Results indicate that tree cover in urban areas of the United States is declining at a rate of about four million trees per year, according to a U.S. Forest Service study of 20 U.S. cities published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.
Forest researchers David Nowak and Eric Greenfield of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station used satellite imagery to find that tree cover is decreasing at a rate of about 0.27 percent of land area per year in U.S. cities, which is equivalent to about 0.9 percent of existing urban tree cover being lost annually.
- Environmental Protection
Conservationists are using UAVs to gather data to protect land, plants and animals.
Using seed funding from the National Geographic Society, The Orangutan Conservancy, and the Denver Zoo, Lian Pin Koh, an ecologist at the ETH Zürich, and Serge Wich, a biologist at the University of Zürich and PanEco, have developed a conservation drone equipped with cameras, sensors and GPS. So far they have used the remote-controlled aircraft to map deforestation, count orangutans and other endangered species, and get a bird's eye view of hard-to-access forest areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia.
- MongoBay
Scientists from the University of Maryland and Beijing Normal University are partnering to track and predict the impact of climate change internationally. ...
At the University of Maryland today, officials from both institutions and representatives from the Chinese government officially launched the new Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science, which will conduct the research.
The key tool? A remote sensing database.
Creation of an international remote sensing database will be one of the new center's first projects, and the interdisciplinary work will take place in both countries. In addition to monitoring agriculture, it will also track land use and land cover.
- News Medical
The Department of Homeland Security plans to award up to $50 million in contracts for aerial remote sensing services to support incident management.
- GovConWire
by Adena Schutzberg on 03/01 at 03:00 AM |
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Princeton University-led researchers report in the journal Science (9 December) that nighttime-lights imagery presents a new tool for pinpointing disease hotspots in developing nations by revealing the population boom that typically coincides with seasonal epidemics. In urban areas with migratory populations, the images can indicate where people are clustering by capturing the expansion and increasing brightness of lighted areas. The researchers found the technique accurately indicates fluctuations in population density - and thus the risk of epidemic - that can elude current methods of monitoring outbreaks.
- BizCommunity.com
A group of Penn Medicine researchers is set to save lives with cell phone cameras -- and they're challenging the public to help. The MyHeartMap Challenge, a month-long contest slated to take place beginning in mid January, will send thousands of Philadelphians to the streets and to social media sites to locate as many automated external defibrillators (AEDs) as they can. The contest is just a first step in what the Penn team hopes will grow to become a nationwide, crowd-sourced AED registry project that will put the lifesaving devices in the hands of anyone, anywhere, anytime.Armed with a free app installed on their mobile phones, contest participants will snap pictures of the lifesaving devices -- which are used to restore cardiac arrest victims' hearts to their normal rhythm – wherever they find them in public places around the city.
- press release via AnyGeo
The NHS Atlas of Variation 2011, published by the Department of Health (DH) this month, highlights the amount each Primary Care Trust (PCT) spends on clinical services and links this with health outcomes.
Consisting of 71 maps, the Atlas is aimed at helping commissioners learn from one other, consider the appropriateness of a service, and investigate when clinical health outcomes are not reflecting the financial investment that has been made.
This is the second year the Atlas has been produced.
- British Journal of Healthcare Computing
by Adena Schutzberg on 12/20 at 03:00 AM |
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Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, provided a four-point plan for making her vision a reality. Last year at the GEOINT conference she emphasized that she wanted to put the power of geospatial intelligence in the hands of more users. This year she updated the GEOINT Symposium audience with the progress that the agency has made. The four elements of the plan are:
CONTENT - The goal is to expose 100% of the content within the agency and make it discoverable. Any source material, commercial and NRO imagery; foundation data, whether it is spatial or aspatial in nature ... Whatever is in the analyst's shoebox and especially finished product she wants posted on NGA website.
OPEN IT ENVIRONMENT - Long wants an environment that is two way where users can contribute to the CONTENT environment as well.
CUSTOMER SERVICE - Long emphasized that it is all about the user experience. "We are a full service organizations; we understand the user's footprint and can anticipate the needs of our customers; we need an open IT environment to expose all that content," she said. "We will always be embedded with our mission partner; but increasingly our mission partners are GIS-savvy. We encourage it. For users needing assisted service they can enter into a chat with an analyst that helps the mobile force in certain challenges, what Long calls proactive assisted service.
ANALYTICS DEPTH - Long emphasized that when content is easily accessible and the user is being served, then the NGA can get to the deeper analytics. Long said that over 100 applications for mobile use were being developed and she demonstrated an iPad app developed by NGA to help disaster response team.
by Joe Francica on 10/17 at 05:35 PM |
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The Netherlands
The Netherlands Ministry for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation announced the creation of a national database for satellite images that will be available to the public and entrepreneurs. The Ministry is allocating 4 million Euros to create this database. The imagery will be centrally procured to keep costs down. The Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment will be contributing to the satellite database; the minitry will provide full access for free to the government's 'base registry' of topographic data, maintained by the cadastre, starting January 1st, 2012. At the moment access to the full database costs 50.000 Euro.
Sweden
The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has tapped Cybercom to buid an IT system that supports inventory of, damages caused by, and hunting of predators in Sweden. Among the partners is Esri Sverige.
EU
Several EU countries must give funds back to the European Commission due to errors connected with GIS technology.
The main financial corrections are €76.6 million charged to Sweden for the weaknesses in the Land Parcel Identification System – Geographical Information System (LPIS-GIS), administrative controls and sanctions for area-aids expenditures, including area-based Rural Development measures; €70.9 million charged to Italy with regard to the late controls in the sector of milk; and €22.3 million charged to Denmark for the weaknesses in LPIS-GIS, in the on-the-spot checks and in the calculation of sanctions.
by Adena Schutzberg on 10/14 at 03:48 AM |
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DigitalGlobe's Rapid Delivery of Geospatial Intelligence (RDOG) program to provider faster delivery satellite data and intelligence to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency got an added boost today with the federal agency issuing a contract for $37.9 million in additional funding for the program. Jeff Kerridge, senior vice president and general manager of DigitalGlobe’s defense & intelligence business unit said that the original RDOG concept was just a small area online originally that provided but that the web services platform continued to grow withing the past few years. This new contract represents recognition from NGA as to success of the delivery platform. Kerridge said that the program is in alignment NGA director Tish Long's goal of getting more data online and getting closer to the customer.
The objective of RDOG was to provide end users, especially warfighters, access to satellite data within hours of data acquisition. The new contract will expand the scope of image delivery to cover in excess of 10 countries, with imagery delivered within three to five hours after data collection. The ability to provide faster access is facilited by the increase in the number of ground stations located within the equatorial region. This year, DigitalGlobe has activated four new ground stations around the world and three more are planned for 2012, which will take the total number of ground stations to eleven. Kerridge indicated that this added ground station capability for more frequent downloads of satellite data is equivalent to adding another satellite to the constellation.
The RDOG interface is a "Google Earth-like" experience that allows for roaming, panning and zooming to the data that is tagged with information about when it was collected. RDOG also represents the intentions of DigitalGlobe to bring this type of functionality to users in both other public agencies as well as commercial businesses.
by Joe Francica on 10/05 at 08:17 AM |
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