Sensing the soil using GPS

There's a cool post over at Ars Technica today about using high-precision GPS to measure soil moisture. To do so, you need a survey-grade unit, but it's still really cool. And the story behind it is even better.

Very cool Landsat images for d/l

http://eros.usgs.gov/imagegallery/index.php

Holiday collection: fun sites from the end of 2008 (and Maya Lin at the De Young!)

So many site, so little space. So here's my wrap-up from G.reader on the cool stuff floating around at the end of the year (Many from the Map Room blog, a wonderful font of mapping information).

• Boston Globe's Year in Maps article. This has some lovely examples of new cartography. Maybe Tim can start one of these at the Chicago Trib next year!
• NASA's gorgeous and simple Global Fire Map. I like the simplicity and effectiveness of these maps.
• Sean Gordon's wrap up of user-created maps online is an interesting read.
• Kind of gross yet cool: Mapping Rats in NY.

And last, but by no means least, if you are lucky enough to live in the bay area, and have an interest in maps/mapping/representations of landscapes, go to Maya Lin's exhibit "Systematic Landscapes" at the De Young. It is mesmerizing, fascinating, charming and thought-provoking at the same time. I just loved it. It is on through the 18th, so get on it!!!!

More Time Wasting Tools!

Check out this great site for highlighting the use of maps in movies and TV shows.

This is cool: GUIDOS Pattern Analysis Tool

Don't love the name, but like the product. The software is here; and you can map their forest fragmentation maps across the US in GEarth here.

OakMapper 2.0 released

Hi y'all. The new OakMapper 2.0 is up and running, and we'd like your help in mapping areas of oak mortality around the state. Version 2.0 improves upon the website's prior version with increased functionality and additional tools within an easily navigated interface.  Launched by the UC Berkeley Kelly lab in October, OakMapper 2.0 makes it easier for users to explore data, download maps, look at images of oak mortality, and submit suspected locations of oak mortality that may be associated with SOD.  The new interface utilizes the familiar background layers and navigation tools from Google Maps.  Users are able to draw points and polygons directly on the map as well as attach photos to specific points.  The Kelly lab encourages the public to use this site to map suspected cases of SOD and to track their submission by signing up for an account with OakMapper.  Registered users of the site can update their information and make comments on other users' points.  Official confirmations of P. ramorum are clearly separated from community-submitted points and either set of points can be filtered out.The new OakMapper is found at oakmapper.org.  Please consider signing up to be an OakMapper user! The OakMapper was recently featured in the recent journal of the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association

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lat long coordinates from google maps

When the place you want the latitude and longitude for is centered (default for search results), copy and paste this into your browser bar: javascript:alert(gApplication.getMap().getCenter()) A window with the lat long will pop up. I use this often to fill in data for unmatched addresses after batchgeocoding.

Spatial R

From Alessandro, a link to Kamran Safi's Spatial R pages, which are extremely useful. He is at the Zoological Society of London. Thanks for this, and let's keep our R coding going.  

The Delta Blues

A great source of maps and animations about the Delta is the Public Policy Institute of California. See their map of a possible future delta; and their animation of another possible future delta (underwater).

LiDAR and 3″-4″ ortho files of Contra Costa County available!

I went to the Contra Costa Countywide GIS meeting yesterday and found out about these countywide files that were recently posted to the Casil FTP site in the coco-county folder. Infrared imagery is expected to be posted by January 2009. The LiDAR was flown for flood control analysis, but it is publicly available for any other research. The county GIS deptartment asks that you contact them to share how you work with the data. Also, I came across this LiDAR resources site with links to other data and helpful info.