newsletter on our lidar work, written by me, Sam, and Qinghua.

We are using Lidar data to map forests before and after vegetation treatments and measuring forest habitat characteristics across our treatment and control sites. These data will give us detailed information about how forest habitat was affected by fuel management treatments.

Visualizing the forest
The image at left is not a photograph: it is a computer generated image of our SNAMP study area, using only Lidar data. These kinds of visualizations are commonly used in the forestry field for stand and landscape management, and to predict environments into the future.  But visualization software packages usually only focus on one stand at a time. Our method allows us to visualize the whole firescape.  This is useful for understanding the complexity in forest structure across the landscape, how the forest recovers from treatments, and how animals with large home ranges might use the forest.  The UC Merced team created this cutting-edge product.

Finding the trees in the forest
In order to see the trees in the forest, the UC Merced spatial team researchers developed a method to segment individual trees from the Lidar point cloud. The method identifies and classifies trees individually and sequentially from the tallest tree to the shortest tree. We tested this method on our SNAMP Lidar data. These forests are complex mixed coniferous forests on rugged terrain, and yet our method is very accurate at defining individual tree shapes. We are applying the method in both of the SNAMP study areas.

Mapping downed Logs with lidar data
The UC Berkeley spatial team researchers used some new techniques that help distinguish individual features, and mapped the logs, as well as some of the trees in this stand. In the figure at left: red colors are logs, green colors are trees.

More information on these and other projects can be found on the SNAMP website.

Earth is like a potato in space

the new geoid: yellow is highest and blue lowest gravityNew results from Europe's Goce satellite has rendered a highly detailed map of how gravity varies across the Earth. These kind of measures are important for understanding how gravity shapes some key processes on Earth.

"Chief among these new insights is a clearer view of how the oceans are moving and how they redistribute the heat from the Sun around the world - information that is paramount to climate studies.

Those interested in earthquakes are also poring over the Goce results. The giant jolts that struck Japan last month and Chile last year occurred because huge masses of rock suddenly moved. Goce should reveal a three-dimensional view of what was going on inside the Earth."

The article describing the work, from the BBC, also includes a nice discussion of the concept of the geoid.