A former colleague writes to us about his experience with petroleum clients using the MarineMap decision support tool for assessing environmental impact. He writes: "The tools that Farallon helps create are well respected and you never know who might be using it and for what"
eCatch 2.0 - rebuilding sustainable fisheries on the California coast using GIS
Posted on December 16, 2011 by Joe Metro
If you follow environmental news then you probably already read about eCatch, a new iPad app developed by The Nature Conservancy that gives fishermen real-time access to the latest information on where the fish are – the abundant ones they want to catch and the overfished ones they need to avoid.
The basic idea behind eCatch is that some fish are becoming endangered through overfishing, and the best way to mitigate this is to give fisherman as an industry, the tools to manage their fishery sustainably themselves.
Using eCatch, fisherman at sea, report areas where they caught overfished species and learn from other fisherman where the more abundant species are. By collaborating and sharing information in real-time, fisherman can prevent rapid declines in fish populations and rebuild robust fishing industries and communities along California’s Central Coast.
eCatch 1.0 is a web-based application that allows for:
Visualizing the locations of catches for a variety of fishing vessels
Developing reports that summarize the species and catch from each vessel, and as aggregates for a group of vessels
Monitoring the progress towards catch limits
Tracking the capture of depleted species
The results are pretty impressive so far so The Nature Conservancy has engaged Farallon Geographics to help them develop eCatch 2.0.
eCatch 2.0 will introduce significant enhancements to the UI and mapping technology to make accessing and interacting with fisheries data both more dynamic and more intuitive. It will also expand the application so it is useful to managers and administrators as well as fisherman.
Users will be able to query and visualize catch histories in order to predict trends as well as define and view reports and histories on species limits, location and amount of overfished species taken for a given time period for individual vessels and aggregated by associations.
Some specifics:
Fishermen will be able to see on a Google basemap of the central California coast, locations where overfished species have been caught from their vessel, as well as any other vessel.
Fishermen will be able to display any portion of their fishing history on the map by indicating the time span and species caught.
Managers and Administrators will be able to link to a form that allows for editing logbook data simply by clicking on a set point.
The application will alert users when an overfished species catch event happens as soon as the data are entered into the system
Farallon is working with the Nature Conservancy on a set of web services for geospatial data access and reporting using Microsoft .NET web framework along with PostGIS/PostgreSQL, ESRI SDE, ESRI ArcGIS Server, ExtJS, and OpenLayers.
eCatch 2.0 is expected to go public sometime this year.
Where’s my stuff? Using Open Source GIS to track archeological treasures in the Middle East
Posted on April 25, 2011 by Dennis Wuthrich
We've been working on the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (www.megajordan.org), a very cool Open Source and web-based GIS for documenting archeological sites. MEGA has just been launched for the Kingdom of Jordan, and we're already hard at work on deploying it for Iraq.
While MEGA does lots of things, we see it as the definitive geospatial inventory of archeology in Jordan. And while that might not sound too interesting, it turns out that you can't really properly interpret, conserve, and manage archeological sites until you've documented them. For MEGA, documentation means defining the location and extent of a site, its various names, significance, and specific archaeological finds at a site.
Consequently, the MEGA web app allows authenticated users to add and edit GIS features such as sites and archeological features managed within a PostGIS database. As of late April 2011, that amounts to something like 56,000 geometries representing everything from pottery shards to the remnants of ancient civilizations such as Petra.
It's one thing to put information into an inventory (this will be a blog post for another day!), but it's quite another to find a specific item in a large inventory.
One of the more interesting challenges in building MEGA was thinking through how to make it easy for the archeologists, inspectors, planners, and researchers using the app to find where a specific site or artifact record in the inventory was.
For MEGA, we took two different approaches to search. The first, and the more "GIS-y" approach, was to use the map as a means of filtering the site inventory. Specifically, we take advantage of administrative boundaries (governorates and sub-governorates in Jordan are analogous to U.S. states and counties) as a means of quickly identifying sites.
We display these admin boundaries as vectors on the map, which means that we can use their geometries to query the database for sites within a given boundary (just open the report panel to see a list of the sites within an administrative boundary in addition to their locations on the map). The admin boundary vectors also let us do a better job (in my opinion) of letting the user navigate and zoom throughout the Kingdom. All a user has to do is move their cursor over the map and click on governorate to zoom that that location.
There are times when you want to find a specific item in an inventory. Unlike the traditional GIS web app, MEGA tries to implement text-based searches in a more intuitive fashion. All a user has to do is start typing in any of the names or identification numbers associated with a site to start searching the inventory.
MEGA allows any number of Latin or Arabic names for a site or archeological feature, so allowing a user to just start typing for a simple search is a pretty big deal. Our search widget is implemented using AJAX, so feedback is pretty immediate and useful.
For more sophisticated searches, users can click the "advanced search" link to expose what I hope is a user-friendly way of building sophisticated filters (both attribute and geospatial) that can quickly return and display just the specific sites that meet the selection criteria.
Liftoff! Just back from the official rollout of Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (MEGA)
Posted on April 18, 2011 by Dennis Wurthrich
I've just returned from the formal launch of the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (www.megajordan.org) in Amman, Jordan. Since Farallon has been working on this project since 2007, the publicity and public announcement of MEGA was super gratifying. Plus, it's the first project that I've worked on that had a member of a Royal Family (Jordan's Princess Sumaya) gave the keynote address at the launch.
Below is a YouTube video (in Arabic) which shows the rollout event. At time 0:07 you can see Princess Sumaya sitting in the front row.
I will be writing a detailed blog about the project next week.
The role of GIS in asset management of water resources for developing (and developed) countries
Posted on March 01, 2011 by Dennis Wuthrich
Managing water resources and water resources infrastructure is of growing importance worldwide. Here in California water resource management is increasingly a hot topic because of our growing population and the impacts of climate change - where is the water, where are the pipes, where are the pumps & equipment, where are the people the water flows to, etc - all of this information needs to be collected, managed and understood, in order to make intelligent decisions.
As serious as our water resources infrastructure management issues are here in California, they are even more pressing in developing countries in Africa. Whether at a village, NGO or regional government level there needs to be some way to understand where assets (from hand pumps to seasonal water sources) are located, what condition they are in and how they vary over time.
A GIS asset management system address these issue in a highly effective and when done right, a cost-effective manner.
I have a lot to say on these topics, but will summarize the important bits as follows:
The core role of GIS in asset management is to act as the authoritative inventory of a water system assets. The GIS is the final word on the "what and where" of your system assets. The actual work of managing your assets (the "workflows" that you use to inspect, repair, monitor, and extend your water system) will all rely on this spatially referenced inventory.
By far, the most valuable and important component of your GIS will be the database that you use to store and manage the asset data in a secure and flexible manner. Organizations will want to use a relational database management system capable of working with geometries (such as points, lines, polygons, geo-referenced images) natively. Most of the standard databases can now store, index, query, and process geometries. To me, PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extension is the relational database that best balances capability and ease of use.
The most cost effective, but also some of the most innovative GIS solutions use Open Source software. PostGIS is an open source database. GeoServer is a great spatial server. OpenLayers is a great web application client framework. QGIS is a very good desktop GIS. All are Open Source. And all can be obtained for free. As for support, companies like Farallon and OpenGeo provide support for these technologies.
Because asset data will be the most valuable portion of any system, encoding information in openly published data formats is important. By this I mean that data should be accessible without requiring the purchase or use of a single, vendor controller API. OGC standards ensure this. And integrating your GIS with other systems should be done using web services that use standard and open encodings such as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and REST (Representational State Transfer) patterns.
Collecting data in the field needs to be simple, inexpensive, and fool-proof so that your users get complete and valid information. In my opinion, the latest smart phones (like Android and iPhones) and tablets (like the iPad and the coming wave of Android-based tablets) are becoming the best platforms for collecting data in the field. We've done several field data collection projects using Android phones/tablets, and they work extremely well.
Even with all this discussion concerning technology, I must say that technical bits usually end up being the easiest part of any system development. The challenge is to truly understand how to build solutions that make it easier for people to do their jobs. This means understanding your users information requirements, designing easy to learn and robust workflows, making user interfaces easy to use, and deploying it all in a way that your clients can actually maintain without breaking their budgets.
Because this blog post is about resource management in developing countries where budgets and technological infrastructure are limited, I've focused my comments on Open Source Software, Open Data formats, and standards-based technologies. But the same principals on using a GIS for asset management apply to organizations with existing IT and GIS infrastructures using commercial software such as ESRI or Intergraph.
Farallon has a lot of experience in developing asset management systems for the developing world (e.g. Mega-J), as well as for the developed world (e.g. Union Sanitary District). Water systems, in particular, are an area in which we have a good bit of experience.
