LIDAR

An poster that shows how LIDAR can be used artistically.  Source:  DOGAMI (http://www.oregongeology.org/pubs/ll/p-posters.htm#Honeyman)

I recently attended  a presentation at Portland State University on LiDAR.  The presenter was  Ian Maden, Chief Scientist of Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).  He discussed several topics including:  the basics of LiDAR,  planning/ obtaining funding, how foresters have used LiDAR, and a few of DOGAMI's projects.  


I want to give a brief explanation of what LiDAR is but for a better understanding I recommend checking out  DOGAMI's LIDAR page. The US Forest Service is also a great resource for learning more about LiDAR (Link).  LiDAR stand for light detection and ranging (According to Ian it really started out as "Light Radar".)   LiDAR is collected by sending a pulse of lasers from an aircraft to the ground.  The beams then bounce back up to the sensor.  The distance the light traveled can be calculated by knowing how long it takes the light to hit the surface and bounce back to the sensor.  Each pulse is record as a point with the aid of GPS a 3 dimensional location can be recorded for each point. All of the points create a point cloud.  The point cloud can then be used for a variety of purposes. 


One of the major uses of LiDAR is to create a Digital Terrain Model (DEM) that has high resolution.  To create the DEM the point cloud must be converted into a bare surface model.  Another use of LiDAR is to monitor forests and map vegetation.  You can actually identify the top of individual trees and determine the height of a tree using LiDAR.  THE US Forest service has free software called fusion that will allow you to use LiDAR data.  

LiDAR isn't just limited to airplanes.  In fact many companies are using LiDAR on the ground to collect data to create accurate 3D models.  One of my mentors  worked on a variety of projects that has used terrestrial LiDAR.  One of the more interesting  projects was collecting data in a factory so that a 3D model could be created.  The owners of the factory wanted to figure out the easiest way to get new equipment into the factory.  Other uses for ground collect LiDAR include:  Detecting surface change, forest and habitat modeling, and mapping bathemetry of lakes and rivers, as well as making models of crime scenes.    

The amount of information that we can collect by using LiDAR is amazing.  There are so many uses for the data being collected and I'm sure people will come up with new and exciting applications in the future.  I recommend explore the data and learning more about LiDAR I've provided a few links below to help you get started with your exploring.

Links to more information
Video Introduction to LiDAR
Forest Service Fusion Program
CloudCompare Software

Examples of LiDAR Projects
Forest Model
Crime Scene
i 10 Associates
Quantum Spatial
 

Neighborhoods Introduction

Editor Note:  This is the first post in a series about neighborhoods  

Lately I've been interested in neighborhoods and how they are defined.  There are many ways people reference what part of a city they live in.  Some example includes: street intersections, local features, or neighborhoods. 

In the city of Portland there are over 90 neighborhood associations.  Each  representing a unique area of the city.  For more information visit https://www.portlandoregon.gov/oni/28385.  In larger cities neighborhoods help give people a sense of community.  Having neighborhoods association help business and individuals plan how their community grows. Typically the neighborhoods also have an important and interesting history.

 There are many ways to define neighborhoods and sometime these definitions can cause confusion.     For example I live in a neighborhood of Portland called Montavilla.  The map below is an outline of the neighborhood based on the neighborhood association  boundary.  

The above image is a map depicting the boundary of the Montavilla Neighborhood .  This map cab be found at https://www.portlandoregon.gov/oni/48330  

In my mind Montavilla is much smaller than this map.  I personally wouldn't describe 86th AVE and Division as part of my neighborhood, but it is part of the the official Montavilla Association neighborhood.  There are also some areas of Portland that people refer to using other names then their "official"  neighborhood name.  For example Mall 205, and Gateway are used all the time to reference an area along I 205 and the I 84 intersection. 

Over the next few weeks I want explore the idea of neighborhoods and peoples perspective on neighborhoods.  I also will be writing about   the history of a few select neighborhoods and how that history formed the community and influenced its boundaries.  

Maps aren't just for real places

When I was younger I remember creating maps of fake cities.  As a child I had no real sense of city/ urban planning, so most of my maps depicted sprawling cities that had everything thing you could think of from 5 professional sports teams to the largest park in the world.  Rarely did my maps include places for people to work (like ship yards, factories etc.).

Now I realize that cities and how they developed are really influenced by their narrative.  By that I mean:  The cities natural landscape,   what brought the first settlers, the cities relationship with surrounding neighbors, and the cities history in general. This type of narrative is what really gives a city its structure and shape.  Though it is not necessary to create a full narrative/history of an imagery  city it important to keep the narrative in mind if you want to create a semi realistic city.

While it can be fun to create large cities that resemble New York or London it can be just as interesting to create a city that is  ordinary.  I came across a project by Neil Greenberg called "fake Omaha".  Greenberg's project is creating a city that is average.  Not only did Greenberg hand draw a map of the city, but he created a narrative of the city.  Now "Fake Omaha has become a place to test new planning and development ideas. If you interested in urban planning or jsut creating a Realistic fake city I suggest checking out this project.  

Links to check out relating to "Fake Omaha"

Interview with Neil Greenberg

An article with examples from Fake Omaha

Official Fake Omaha website

Volunteer Mapping Efforts

I originally got the idea for this post after reading  Mapbox's blog post about providing imagery to help map parts of Mongolia (click here to read their post).

Living in America it is easy to pull up a map online that is update and accurate.  Sometimes sites like Google maps aren't updated and that has allowed sites like OpenStreetMap to become a more update place to get a map.  OpenStreetMap allows users to add information to maps.  Maybe a new neighborhood has opened and their streets haven't been mapped, or maybe a street is closed.  Open source mapping is a powerful tool.

People do a good job at updating areas that they live nearby or are familiar with, but many parts of the world  aren't accuracy mapped even with OpenStreetMap.   OpenStreetMap has created an organization called "Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team" (HOT).  Please check out their website to learn more (http://hot.openstreetmap.org/).  HOT was developed to aid in Humanitarian work by creating accurate and up to date maps of areas in need. 

A recent project by HOT was updating maps of areas in Africa affected by Ebola.  Before their involvement some areas only showed a few roads, when there are actually hundreds.  The Red Cross has a nice article (found here) about HOTs mapping efforts.  HOT also has plenty of information about this project on their website. 

While some of HOT's work involves collecting data a lot of there work can actually be done from anywhere in the world.  by providing volunteers with satellite imagery in OpenStreetMap, users can digitize rivers, roads or anything else they can see from the imagery.   So if your interested in Humanitarian work or want to get involved with relief efforts during a natural disaster, but aren't able to take time off from work or travel to help, consider getting involved by digitizing imagery.   

40 maps to keep you busy this weekend

Kalev H. Leetaru, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Anand Padmanabhan, and Eric Shook

Today I came across an article from the Washington Post  called "40 more maps that explain the world" (click here).  I found most of the maps to be relative and interesting. Though all of the maps had interesting information  to display, I found a few didn't do a good job at grabbing my attention.  With so many maps being created I think its important to create maps that really stand out and have a clear purpose (of course many of the maps presented in this article are part of bigger presentations and were never meant to be viewed alone).

The map at the top of the page really caught my eye. The map was created using information from twitter.  I think the author's use of a dark background really help the foreground to stick out.  I've noticed that a lot of mapping that uses only points to map areas tend to use a darker background.  Like many maps that use twitter data you can gain valuable knowledge about population density and transportation networks.   

Have fun exploring these forty maps and who knows you might learn something as well. 

Foss4G /WhereCampPDX

This week FOSS4G is holding it's annual conference in Portland OR.   Do to my lack of planning and busy work schedule  I haven't been able to attend any of the events, but several of the workshops were held just down the hall from my office at PSU. 

For those of you who don't know what FOSS4G is here's a description from their site:

"The annual FOSS4G conference is the largest global gathering focused on open source geospatial software. FOSS4G brings together developers, users, decision-makers and observers from a broad spectrum of organizations and fields of operation. Through six days of workshops, presentations, discussions, and cooperation, FOSS4G participants create effective and relevant geospatial products, standards, and protocols.

FOSS4G has been held all over the world and draws attendees from over 40 countries. Nottingham, England hosted the conference in 2013. In 2014, Portland, Oregon, USA will host FOSS4G’s tenth year." (https://2014.foss4g.org/about/)

And below is a link to the maps that have been submitted for their map contest.  I encourage you to take a look.  These maps were made using open source software and open source data. 
https://2014.foss4g.org/map-gallery/

On Friday after the FOSS4G comes to a close a weekend event called WhereCampPDx will be kicking off.  WhereCampPDX is a free "nonconference"  where those in attendance get to select what topics are covered.   "Popular topics include social cartography, software and hardware, context awareness, mobile experimentation, humanitarian mapping efforts, food webs and local food transparency, transit, psychogeography, geo games, paper maps, and place hacking."
check out their site at  http://wherecamppdx.org/

Historical maps of Portland

I thought it would be interesting to look up some historical maps of the Portland area.  Over the last century the layout of Portland has changed drastically.  Some of my neighbors can remember when the house across the street was an open lot where kids played baseball.   My journey of discovery took me the the City of Portland's website (https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/44016) where I found a whole bunch oh historical maps and comparisons.  A lot of the documents seem to focus on the change of the east side of Portland. 

Paving map from City of Portland Archives

The above image is a map of Portland that shows which streets were paved in 1894.  The streets are broken into type of pavement.  What I found interesting was the track that was located in NE Portland.    Until looking at this map I was not aware of there being a track in that area. 

I think a lot can be learned from how a city develops overtime.  These historical documents will play an import role in future city planning as the population increases and space becomes an issue. 

School's Starting Soon (if it hasn't already)

Fall term has already started on many campuses and is only a few short weeks away for the rest of the students.  Even though I won't be pursuing a degree this term I still want to pursue an education.  For a very brief second I thought about taking classes as a non degree student.  Portland State offers several interesting classes I haven't  taken yet, but one class can cost over $1000 and take up valuable time.   Last year  I came across a post on GIS Lounge about the abundant free online courses out there.   Many college now offer a wide selection of college classes online for free, there are now several stand alone sites that provide courses for free.  Though some schools offer a very slim selection of GIS courses, most have a decent geography offering.  Some school however, offer a very wide selection of GIS classes.  So far Penn State  (http://open.ems.psu.edu/courseware) looks the most promising. 

Below is a link with more free courses to check out. 
http://www.gislounge.com/learn-gis-for-free/

Map of Oregon and Washignton

This is a map I made for my map design class.  The Assignment was to create a map that showed some part of the U.S. and used a point, line, and polygon feature provided by the instructor.  The background is an image courtesy of Tom Peterson.   For my map I choice to display features associated with people in the Pacific Northwest.  The features I used were, roads, urban areas, and cities.  I choice to keep my design simple by using red for roads, grey for urban areas and dots for cities.  To indicate the relative size of the urban areas I varied the size of my labels.  I also want to distinguish Interstates from state highways, so I used the standard road shields.  One thing I would like to change about this map is the color and font I used for labeling the cities.  Its hard to read some of the labels over the background.  I would also lighten the background image (when print the background is vary dark). 

Last term I took a class called Map Design and Production.  It was the first class I took that was completely focused on map design.  The teacher was an actual cartography for the BLM, so he gave a lot of insight into making a map geared towards your specific audience.  Up to this point all the GIS classes I took simply had us spit out a map using ArcGIS (with the time and right knowledge you can make a decent map in ArcGIS).  In this design class we used ArcGIS to gather  and analyze the data and then exported the basic GIS map into Adobe illustrator, where we made our final map. Another aspect that made this class interesting was that we focused solely on making maps for print rather then web display.  Two differences between the formats are the way you select colors (RGB for web, CYMK for print)  and print maps are static rather then interactive.  I would be interested in taking a class or learning more about web mapping since we are seeing a large increase in its presence.

Selecting the right colors for your maps can make a huge difference on how they are persevered.   Trying to find the right color can be challenging and take a lot of work.  Luckily my instructor introduced us to a site called color brewer ( http://colorbrewer2.org/ ).  The site gives advice on which colors to use depending on several criteria.  I found the sight helpful, but still had to spend time tweaking the colors so they looked the way I wanted them.    Below is an example of a  map I designed using color brewer.

Transit planning and GIS

 My research for a  term project last year lead me to a lot of new and interesting sites related to transit.  I'd like to highlight one of them.  I would like to look at Jarret Walker's blog  (http://www.humantransit.org/).  Mr. Walker has years of experience working on public transportation and has even written a book on it.  His blog has a ton of general information related to mass transit as well as specific parts dedicated to individual cities.  So far I have only had time to read the Portland Oregon part of his blog.  It has a lot of information and I can only assume his other sections are just as detailed.  I like his blog because it isn't just one or two paragraphs per subject.  He really dives into the material.   I'm sure his blog will be a huge resource for me when it comes to public transit.   

python programming, and more

This term I took a python programing class.  I had done a little programming a few years ago but didn't remember a lot.   Taking this class remind  me  how useful program can be for running automated tasks.  If you have never heard of  python and you do a lot of geoprocessioning  I recommend checking it out.  Here's  link to my programming class webpage http://gisgeek.pdx.edu/wordpress/gis-programming-python/.  There are lots of good links so you can start exploring python.  Python is a very simple programming language and is easy to get started with. 

Taking this class also made me realize how much we are dependent on programing.  Every webpage relies on programing.  The interactive pages require a lot of programing.  Today I read an interesting article on wired.  ( http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/facebook-hack/) Some engineers from Facebook have created a new programing language called 'Hack".  A lot of people think this will be the language of the future.  The cool part is that it is open source and has been tested on one of the biggest  platforms there is, Facebook itself.  I haven't had a lot of time to look into it further, but I'm interested to learn more and see how it works. 

A great way to display statistics of San Fransisco crimes

 

 

map designed by Doug McCune

I came across this map on strange maps http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps.  These infographics were created using 2009 crime stats for San Fransisco. It can get so boring looking "heat" maps of crime or boring old graphs.  Doug's approach brings a new look to crime data.  It does a really good job at showing where the hot spots are for crime.  I In general I think 3-d images do a great job at capturing people's attention.  If your interested in finding more unique maps I recommend checking out Strange Maps      

Cool new site

Curiosity of Hand Maps.org http://www.handmaps.org/recent.php?ID=347

 I've been trying to find some good books on cartography (I know the internet is full of useful information, but there is just something about a physical book).  As I was searching for book I came across this site site http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/01/07/must-read-map-books/.  which eventually lead me to Hand Maps http://www.handmaps.org/index.php .  This site has user submitted maps that are hand drawn.  With the so much cartography and map making done using a computer its really refreshing to see some hand drawn maps.  Some are simple sketches of family trips while others are very detailed.  This site has given me some inspiration and I'm thinking of taking the time to make a hand made map. Maybe it'll will be good enough to appear on Hand Maps. 

Google map tutorials

When Google Earth first came out I was in high school.  I though it was so amazing being able to look at anyplace on earth and mark places I’ve been.  Over the last decade they’ve kept adding new features to it.  Beyond Google Earth Google has revolutionized the way we look at and use maps.   In the past I’ve mainly used Google Maps to look up location, but there is so much more you can do.  For example you can create custom maps, look up traffic conditions among other things.  Below is a link to Google maps tutorials.  http://www.google.com/earth/outreach/tutorials/all.html Some of the videos are very useful.  I hope to use some of these new techniques and post  some examples of my work.