Another Great Use of the MarineMap Environmental GIS Decision Support Tool
Posted on May 18, 2012 by Joe Metro
Yesterday, we received a very rewarding email from a colleague who had worked for Farallon on a project we helped the MarineMap Consortium complete a couple of years ago:
"Just thought I would pass along an experience that, I hope, may bring a smile to your face. I was in a meeting with some VIP's today for a petroleum client we are working with. It has to do with running power cables out to the oil platforms off the coast of So-Cal. They have to be very careful to do this while also adhering to several environmental guidelines of not disturbing any habitat."
"Well, we were in this meeting and one of the project managers said he had discovered a 'killer' web application that shows all the features we need to make sure we avoid."
"He proceeded to open up the MarineMap Decision Support Tool. I was so excited! I told them that I had a hand in helping to create that web application when I worked for Farallon which was part of the MarineMap Consortium team. The tools that Farallon creates are well respected and you never know who might be using them (and for what, right?)."
Tomas Lopes, GIS Manager, URS Corporation
What is MarineMap?
MarineMap Web 2.0 is online mapping application that enables members of scientific community and general public to participate in the selection of marine environments that should be designated for conservation, recreational, and commercial uses. Read More »
The MarineMap application is being updated and will be replaced by SeaSketch Read More »
Tags:
Environmental,
Open Source,
Web Mapping
If I Were a Small City GIS Manager
Posted on January 03, 2012 by Adam Lodge
If I were a small city GIS manager
...I would deploy significant portions of the City's GIS infrastructure using free and Open Source technology. Why?... why not? It's free to procure and provides top notch capabilities. In the absence of specific technological or organizational constraints, here are the components I would use.
Database:
The database would be PostgreSQL with PostGIS. Using PostGIS, anyone with even minimal SQL skills can develop spatial queries, integrate data between GIS and other business systems, and serve data to almost any application tier technology.
Desktop:
I would use Quantum GIS (QGIS) as the desktop GIS technology of choice. QGIS beautifully meets the 80/20 rule for ad-hoc GIS processing and display. Meaning - it has the geo tools required for most any task you throw at it. All it is missing are the obscure tools that rarely get used. (Has anyone ever used "Calculate Distance Band from Neighbor Count"?) The good news is, if I am that guy who needs a custom analytical tool, I could build it in Python (also Open Source), embed the functionality within QGIS, and share it with the QGIS community.
Application Server:
My server GIS would be powered with GeoServer. Nothing makes it easier to transform a table or view in a database into a functional web service ready to be consumed by most any viewer - Google Earth, Open Layers, or even ArcGIS Server.
Presentation Tier:
Lastly, web applications would be built using Open Layers. I'm no web developer, so what makes Open Layers awesome to me is its simplicity. It lets me consume and expose whatever basemap I want. It can be Google Maps, Bing Maps, ArcGIS online, WMS, WFS - you name it, Open Layers can sprinkle your custom data on top of it.
All of this free, enterprise-class capability makes me marvel at the oodles of cash that are blown on proprietary software (and software maintenance) by cash-strapped local governments every day. As a former GIS Manager for San Mateo County, I have to ask what is it that you think keeps cities spending the money? Drop a line if you have any ideas.
Tags:
Open Source
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.
Tags:
Asset Management,
Database,
ESRI,
Open Source,
Sustainability
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.
Try it for yourself and let us know what you think! www.megajordan.org
Tags:
Asset Management,
Cultural Resources,
Open Source
