Fire Terrorism

It's back: discussion about the use of arson and catastrophic fire by terrorists. The Fire Center have been talking about this; and I think this kind of worry was what helped us get homeland security money for fire research and outreach in pre-Katrina times.

Niche Modeling Resource

For all you niche modelers out there, the Biodiversity Informatics Facility have created a new resource website with what looks like tons of useful information. Their full website also has lots of related information and practical resources.

Strange Maps

Some very interesting [ if not downright weird ] maps.

Crisis Response in Kenya

I just heard this story on The World on KQED: " Blogging the Violence in Kenya -- Post-election violence in Kenya is still going on, but it's hard to monitor. Now, some concerned bloggers are trying to help. They've set up a website where Kenyans can report on what they see in their own communities. The result is a real-time, web-based map that shows what's happening all across Kenya." See Ushahidi Here

Africa@home

A recent article in the economist highlighted the potential of volunteer computing projects, such as SETI@home, to utilize the ram power and brain power of the masses. This excerpt highlights a particularly interesting project (Africa@home) to classify remotely sensed data. The article also introduces BOSSA, a software made at Berkeley to integrate the skills of many volunteers over the Internet. "Bossa nova To lower the barrier to entry for projects like this, Dr Anderson recently launched a new open-source platform called BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation), which aims to do for “distributed thinking” what BOINC has done for distributed computing. One of Dr Anderson's first customers for BOSSA is Peter Amoako-Yirenkyi of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, who is working with other African researchers and a research group called UNOSAT, which processes digital-satellite data for various United Nations agencies. The project, which is part of an initiative called Africa@home co-ordinated by the University of Geneva, will enlist volunteers to extract useful cartographic information—the positions of roads, villages, fields and so on—from satellite images of regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are hopelessly out of date. This will help regional planning authorities, aid workers and scientists documenting the effects of climate change. Dr Amoako-Yirenkyi is excited by the prospects such projects open up for African researchers. “We can leapfrog expensive data centres, and plug directly into a global computer,” he says. Rather than fretting about a digital divide, researchers in developing countries stand to benefit from this digital multiplication effect."

Chicago Field Museum Maps Exhibit

This site is gorgeous. Suggested by Jeremy.

Datasets for potential biofuels work

Starting a thread about global data for potential biofuels mapping that LBL is involved in with BP. In a nutshell, we have to ensure we understand biofuel / crop / natural forest tradeoffs that will undoubtedly be forced with the new enthusiasm for biofuels globally. Spatial decision support can help here. From SEDAC.

Happy New Year!

and Tim's recent article on webGIS in the Berkeley Science Review.

Border Fence Raises Environmental Concerns

Although this isn't a Geo-technology article, the issue is inherently geographical and a good example where ecology, politics, and geography come into conflict. Not to mention a complete disregard for community participation in the public process.

Flying Blind

Nice article on remote sensing; discusses recent article in Trends in Ecol & Evol. There are some good Google Earth kml examples at the bottom of the page.