by Ricardo Morin
In my previous post, I introduced the Oregon Drinking Watersheds project and I described the web application in detail. In this post, I will discuss the process we used to compile the data.
That is the question Oregon Wild wants to be able to answer at a moment’s notice, and that’s the subject of my latest volunteer project.
Oregon Wild needs the data and a tool, to help understand the full extent of Oregon’s drinking watersheds and which populations are connected to any given Oregon location through common watersheds.
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.
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.
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!