Ghost Maps

There are over 35 million geotagged, time-stamped photos on flickr now. That's enough to start doing some pretty interesting analyses, including this one from Crandall, et al., at Cornell (presented at the WWW 2009 conference, "Mapping the World's Photos" [PDF]).  Not only is it possible to map hot spots of world tourism, but by incorporating the time stamps to map the routes people are taking, you can make out individual streets. As suggested by the Information Aesthetics blog, you could even design popular walking tours.

Once GPS-enabled cameras represent a larger share of the market, flickr may provide data for all sorts of important analyses: tracking SOD, the migration of an endangered song bird, or estimating the "desolation" of a place: the world heat map that the Cornell group presents looks shockingly like the lights at night. The machine... it's ALIVE!!!

Dennis Baldocchi describing the FluxNet integration project

This is a nice summary of the work Dennis Baldocchi and his group have been doing to pull together the data from the FluxNet towers to get at regional views of carbon fluxes.  We read about this effort last week in remote sensing class, and here is a more familiar and friendly venue to learn about it.

Last week to vote for your favorite NASA image

NASA Image of the Day

Here are the top 50 images that have been chosen by our users as their favorites. It is now time to select your favorite image. You may vote for only one, so choose carefully and come back on April 29 to see which image has been voted the favorite.

Video on Myriahedral Projections

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1xXTi1nFCo

This video on Myriahedral Projections is a great illustration of how projections work in general, but the cuts it makes are fantastic. Myriahedral Projections have many sides, but are (almost) conformal and conserve areas well. This video is entertaining for any crowd.

Recent Paper on Myriahedral Projections here: http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/myriahedral/CAJ103.pdf

ESRI's Geoprocessing blog: Lidar and ArcGIS part 4: forest density and height.

This blog post is written by Clayton Crawford, a Product Engineer in the Software Products Group's 3D Team in Redlands.

This is the forth in a series on Lidar Solutions in ArcGIS.

Leah Evans' Textiles: Maps as Quilts

Leah Evans makes these hand-sewn quilts that channel cartographic themes. Just like us, her current work combines aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery. But unlike us, she uses appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches. Intriguingly, she says it is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests her most of all. The maps themselves “are not consciously based on specific places,” she writes. “For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes.”

Check it: mapping streambed from a kayak

You've got to watch this video. I love these dudes. Originally from the Map Room.

The project uses an innovative underwater video system that takes Global Positioning System (GPS) digital data and stores it continuously on the audio track of the DVD as the kayak floats down river.

Simultaneously, the river’s surface features are recorded using a similar geo-referenced video camera. Images from both video cameras are downloaded into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to produce digital maps that depict the stream in minute detail, above and below the surface.

helpful new features from ESRI

here are some gems I learned about at CalGIS:

1. Go to ArcGIS Online Resources to quickly, easily, and freely add in terrific basemap data and high res imagery to any .mxd. If you are logged in you will have access to a lot more options.

2. Arc 9.3.1 (to be released any day now) will include a "layer packages" feature. So, if you want to send someone your file exactly as you are looking at it, you can right click on the layer and select "save as layer package", and it will zip the .shp + .lyr into a .lpk to share more easily. Also, there will be free access to Microsoft Virtual Earth within your Arc desktop.

Geospatial Revolution Project

This is a great way to open the new website. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”, and location-aware thinking, services and businesses are on the increase. As the Department of Labor is working with other GIS societies and institutions to develop content standards for required skills for these new employees, it is worthwhile to look back and see how far, and from where, we have come.

In that vein, the Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public service media and outreach initiative on the brave new world of digital mapping. Check out their video, which stars our very own 2009 CNR Citation winner Kass Green.

Our buddy Robin Grossinger in the news

Love love love the work the historical ecology group at SFEI is doing. The Chron recently had an article highlighting the work of Robin et al in reconstructing the past landscapes of the bay area. Image from the SF Chronicle.