I gave a presentation of my research on southwestern plant patterning yesterday–this was in fact an “oral dissertation defense”, according to the Masters Project Handbook. Below is a video, and the slides. I’ll hopefully be adding more material to the research page as I get around to it, including a NetLogo implementation of an existing vegetation model and possibly a Google Earth tour of some of the sites and data. First however I have to finish writing the non-oral part of the thesis.

Slides (6mb pdf)

Narrative summary of the talk:

Self-patterning of vegetation has been identified in dryland ecosystems worldwide, such as the “tiger striped” savanna of the African Sahel and the banded shrublands of Australia. In these water-limited systems plants are organized into consistent spatial structures by the facilitation of new growth in the organic shadow of existing plants. These landscapes are theorized to be more efficient at retaining rare rainfall, but are also expected to undergo catastrophic shifts if precipitation drops below difficult-to-predict thresholds.

No such banded systems have been identified in America, but I was curious if more subtle patterning could be happening in southwestern drylands which share many of the same ecosystem characteristics and display threshold response to changes in precipitation. If a form of emergent patterning were occurring in these ecosystems, it would have implications for predicting landscape response to pending changes in climate. Focusing on pinon-juniper woodlands in Arizona and New Mexico, I mapped the shapes of patches of vegetation from aerial photographs and measured their degree of spatial pattern. Estimates of surface water movement and distribution were developed for the same sites from digital elevation models. Testing the spatial correlation of these landscape characteristics indicated strong linkages between vegetation patch shape, vegetation density, and surface water hydrology. In sites in Arizona, these relationships were consistent with theories of self-patterning, suggesting that this previously unidentified phenomenon could be occurring in in an American dryland landscape.

Where i is a very large patch class; n is the very large number of patches of class i; j is the very large number of patches of all classes; p is the very large perimeter of patch ij; and a is the very large area of patch ij.

Hexes: Mean Shape Index of Juniper canopies north of Strawberry Crater.
Centroids: local R² of a geographically-weighted regression model linking MSI to modeled accumulated soil water.

I’ve updated my research plan, again. It’s becoming a hobby. Now with improved narrative, and references to attest to its scholarly character.

2 months ago I was wandering around in rented cars, waking up to the dawn in improvised Forest Service campgrounds, cooking up bacon and eggs and coffee on camp stoves, breaking down my tent then rushing out into the piñon-juniper woodlands with a gps antenna magneted to my bandanna, a compass around my neck and a camera in my hand, documenting the landscapes that were going to become my study sites. I would drive and hike around in a rush to look at things until I decided I had to look at something in particular very slowly. Then I would stare at it. Mostly bushes and trees and soil and water courses. Also hills and valleys. I visited Sierra Vista and Tombstone and Arizona and Flagstaff and Cedar Ridge and Tuba City, and mostly places in between, like Cochise County and the San Pedro River and the Coconino forest and Waputki and the Little Colorado canyon and the rangelands of Navajo Nation. I took a train to New Mexico and did similar things there. Then I took a train home. It was a good time. There was a lot I missed because I was in a hurry to look at semi-arid vegetation, but there was a lot I saw because I was looking for semi-arid vegetation. I wrote about it a bit here.

Because I had a camera in my hand and because New Mexico and especially Arizona are so damn visual, I took a lot of photos. I’ve finally posted some of them up here.

Windows on Earth is an interesting Google-Earth-like visualization program, apparently simulating the International Space Station’s view of the world in detail. A version of the project can be run through your web browser, no download.

The interface is kind of cool.

Apparently legendary video game designer Lord British is currently on the space station, and is using the program to help him take photographs of specific locations on earth, which will then be released, through the Windows on Earth program. Which all seems a bit meta. Interestingly, Lord British’s father is/was a NASA astronaut, and the photos being taken now will be for comparison with those taken by his father in the 70s and 80s, to visualize land cover change and human impact. Sounds like an interesting project.

I’m pleased to see that my research has started to produce some GIS art.

Below: Coconino Juniper Patches with Landscape Shape Index Overlay. Media: Patch Analyst on isodata classification of 1m orthoimagery.

For the curious, I’ve posted a more detailed version of my thesis research plan. Which is currently being executed.

Also, I’m nearly done developing some of my photos from my summer research trip, and that gallery will be up soon.

Here’s a fun bit of Google Earth-utilizing research:

Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer, Begall et al, PNAS

“We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring “deer beds” in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction.”

Apparently this work follows on from previous research the team has done on the sensing of magnetic fields by naked mole rats. In this case, they used Google Earth to scroll around looking for cows, then once they had documented 8510 of them, decided they tend to lie down facing north-south. And likewise for deer.

Here’s some more from NPR.

“Holland says that other researchers should confirm the finding. One way of doing that would be to “start going out and putting magnets on the heads of cows and horses and deer, to see how that affects them,” he says. “That’s one of the more traditional ways of testing if they have a magnetic sense.”

If they really do have an internal compass, he says, the magnet would mess it up.”

I’m back from my two-week ramble through the public lands of Arizona and New Mexico. This was an ideal destination for me: I’ve been in the area a few times before, just enough to begin to know what to seek out and what sorts of landscape patterns might be waiting for me, but not nearly enough for it not to seem entirely exotic and impossible to my boreal-based brain. Well, I’ve only now scratched the variations on landscape and vegetation and physiognomy of the great American southwest. But I did get to run down some old leads and spend some really solid time in a couple of regions I’ve long wanted to. And do so with the wonder of ignorance.

And oh yes, I was there to do some research reconnaissance. Looking to see what vegetation pattern looks like from side-on and roots-up instead of from above. I have a lot of digesting to do, but I suspect the trip was successful on that criterion. For sure I had great meetings with people who really do know the ecology of the magnificent semi-arid zones: Dave Breshears (who made time for me the day his right-hand-guy was leaving for a faculty position), Neil Cobb (who made time for me the week he was prepping for his wedding celebration) and Michaela Buenemann (who made time for me in between settling into her new faculty position and road tripping to Dr. Cobb’s wedding celebration). The reflexive generosity of time and ideas that researchers have for each other is one of the things I love about working in the sciences. It seems the best people are the ones who are the most giving of their resources. (Including data! Thanks guys. Thanks also to Dr. Alfredo Huete, whom I now really regret not having been organized enough to ask for a meeting with.)

Thanks also to this guy, whose website drove home the point that, unless it specifically says “no camping”, you can pretty much camp anywhere you want in the southwest. This turned out to be a key idea in my trip. There were a lot of places I wanted to camp, and did. And while I’m at it, thanks also to Enterprise, for not freaking out when I brought some rental cars back with a little dust in the wheel-wells.

Much of the point of being there was to take photos I could later reference while taking the remote-sensing god’s eye view of the same landscapes. So I had my camera in my hand a lot, and I’ll post some photos as I work through them.

I’m leaving today for 2 weeks of field work in Arizona and New Mexico.

I’m doing some field reconnaissance in support of my weird thesis research on self-organizing plant patterns in the semi-desert. That mostly means I’ll be driving around in rental cars, looking to see what the places I’ve been peering at from above actually look like in person. Also camping out in the high desert at night, looking to see what patterns the stars have. I’ll be in the Tucson/Sierra Vista region, then north of Flagstaff and up to the rim of the Canyon, then training into Santa Fe/Los Alamos area. I’m taking the Southwest Chief back to Chicago and Ann Arbor on the 23rd.

Do you see a pattern? I don’t see a pattern.

I’ve made a Google Earth-compatible .kmz file with all the AVIRIS flightline locations from 2000 to 2006, as listed on the AVIRIS website. Google Earth is a relatively painless and speedy way to get a sense of the landscape sensed in each imagery dataset.

More information and the file itself is available on this page.

(AVIRIS is NASA’s plane-mounted hyperspectral sensor. It is entirely a coincidence that I’m posting this on NASA’s 50th birthday but hey, happy birthday NASA.)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was signed into existence 50 years ago today. The Economist has a good, reasonably breif, article about the intentions and directions of the agency. Being the Economist, it’s partially speculation about potential private-industry virtues of “space exploration”. But the article is more about the division between the dreams of the manned and unmanned branches of the agency. It also mentions the earth-observing program, which I think is a third NASA branch unto itself. The article suggests the unmanned probe makers may tolerate the manned exploration romantics just as cover and funding-bait. And possibly vice a versa. Maybe the earth-observers can likewise use both the manned and the unmanned missions as an infrastructure to exploit. Either dream is closer to the original mandate of the massive NASA bureaucracy than building satellites to measure the environment, which could be a hard sell on it’s own. Or maybe, nowadays, astronauts and probes both just draw away money and steam it off into space.

Many happy returns? — The Economist

Also see A Rocket to Nowhere, from a few years back.

Eric Russell’s GIS extension for NetLogo has been released as a 1.0 version. Eric has licensed it as fully open source, in the hopes that it will be developed further by the community, which is great. It will come bundled with the 4.0.3 version of NetLogo, which is due out shortly (and will not be open source at all. When CCL? When?).

It’s too bad the upcoming Language as a Complex Adaptive System conference won’t have a poster session, or I’d use the GIS extension to roll some realistically spatial population-distribution data into my accent formation model and see if it generated any interesting results to poster up.

I’m trying to find some additional study sites for my research. I’ve recently realized how stupid I’ve been by not using Google Earth as my main exploratory site-search tool. Way way waaay faster than trying to download overview imagery raw from USGS or wherever. It also occurred to me that there are thousands of people who cruise around in Google Earth every day, looking for interesting things and talking about it in the forums. So I posted there, in case anybody might have seen the kinds of semi-arid plant patterns I’m looking for. I’m interested to see if there will be any response.

update: the post has been moved to the “Moderated” section of the Nature and Geography forum. The above link has been updated.

A study site in Arizona.

Eric Russell has released an early-development version of an extension for using GIS data in the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment. This is fairly large good news to a fairly small group of people. I’m one of them.

In addition to bringing raster-based data into NetLogo models (such as using USGS elevation data in this Grand Canyon model that Eric previously contributed to) the extension allows for import of vector data in the form of shapefiles. The shapefile format is openly-documented, but that still can’t have been easy to build. Assuming it works, doing so should substantially lower the barrier to integrating truly interesting real-world data into agent-based models, especially for people who don’t want to dedicate the bulk of their effort to that task.

I haven’t tried it yet, so I can’t speak to stability. Installation looks to be pretty easy though. It’s very possible this will come in very handy with my pending research.

(insert routine when-will-NetLogo-go-open-source gripe here.)

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherds is calling it an act of war. The Farley Mowat was seized by teams of “emergency response” mounties deployed in zodiacs from a pair of coast guard ice breakers. Nobody is yet saying exactly where it happened, but apparently they were somewhere in the Cabot Strait, between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. Watson says they were in international waters. The Fisheries Minister, Loyola Hearn, says they were in “internal waters”. That’s a giant difference in interpretation.

So without knowing just exactly where it went down, is either claim reasonable? At the wikipedia level of analysis, the answer is yes.

“Territorial waters” are measured from the low-tide shore baseline 12 nautical miles out to sea. Within it’s territorial waters Canada has legal sovereignty, presumably similar to the legal status of national terrestrial territory. There is an exception requiring free “innocent passage” of vessels, but I doubt if the Farley Mowat could claim they were on a mission of good order and security.

There’s something else called a “contiguous zone” which countries can optionally claim out to 24 nautical miles. Canada does, but it doesn’t seem like it has much serious jurisdiction over that zone.

Here’s what I figure for the territorial waters and contiguous zone of the area, all other things being equal:

By that measure it looks like the Farley Mowat would have had plenty of room for free sailing. Even if they needed to make passage into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, they could have kept outside of Canadian sovereign terrority.

But as far as I can tell Minister Hearn hasn’t actually been directly quoted using the language of territorial waters. He’s talking “internal waters”. Internal waters are also sovereign territory. The wikipedia definition makes it sound like you pretty much need to inland to be internal. Interestingly, Canada makes a number of exceptional claims to “internal waters” that don’t seem to come even close to fitting that definition. Most controversial at the moment is a chunk of the newly-navigable northwest passage. Also however, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Once again, according to wikipedia, the Gulf estuary (the worlds largest estuary!) covers the area between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. By definition, from the looks of it:

It’s worth noting that within internal waters, there’s no right of even innocent passage.

So was the Mowat attacked by mounty pirates when she was boarded, or was it an legitimate arrest? If you accept Canada’s claim that the 1000s of square miles of heaving grey Atlantic in the Cabot Strait are “internal waters”, then it looks like this a purely internal affair. If you’re dubious of that claim, then it gets interesting.

But even if it was a high-seas boarding, it won’t rank as especially crazy on the Canadian-fisheries high-seas boarding scale of craziness. Back in 1995 the Coast Guard forcefully boarded a trawler that wasn’t in internal waters, wasn’t in territorial waters, and wasn’t even in the 200 mile economic zone.

From the federal court record:

“On the 9th of March, 1995, at or about 18:15 (6:15 p.m.)[1], armed boarding parties from three (3) or four (4) Canadian vessels boarded the Spanish deep-sea freezer-trawler ESTAI (the “ESTAI”) within the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (”NAFO”) Regulatory Area, which is to say outside Canadian fishery waters or, put another way, on the high seas. The boarding parties, which may have included members of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (”RCMP”) emergency response team, arrested the ESTAI.”

(emphasis added)

From ever-trusty wikipedia:

On March 9 offshore patrol aircraft indicated a likely candidate and several armed DFO offshore fisheries patrol boats, along with Canadian Coast Guard and navy support, pursued the Spanish stern trawler Estai in international waters outside Canada’s 200 nautical mile (370 km) EEZ. The Estai cut its weighted trawl net and fled, resulting in a chase which stretched over several hours and ended only after the Canadian Fisheries Patrol vessel Cape Roger firing of a .50 calibre (12.7 mm) machine gun across the bow of the Estai. The Canadian Coast Guard Ship Sir Wilfred Grenfell used high-pressure fire-fighting water cannons to deter other Spanish fishing vessels from disrupting the enforcement operation. Finally, armed DFO and RCMP officers boarded the vessel in international waters on the Grand Banks and placed it and its crew under arrest.

(emphasis added)

This seems a little hard to credit at first blush, but a report from somebody called the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information is claiming that lack of open access to spatial information might have cost the Australian GDP about 7%. Damn. Here’s Open Access New reporting on the subject.

There’s something compelling about this map of the walking paths of the Apollo 11 astronauts on moon, superimposed on a baseball diamond for scale.

Like, they were really there walking around on the holy crap moon.

A bit. They didn’t go very far. If I was on a brand new world I wouldn’t go far from the car either.

In the late winter of 2006 I worked as a picker at Vantreight farms, which if I remember correctly is the second largest daffodil farm in the world. At the time there was much controversy and knowing unspokeness around the farm fields because Geoffrey Vantreight Jr., the grandson of the founder, had just passed away and his sons were feuding over what to do with the property. With real estate value what it is in the Victoria region (and the Saanich peninsula being drop dead gorgeous in certain lights and from certain angles, which I had plenty of opportunity to experience bouncing out in the farm bus as the sun came up), the land the flowers are grown on is arguably worth far far more than the flowers will ever sell for. On the other hand, the land is in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is a sort of functional greenbelt and which requires a lot of baksheesh to the Victoria City Council before you can develop in it. As I was slogging up the muddy rows of maturing daffodil stems with my pairing knife, the entire matter had landed in some sort of court or binding arbitration, and the future pre-summer livelihood of Quebecois hippies, Punjabi-Canadians, migrant Mexican labourers and the occasional aimless BSc. was hanging in the balance.

According to a slick new addition to the daffodil.com website, it appears the matter has been resolved. A fancy flash interface will show you a series of map overlays which propose a

“mixed-use housing development on land that is not farmable or in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) featuring 31 single-family homes, 92 townhomes, and 141 condominium units. Net revenue generated from the proposed development of this land will be invested back into Vantreight Farms, which grows approximately 18 million daffodils per year, generating 1,500 to 2,000 jobs annually. This development is essential for Vantreight Farms to modernize and expand its operations and also to assist us in becoming economically, environmentally and socially sustainable for generations to come.”

Interesting. Judging from the amount of money they’ve spent on GIS and web development, I’d say there must be some ongoing controversy they’re trying to allay.

update: Shortly after posting this I got a call from Ryan Vantreight, grandson of Geoff Jr., who was concerned about some of what I said in this post. He offered some extra information, which I’m happy to present here (I hope this is an accurate summary of Ryan’s main points)

(I’m not too worried that modernization would mean the end of seasonal picking on the farm. I’ve watched Star-Wars-esque machines, under the control of a couple of guys, harvest an acre of California cotton in 15 minutes which would have taken dozens of pickers a day back in the day. But I have a hard time imagining how any similar machine could harvest daffodils of just the right stem length without enormous wasteage, too much to be affordable. I think.)

I’m in no position to verify or dispute any of this of course, but Ryan certainly sounded like a reasonable guy. I carry a deep and I think justified suspicion of residential development around Victoria (think Bear Mountain and shudder), and a condo development for a condo development’s sake isn’t much to celebrate. But I like the daffodil farm and remain grateful for the paid work I did there. Nor can I rule out doing some more of it. Vantreight farms is a couple of rare things — a large yet family owned enterprise, and a (so far) functioning farm. If Vantreight Hills is what’s required to keep the farm afloat, then it can at least be said that there are less justified condominium development proposals in the world.

It’s crazy go nuts week here in graduate student land, as final projects and final exams go off like mortar rounds all around us. Duck and cover! “Graduate student”. Oxymoron.

Yesterday I submitted my term project for my data analysis class: an implementation of Moran’s I statistic for measuring clustering in spatial data, built in the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment.

Moran’s I is a bit dated now I suppose, especially if you ask an up-to-date geostatistician, but everybody still uses it because it’s what everybody knows. And who has up to date geostatisticians hanging around to ask these questions of? If you’ve got a NetLogo model and you want a basic measure of spatial autocorrelation of the results, feel free to use and abuse the code. I managed to port it into my NetLogo accent formation model.

Be warned: it’s not 100% statistically valid or validated. I would be careful about reporting strong claims of “statistically significant clustering” until you’ve either improved on it or carefully characterized the results in your own model. But I think it’s reasonable as an ad hoc measure of clustering to parachute into whatever needs one.

Before I had this thing running, the measure of autocorrelation I was using in my accent model was to crank out a semivariogram for all the point pairs, add up the average value-distance for all the pairs on the “near” half of the variogram, add up the average for the “far” half, and compare the ratio of the “near” and “far” averages. Ouch. I called it the “near-far index”. In fact, let’s call it “Stimson’s near-far index”. Don’t use it for God’s sake. When presenting my Moran’s I improvement, I kind of had to describe the Stimson’s statistic it was replacing. Pierre Goovaerts was in the room. I felt his friendly Belgian eyes burning into my back with incredulity. Ouch.

The Living Oceans Society have put together an animated interactive model of hydrologically realistic oil spill scenarios on the BC coastline. It has lots of features, but it can be comprehended faster by using it than having it described, which is a great thing. You can add bird habitat, fish migration routes and the like to the map, then watch them get obliterated when the ocean currents turn the wrong way. It’s super cute, and appropriately scary.

Oil shipping, processing and extraction has been strongly regulated in BC, but a number of serious threats have been coming up in the last few years (e.g. there is a long-standing moratorium on even exploring for oceanic oil off the BC coast, but the government is now claiming that it can’t find the piece of paper where that was written down). Public opposition has been strong and will get stronger. This model contributes to that discourse with a nice mix of modeling, GIS and infoporn.

Footnotes on their data sources and processing techniques are here.

As part of my series of ‘quality blogposts I will eventually get around to writing’ (see also further notes on making websites from open source CMSs and comparing music player software), I’m working on some hows and whys to make embedded website maps using open source tools. Inevitably, this isn’t that. But I did come across this website and I figured it was worthy of a shout out:

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.

Their mediawiki powered, cc-wiki licensed website is amateurish but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my estimation. Sometimes amateur websites suffer from poor informational design, but this is one of the better I’ve seen. The “I want to see maps; get out of my way!” link square at the top of the front page may be a bit cute but it does the job. The ‘lolcat of awesomeness’ they hand out to special contributors may be way too cute but well, it does the job. The whole thing comes off as active, friendly, and telegraphs how to get deeper in, rather than intimidating the new visitor by suggesting how much deeper in you would have to go to figure anything much useful out.

And they’re an open-access street map project. How cool is that?

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab routinely uses Cuprite, Nevada as a testing and demonstration site for their plane-mounted hyperspectral sensor AVIRIS.

I’ve been working my way through the back-catalog of AVIRIS imagery, looking for a study site. I was kinda suprised when I saw this:

I guess somebody noticed all those planes and decided to give NASA something to look at.

Full sized image (a black&white preview of the actual data set), is here.

Recently my extended family was chatting about “nasty corporate entities you have worked for”. I have quite a list. Logging companies, oil companies, militaries. It ain’t pretty. My mom pitched out NASA as one of mine.

Now I don’t quite agree with that. It’s far too true that the vast majority of NASA’s resources are committed to cube-esque self-perpetuating boondoggles on the one hand, and boyish triumphalist pre-obselete politicized megafollies on the other. And that’s bad. Some people are advocating a new apollo program to save our planet from epic climatic perturbation, and instead what we have is a more literal apollo program to stand around on Mars a bit. Kind of a waste of our treasure, and a bit off the point as a new spiritual uniter of our civilization. Yes, OK. But.

NASA also does some of the best work on the planet on gathering data about the planet. Planetary and regional and landscape-scale data that is sine quo non for understanding and responding to planetary and regional and landscape-scale problems, which increasingly exist. The fact that we can think globally and quantitatively at the same time, at all, is largely thanks to the boffins and administrators at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and their fancy ballcaps.

The biggest and best and most mature of NASA’s earth-observing programs is the Landsat series of satellites and their accompanying infrastructure and data processing and distribution programs. Anybody who works in satellite monitoring of the earth’s functions has used Landsat data, and probably mostly Landsat data. Around the time that NASA announced it’s Bush-mandated refocus on putting people on Mars, they also quietly announced that the ailing Landsat program was going to be left to die in space, dieing as the satellites died one by one.

Well, as of this month, they’ve backed off that position. They are once again going to allocate some small fraction of their budget into useful programs. According to this report, a resolve exists to make the “moderate-resolution imaging” program a permanent and stable thing. This is good news. So yay NASA! And yay me for taking their money (sort of, occasionally)! And yay Landsat! May you ride the horizon a few decades longer.

José M. Vidal is writing a textbook called “Fundamentals of MultiAgent Systems”, and he’s posted an alpha version on his site, with a call for comments. It’s here:

Fundamentals of Multiagent Systems Textbook

The link to the .pdf seems a bit flakey, but if you try a couple of times it should come through.

Apparently the book is based on his experiences running a grad course in agent based systems. Cool.

He also runs this user-blog on multi-agent systems:

www.multiagent.com

which works on the mechanism that if you assign a weblink in del.icio.us with a certain tag (for:jmvidal), that link and your accompanying text will show up on the blog. Neat.

A friend posted to a remote sensing mailing list to say that he was trying to “create a standalone program for manipulating shapefiles” and did anyone know of any existing code libraries for such things? Several of the responses he got pointed him in the direction of the existing open source GIS community. For example, opensourcegis.org.

GIS is Geographic Information Systems. It’s computer mapping software basically, but it usually isn’t very basic. The existing, commercial tools, are complex, tricky, legacy-ridden and quite powerful. There is one world leader in the production of the software, ESRI with their ArcGIS family, and it is deeply entrenched throughout industry and research.

Open Source is software collaboratively developed by dispersed individuals who contribute their code more or less freely. In return they take advantage of the work of other who collectivley build software that is cheap or free, and open to transformation and growth.

The idea of an actual, functioning open source GIS community is a painful sort of hope. The cost of a single seat license for ESRI ArcGIS is USD$1500.00. That’s a tall barrier to anyone outside of either a) a big institution or b) the western world. GIS, mapping, may sound banal but it’s not. Using spatial data is bottom-line-key to policy and planning in a profound portfolio of infrastructure areas: environmental management, conservation, social and urban development, health. The possibility that every NGO and developing-country school and government organization could use powerful GIS tools is, pardon my geek, a thrilling one.

The reason the hope is painful is that the open-source community has some very high walls to climb if they want to succeed, so high I’m doubtful. The barriers to any new GIS software ecology gaining use are, I think, these:

• interoperability

  It’s getting easier to open files from one program in another, but even when you can open them, working with them glitch-free across programs is a major issue. Often the process of importing and translating without losing functionality can be time taking and frustrating.

• transmission of knowledge

  While the underlying theories of cartography and GIS are mostly the same for all different flavours of software, much of the knowledge of a skilled GIS operator is tied up in the working details of specific software. People learn those details from courses or colleagues. Such training is precious and hard to come by, and usually people take what they can get, rather than choosing their software platform and seeking out training for that platform. Once you’ve learned a platform, it’s a more than most people are willing to do to retrain themselves.

• cost

  nobody wants to buy sofware to do the same thing more than once.

Open source software can generally dodge the cost issue, since it’s typically free and isn’t vulnerable to most of the “total cost of ownership” questions that arguably affect OS operating systems, but the the other two barriers remain substantial for any new GIS software, definitely including open source options.

Hanging over all this is the question of quality. Even if all of the “unfair” barriers to entry are overcome, new software will still have to face the “fair” one: is it good enough to use? For all the complaints I have about ESRI software — and I assure you, I have many — I recognize that creating a program that does so many different complex operations for so many different types and skill levels of users is not a simple thing. The amount of code in the ArcGIS suite must be staggering, and the magnitude of man-hours of interface development is beyond guessing. If an open-source alternative is to compete on features, which ultimately it must, it will require the development of hundreds of analysis and manipulation processes. It seems to me that this is potentially a greater programming challenge than any open source project I am aware of, with the single exception of a full operating system. OpenOffice appears straightforward in comparison (and was jump-started by the Sun Office code, for which there is no paralell option in GIS world), Mozilla/Netscape ditto.

I deeply hope there’s some group of crazy GIS programmers out there with the technical capacity and the heart to take on this challenge. In my short career with GIS/remote sensing I have time and again come across situations where I wished there was a license free GIS package that small groups, enivronmental groups, developing-world groups, could use. Information is power in law, in politics, in science. There is a lot more free data out there than there was: GLCF with it’s back-catalog satellite imagery data, SRTM with all that topology, old, uncopyrighted Soviet maps waiting to become useful again, free fresh satellite data for the taking from NASA, and dozens of small and medium labs turning out their intermediary products. But turning raw and intermediary data into final product needs that software tool. I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of potential users of GIS simply don’t have the technical knowledge and the computing access to make those products when they need them. Technical know-how is a whole other quagmire, but if someone could make an open source GIS package, the benefits would be substantal and long-lasting. I wish I was more optimistic about the chances of that happening.

I’ve been playing with Google Earth, the free 3D earth visualizer that you can download from Google. Three things strike me. First, I’m suprised that more people aren’t excited by this program. Using it is such a striking experience that I would have expected a meme-ish propagation of interest in it. Given that there is some capacity for user upload of points of interest and commentary into the “keyhole community” space, I also would have expected more interest in user-repurposing. Perhaps it isn’t an open enough platform to encourage data-mashing on the scale of Google Maps, which seems to spawn off a new user side project daily. Regardless, just as a beautiful toy, I’m suprised more folk aren’t obsessing about it.

Second, I’m intrigued that some versions of the program exist that allow importation of some standard GIS data formats for overlay. ERDAS Imagine and TIFF image files, and shape files for vector. The program has no analysis tools of course, so it has no pretensions of being a real GIS platform, but as a data visualizer it could be hard to beat. How many times have I seen wary biologists converted to a belief in spatial computing by seeing their study site spun about in 3D? Well, okay, 3 that I can remember off hand, but that’s a lot. Google Earth’s visualizations are wildly compelling in their intuitivness and scalability - you can see scenes as small as a barnyard placed concretley in the context of the relief of a valley or the expanse of a continent in a few smooth shifts of a mouse. Plug some data into this thing and it could make a major difference doing hard-sell for a project proposal. Everybody likes colourful maps, and these are some colourful maps.

And what if Google did decide to go into GIS analysis? They are the information people. Could be interesting.

Finally, it takes me at least 10 minutes of playing with the globe before I feel comfortable without having north close to being up. After a while I get used to the idea of north not having a specific direction, but I really have to overcome a mental barrier to do it. Once that barrier is past, it opens up some striking new vistas and ways of looking at the earth and it’s forms. But it definitely doesn’t come naturally.

If this doesn’t amaze you in some way you suck. the spirit martian lander/rover is sending back the highest resolution pictures ever taken of the surface of another planter. They’re in colour folks.

NASA seems to be publishing them in a few different ways, but the best seems to be this chronologically arranged list of everything that they get.

Lookit that. It’s another damned planet.