3D time-based animation of recent (and current) wildfires in Oregon

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.

Do you want to learn how to use time animations in CesiumJS?

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.

It is now possible to pick a location when updating content

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.

It is now possible to update HOWL selected content directly from the application

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.

HOWL at FOSS4G 2017, Boston presentation slides

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.

I am delighted to announce the beta availability of HOWL

For the past few months, I have been working in collaboration with the folks at Oregon Wild to develop HOWL (Highlighting Oregon’s WildLands). Many thanks to Erik Fernandez of Oregon Wild for supporting this project, providing a ton of data, feedback and direction!

So what is this?

It is a collection of prototypes for visualizing Oregon wild lands and related information (e.g., old growth forests, clearcuts, wildfires) using the web-based Cesium.js virtual globe and map engine and data from multiple sources.

It has been a long time since my last post. Here is an update.

Wow, I can’t believe that my last post was back in July. I have been pretty busy with some consulting work I am doing in the Internet of Things (IoT) field. Pretty exciting! But I am committed to continuing supporting and improving RikiTraki…

It was my first time at a FOSS4G conference and I really enjoyed it. Here are my favorite talks.

Favorite Talks

Monday, May 2

Zero to web map!

This was a well put together hands-on workshop that introduced the concepts of web mapping using Mapbox, adding data to the map using GeoJSON, handling pop-ups, map interactions, using the Geolocation API and mapping directions. In the end, you actually build a semi-useful mapping web app in just a few hours (note that if you are too far from Raleigh, NC, the walking directions API will not work due to maximum distance limitation 😃).

If you have a blog or a web site, it is pretty easy to embed a RikiTraki trail in it, here is how.

You can easily embed a track that you have uploaded to RikiTraki, by using the html iframe tag. Simply insert an iframe tag in your post or page with a link to the trail, like shown in the example below. Notice how it is not merely an image of the track, but the active RikiTraki site which you can fully interact with!