Warren Wilson receives grant for GIS project in Panama

Warren Wilson College and an environmental conservation organization in Panama have been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Panamanian Secretaria Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovacion (SENACYT). The grant will be used by the college and the organization Conservation through Research, Education and Action (CREA) to research and implement ageographic information system (GIS) and wireless sensor network on the 1,000-acre Cocobolo Nature Reserve in Panama. The reserve is part of the largest contiguous rainforest in Central America.

"I'm excited about the project because it focuses on both sustainability and cross-cultural education," said Geography Professor David Abernathy,who coauthored the grant application with Michael Roy, CREA executive director. Abernathy anticipates "some type of student exchange so that WWC students can work in Panama and hopefully a Panamanian student can workand/or study at Warren Wilson."

Abernathy said another focal point of the project will be the use of "green computing" techniques. The computing equipment not only will be designed to minimize power consumption, but also will be operated by solar power.The creation of a GIS and wireless sensor network database in Cocobolo Nature Reserve is a vital part of CREA's intent to help meet the sustainable development goals of Panama. CREA intends to utilize the reserve as the testing center for a system that would combine the following: traditional knowledge system of local farmers and landholders; research on sustainable agriculture and natural resource protection from higher education institutions and non-governmental organizations; and the latest technology for collecting, analyzing and disseminating environmental data in the form of a comprehensive system for managing and distributing geographic and environmental data.

Map Design Survey - North American Cartographic Information Society

How good are you at designing maps? How much about designing maps did you learn on your own? Did you have classes in map design? How about graphic design in general? With geospatial technologies and mapping in general creeping in to the hands of just about everyone, are maps getting better or worse?

These are the kinds of questions the North American Cartographic Information Society are trying to answer with their Map Design Survey.

Take 5 minutes to complete the survey and help our profession grow!

I stumbled onto this survey while browsing one of my favorite sites...

http://www.shadedrelief.com

Announcing the WNC GIS Map Contest

Some of us involved with the monthly WNC GIS meetings have been brainstorming an idea for a contest that we hope will allow a variety of people to show off their personal projects, showcase their mapping talent, and raise awareness about important issues in the WNC area. This email is intended to provide the information needed to get you, your students, or colleagues engaged in the contest. If possible, I intend to follow-up soon with a phone call to see what you think.

Purpose and Process

The idea is for people to submit an original map product to the WNC GIS Users Group for review. A panel of map experts (your peers) will review the submissions. Initially the odds of winning are probably pretty darn good because our mailing list is not very long. In order to become eligible you must be on the WNC-GIS’s mailing list (email me, Leo Klausmann, at leklausm@yahoo.com to join). The larger goal is to develop a WNC-GIS Map Calendar for 2008. The map will be sold through any sponsors we can muster and online. Any income generated from the sales will pay for the production of the calendars and feed back into contest prizes.

The first submissions will be due May 10^th, 2007. A winner will be selected during the May WNC GIS Beer Session (most likely occurring on May 24th). That will give you almost 2 months to get something together. By letting everyone get a chance to look at the various maps that were submitted, hopefully further ideas will be sparked and friendly feedback will be exchanged. Assuming the interest in the contest is there, one approach would be to move to a bi-monthly contest with a rotating volunteer "review board" of perhaps five people.

The Shiny Prizes

Every contest cycle (that is, maybe every two months) two winners will be selected, and they shall win a twenty dollar gift certificate to Malaprops Bookstore, the ego-boosting honor of seeing their map printed in the calendar, as well as a copy of the calendar.

Map Themes

Map themes will evolve around the interests of the review panel but currently there are a few guidlines.

· Some essential and dominant theme or aspect of the map ought to have a regional focus. You can include a larger map area of for example, the Southern Appalachian Region or all of North Carolina.

· How many times have you generated a map whose natural patterns are simply beautiful? Aerial photo patterns, elevation model patterns, soils patterns can be beautiful. If you’d like to, why not abstract them a step further to discover their full artistic potential.

· Cartoon maps or spoof maps are great. Subtle or not so subtle sarcastic maps are fine. Map puns are fine. Any kind of map humor is great. We certainly will accept conventional WNC map themes, but creativity and local/regional themes will help make you a winner.

· The eventual goal of compiling our best maps into a calendar to sold to the general public means that by submitting your map to the contest, you release copyright limitations.

For the first contest cycle, a theme (such as environmental issues, historical perspectives, urban characterization, etc) will not be specifically defined so as not to limit what people can submit. If after the maps are reviewed at the May Beer Session meeting, we all want to decide on a theme for next time, then that theme will be announced.

How do you Submit your Map?

Export your map to a PDF file (very easy to do in ESRI products) and set your DPI to about 300. The filesize of maps varies widely, often because complex rasters or photo material can take up lots of disk space. If your map turns out to be about 10MB or less, then just email it to me, Leo Klausmann, at leklausm@yahoo.com. We want the submitted maps to be of high resolution so that we may easily scale them to fit our calendar, so if your map filesize turns out to be larger, just contact me and we’ll work out a way to transfer it, perhaps by CD-ROM. We hope to bring printed versions of the all the maps to the May Beer Session for all to see. Do keep in mind that people have a range of skill levels and experience, so the maps don’t have to be cartographically perfect.

A Final Word

The organization of this Map Contest so far has been the result of a few brainstorming sessions. The contest is likely to evolve as more people become interested. If you have any ideas on how we could organize it differently, we are more than open to suggestions.

shapefile to Google Earth and other useful tools

Thought everyone might be interested in this blog, which has a useful collection of utilities for file conversion and data manipulation.

mapAsheville API

This post is just a quick demonstration of the mapAsheville - API. Actually, it's our first test of using the API in an existing webpage outside of our own domain... seems to work OK after some trial and error on my part.

As you can see below, we've developed the ability to embed a functional mapAsheville service into an existing webpage. We've got some formative ideas about how this may be able to benefit the community at large and we're already realizng some internal operational benefits from this 'mashup' approach to handing web services.

We've got a long ways to go but I'm excited that it actually works on this blog! Props to Dave Michelson for all of his past and ongoing work on this project!

Give it a try... zooom in, pan around and ID a parcel.

More to come later explaining the mapAsheville efforts...

Impressions from the NC GIS Conference

This was the first time I've attended a GIS conference and I got a lot out of it. The presentation on the cadastral development index that Neil Thomas and I worked on was well-received, and most of the other presentations I saw were quite interesting. I'll tell you about some of my favorite presentations and new products at the conference.

Nancy von Meyer had an entertaining and informative presentation on the status of electronic cadastral data across the country and the many different ways it can be used. Ken Taylor's presentation on Community Wildfire Protection Plans for NC was very interesting. I was impressed that they are doing so much work in mapping and modeling wildfire risks, but it highlighted a thorny issue in that type of environmental modeling: acquiring accurate and up-to-date data on environmental variables (like forest cover, fuel loading, land development change, etc) across a vast geographic distance is usually impossible, so even a well-planned program is only useful in the real world when there is some degree of certainty about data integrity. Another interesting presentation by Paul Smith described the use of GPS backpacks attached to the first Bald Eagles hatched in captivity in NC, which send hourly signals during the birds' migration. The data can be used with Google Earth and has great potential as an educational tool.

Conferences can be the perfect venue to showcase new technology, and we saw a few amazing new products. Microsoft's virtual earth has come a long way (maps.live.com) as a demonstration using the improved 3-D plug-in showed. Unlike Google Earth, once you download the plug-in, the maps run in your browser, which is a little more convenient than launching a separate program. Most of buildings in big cities have been modeled and skinned in 3-D, and look much better than Google's. It seems that you need to use an SDK to modify the Microsoft virtual earth, which might be harder than using Google, but you may want to check it out. The most impressive new technology I saw was from a company called Ztechnology, which has launched a new line of completely 3-D printers. The medium used is a special type of plaster powder, which hardens and changes color when sprayed with special inks. The printer can make stunningly colorful objects of many different shapes and sizes. Shoes, detailed 3-D topographic maps, cityscapes, and human heads were only a few of the possibilities I saw. The printers cost between thirty and sixty thousand dollars, so I may get cold stares if I put it on my Christmas list, but for an organization that already spends many thousands on 3-D data processing or product design, its probably a worthwhile investment.

Neil and I could only stay for the first day of the conference, so if any other people would like post their own impressions or comments, please contact Pete Kennedy at kennedy.pete@gmail.com.