Planet Action - The Projects

This semester I am supervising a small, but dedicated group of students who are applying their expertise in remote sensing to work on three projects supported by Planet Action.  Thanks to the eCognition software provided by Trimble Geospatial and satellite imagery provided Spot Image the students get to work with cutting edge technology.

We are working with collaborators from France, Mexico, and Columbia on the following projects:

• Mountainous land use and land cover mapping in the French Pyrenees to support the monitoring of human-nature interactions in the Haut-Vicdessos mountain area.  This project is in collaboration with Thomas Houet from the GEODE Research Laboratory, University of Toulouse.
• Mapping mangrove forests in the Bocas del Atrato Region of Colombia to support REDD policies.
• Forest quality assessment in the mountains west of Mexico City to support ecological restoration.

Toronto High-Resolution Land Cover

The City of Toronto has posted the high-resolution land cover data set we generated as part of the urban tree canopy assessment to their Open Data Portal.  It's great to see more and more cities opening up their GIS data holdings.

Tsunami Planning: The Need for LiDAR

As I write this post the first waves from the tsunami that originated from the devastating 8.9 magnitude have reached Hawaii.  The Honolulu metropolitan region is home to over 900,000 people and contains numerous businesses, and key pieces infrastructure, including the airport.  By all accounts from the media the excellent alert system that our government has in place will prevent the loss of life.  Predicting the significance of the tsunami's impact is difficult, but Honolulu is fortunate in that LiDAR was acquired back in 2009.  Unlike traditional digital elevation models (DEM) that only represent the bare earth, LiDAR digital surface models (DSM) are a 3D representation of all features.  When I came into work this morning I loaded in the LiDAR DSM for Honolulu into Quick Terrain Modeler, draped on top of it the existing aerial imagery, and then ran some flood simulations for the Honolulu International Airport (HNL).  HNL is an interesting airport.  It is literally on the Pacific Ocean, with its "Reef Runway" being the world's first major runway to be constructed entirely off shore.


The graphics below show what HNL would look like if the ocean levels were to increase by 5 meters.  Please note that these graphics are done for demonstration purposes only.  There is no indication that the sea level will rise by 5 meters, nor has this analysis been subjected to detailed quality assurance and quality control procedures.  Inundation mapping is far more complex than just raising the sea level.  If you are looking for the official inundation maps please visit the the Honolulu government web site.  Here is a nice article on how the updated inundation maps were generated using LiDAR.  There is also an interesting report from Spatial Informatics Group on the The Protective Role of Natural and Engineered Defense Systems in Coastal Hazards that was prepared for HI.  I hope that those communities affected by this tragedy are able to recover quickly.

Landsat and ArcGIS

Over on the AmericaView blog is a video I created that shows how to download Landsat imagery from USGS GLOVIS site and then stack the layers, change the symbology, and generate an NDVI layer in ArcGIS.  My hope is that this video will make Landsat imagery more accessible to regional and municipal GIS professionals.  Thanks to AmericaView for making the funding to generate this video available.

ArcGIS 10 on a MacBook Pro

Although I have been running ArcGIS 10 on my hefty Dell T7500 workstation for many months I just got around to installing ArcGIS 10 on my 17 inch MacBook Pro.  I am running Windows 7 64-bit SP1 on my Mac via VMware Fusion.  While I've had the occasional program crash within VMware Fusion  (mostly the Java updater) I have been really happy with the performance overall.  I use the MacBook Pro for teaching and from an ArcGIS geoprocessing standpoint it's faster the aging Dell Precision 390 workstations we have in our teaching lab.

At ArcGIS 10 ESRI introduced a new license check out capability.  I was worried that the license check out would not work though VMware Fusion, but I logged in from home via VPN, started up the AcGIS Administrator, checked out the licenses, quit VPN, fired up ArcGIS 10, and everything worked like a charm.  For large organizations like our university this new license check out capability will be a big time saver.  The two of us responsible for generating license files spent untold hours in previous years generating license files and trouble shooting ArcGIS license manger issues for those users looking to go on the road with ArcGIS.  I think this will save us a lot of time.

ERDAS IMAGINE 2011.0.2

Although there is no mention of it on the main ERDAS web site or in the ERDAS Community there is a service pack out for IMAGINE 2011.  Installing it will upgrade you to 2011.0.2.  It's a bit confusing checking for service packs for IMAGINE as their old support site is still up and running, but it appears that for IMAGINE 2011 all service packs are being posted to the the new erdas.com web page under PRODUCTS > [MAIN PRODUCTS > [SUB PRODUCT] > DOWNLOADS.  You can find the download for 2011.0.2 here.

USB 3.0

When it comes to transferring large raster or point cloud data sets that are in the terabyte range, mailing hard drives around is always faster than FTP.  Of course copying data to a USB hard drive can be sloooow.  If you have not done so already consider in investing in USB 3.0.  We've been getting a 10x boost in transfer speed with USB 3.0 as compared to USB 2.0.

USB 3.0 requires different ports than USB 2.0, but all you need to upgrade is a USB 3.0 PCI card, which will run you less than $50.  You will also need as USB 3.0 compatible hard drive.  We have been using the Seagate GoFlex drives, which support both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 through an interchangeable base plate.  This is very handy in that we can use USB 3.0 to transfer the data on our end and then switch out the base plate to the USB 2.0 model prior to sending the drive to our collaborators, most of whom are still using USB 2.0.

Prioritizing Preferable Locations for Increasing Urban Tree Canopy in New York City

Our article on Prioritizing Preferable Locations for Increasing Urban Tree Canopy in New York City is out in the online journal Cities And The Environment (CATE).  Abstract is below.  CATE offers free access to all of its peer-reviewed articles.  The latest issue contains the proceedings from the 2010 MillionTrees Research Symposium.  GIS played a role in the majority of the research published in the proceedings.

This paper presents a set of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods for identifying and prioritizing tree planting sites in urban environments. It uses an analytical approach created by a University of Vermont service-learning class called “GIS Analysis of New York City's Ecology” that was designed to provide research support to the MillionTreesNYC tree planting campaign. These methods prioritize tree planting sites based on need (whether or not trees can help address specific issues in the community) and suitability (biophysical constraints and planting partners’ existing programmatic goals). Criteria for suitability and need were based on input from three New York City tree-planting organizations. Customized spatial analysis tools and maps were created to show where each organization may contribute to increasing urban tree canopy (UTC) while also achieving their own programmatic goals. These methods and associated custom tools can help decision-makers optimize urban forestry investments with respect to biophysical and socioeconomic outcomes in a clear and accountable manner. Additionally, the framework described here may be used in other cities, can track spatial characteristics of urban ecosystems over time, and may enable further tool development for collaborative decision- making in urban natural resource management.

Using LiDAR to Map the Green Infrastructure

My latest article has been published in LiDAR News.  It gives a brief overview of the importance that LiDAR plays in accurately mapping trees in urban areas.  We are making excellent progress in mapping New York City's urban tree canopy using the recent LiDAR collect.  I hope to have a post out on that project next month.  For more on how New York City's LiDAR is being used for solar mapping check out Matt Ball's article on Spatial Sustain.