Ricardo's Blog

by Ricardo Morin

Serverless Geoportal: where is the data?

This is a follow up to my earlier post discussing the design of a Geoportal for Provita. In that post, I mentioned that we use the serverless JAMStack approach, with no servers and no databases to monitor and maintain.

So, “without” servers or databases, how are we organizing and managing the data of the site?

In this post, I answer the question by describing the data organization and the storage aspects of the Geoportal.


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Rikitraki renovations on the way!

Wow! I can’t believe it’s been five years since I developed Rikitraki. A lot of things have changed in Web development since then, so I think it is time to implement some sorely needed renovations.

Some of the changes are simply to bring the code up to snuff with today’s best practices. But some other changes will be functionality improvements that I have been thinking about for a long time.

In this post, I lay out what I am thinking for the next big release. Comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.


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Developing a serverless Geoportal using the JAMStack

Over the past few months, I have been working on a cool new project for the Provita folks.

Provita wants to maintain and publish a collection of geospatial data sets to enable researchers, 3rd party organizations, and casual users to have access to up-to-date Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data for supporting ecology, biodiversity, and environmental protection applications, studies and analyses.

In this post, I introduce key project requirements and the overall design of the app.


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New project, new tools! Yay!

New Project

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.


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Logging visualization update: mo' data

Visualization now includes BLM, private and state lands data


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.


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New HOWL Project: Logging Visualization

Visualization and time-based animation of logging activities in Oregon


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.


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