Updating Aerial Imagery and other Government GIS News

It's spring - and time to capture aerial images before the trees bud! Lancaster County, PA is doing it with NGA and USGS (local paper). Summerland in BC is doing it on its own (local paper).

- various outlets

Governor Pat Quinn, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor Rahm Emanuel today unveiled Socrata-powered http://www.MetroChicagoData.org , the nation's first data convergence cloud that brings public data from the City of Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois into a single Open Data portal, for easy access by residents and businesses in the Metro Chicago area.

There is an API, but I don't believe you can download the data.

- press release

The USDA Forest Service's Eastern Forest and Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Centers recently unveiled a product that helps natural resource managers rapidly detect, identify, and respond to unexpected changes in the nation's forests by using web-based tools. ForWarn, a satellite-based monitoring and assessment tool, recognizes and tracks potential forest disturbances caused by insects, diseases, wildfires, extreme weather, or other natural or human-caused events. The tool, available at http://www.forwarn.forestthreats.org, complements and focuses efforts of existing forest monitoring programs and potentially results in time and cost savings.

San Diego (Open Data) App Challenge and other GIS Competition News

Mayor Sanders and the City of San Diego are challenging the software developer community to create new apps using city and partner data. They’re also inviting the public to share their ideas for innovative new apps.

Winners will receive $50,000 in cash prizes as well as promotional exposure. Prizes will be awarded for apps that enhance city services and quality of life for San Diegans, and that use the data in innovative ways. Submitted apps can run on the web, desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. The public is encouraged to share application ideas related to energy, tourism, economic development, transportation, the environment, health and other areas.

The public will have one month to share ideas for San Diego apps they’d like to see created. Developers will have approximately three months following the challenge launch to build their submissions. A panel of distinguished judges from the tech industry, venture capital, and partner institutions will select winners, and the general public will vote to identify two “Popular Choice” winners.

The Get Outdoors Massachusetts contest is open to the public and seeks public participation in developing technologies that feature Massachusetts outdoor and natural resources. The goal of the competition is to provide software developers with data to create a mobile application for the public to use a smart phone to map to public lands, access points and other outdoor venues for outdoor recreation. The agencies will provide data about state parks, wildlife management areas, public boat ramps, agricultural tourism locations and parking locations and lists of available activities at each facility or location.

The 2012 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest is designed to investigate the potential of multi-modal/multi-temporal fusion of very high spatial resolution imagery. This year, participants will download three different sets of images (optical, SAR, and LIDAR) over the downtown of San Francisco and each participant will get to choose their own research topic to work with. Proposals should describe in detail the addressed problem, the method used, and the end result.

China’s New Maps and other International GIS News

China map data stores are up, as is use of those data stores.

Access to and usage of Chinese geographic data have both improved with the establishment of three key platforms, according to a conference held by the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation (NASMG) on Monday.

 

The three platforms include an online city management network, a public map database and geographic condition monitoring used by the country's decision-makers.

Members of Musanze District Disaster Management Committee (DDMC) should clearly identify zones that are highly prone to disasters.

A project to map the [olive] trees [of Puglia, Italy] with satellite photographs is under way. Each tree will be individually cataloged and form part of a database. Puglia’s environmental official, Lorenzo Nicastro, said the census would cost € 250,000 and it would be a valuable tool for the agency tasked with protecting the trees, as well as granting or denying permission for the transplantation of trees.

The first pan-Indian satellite mapping of sugarcane has revealed that the estimated area under the crop has gone up by 5 per cent to 51.82 lakh hectare in the current sugar season, industry body ISMA said today. ...

 

The satellite survey was jointly undertaken by ISMA and the National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories Ltd (NFCSF) through a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) based agency, which procured images from National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) Hyderabad, the body said.