by Ricardo Morin
Back in September, I got involved in a new project with the Provita Non-Government Organization (NGO) to publish the content of the Venezuelan Red List of Ecosystems (Libro Rojo de los Ecosistemas de Venezuela) on the web.
Today, after a few months of teamwork, I am excited to share the results:
I am really excited about a new project that I am starting for Provita. Provita is an environmental Non-Government Organization (NGO) in Venezuela which has been working hard for decades for the conservation of endangered species and their habitats in my country of birth. I am honored to have been accepted as a volunteer in this great organization, and I am looking forward to contributing my efforts to the mission.
As soon as I have some results to show, I will be posting the details here. For the time being, I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss the requirements of the project and how I went about selecting the development tools that I chose.
The purpose of this post is to document the data processing steps applied to the original sources of the data, to create the layers used by the logging visualization site.
The logging visualization site now includes data from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) which expands the scope to cover nearly all federal public lands in Oregon. Where official records are incomplete, we include clearcuts on federal lands using data gathered by Oregon Wild using a combination of public records and aerial imaging assessments.
In addition to public records from federal agencies, we have added clearcuts on private and state lands for the 2001-2017 time period using forest loss gleaned from Landsat satellite images thanks to the excellent Global Forest Change project.
The latest HOWL project is about raising awareness of logging activities in Oregon.
We are starting the project with the visualization of logging activities in National Forests. Later on, we will add logging activities in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. And finally, we will attempt to include logging activities in private lands as well.
I am pleased to announce that today I released a new HOWL ‘spotlight’ that maps recent (and current) wildfires in Oregon. This ‘spotlight’ displays wildfire data for the current and two past years from the GeoMAC database of fire perimeters.
Head over to the Cesium Blog to read my guest post.
The article is a step-by-step tutorial on how to easily use CZML, the CesiumJS data-driven interface to incorporate time dynamic animations in your own applications. The tutorial draws from an example implemented in the OregonHOWL site, used to animate Oregon’s history of wildfires.
Adding a new item to the Threats ‘spotlight’ grabs the latitude and longitude of the double click position on the map, so the values do not need to be explicitly known. However, sometimes the location of an item needs to be updated, but entering latitude and longitude directly on the form is not very friendly when the coordinates are not known in advance.
Now, latitude and longitude can be picked from the map when updating an item. Simply click on the marker icon displayed on the form.
Up until now, the data behind HOWL ‘spotlights’ has been pre-processed off-line and loaded onto static files. This means that any data changes must be performed by a HOWL developer and deployed to the web site like a new application release.
I am honored to have had the opportunity to present the results of my latest project, Highlighting Oregon’s WildLands (HOWL), at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), held in Boston the week of August 14 through 18, 2017.