According to Rayonier New Zealand’s Philip Elworthy, the new Cable Harvesting Planning Solution (CHPS) will help foresters in New Zealand and possibly around the world, to harvest logs from very steep plantations more efficiently. This announcement was made to delegates at a forestry geographic information systems conference organised by Scion in Rotorua.
Some steep terrain harvesting was already taking place in New Zealand, but most of this planting occurred in the early 1990s and would be ready for harvest in the next five to 10 years, creating “huge challenges” for harvest planners, said Elworthy.
On this type of land, this is generally done by cable harvesting, where felled trees are lifted on cables to a central hauler that can be cost effectively reached by trucks. CHPS combines planning software with Esri ArcGIS software to allow planners to model a plantation and configure the most effective locations in which to position the hauler and cables for least environmental impact.
CHPS has been developed by Rayonier, Geographic Business Solutions (GBS) and Atlas Technology, with input from various industry group, including Rotorua’s Scion crown research institute. It will be presented in the United States next month at a conference organised by Esri.
In a session entitled “10 killer apps,” at Esri DevSummit 2012 last week in Palm Springs, CA, Mansour Raad @mraad and Sajit Thomas @spatialAgent show 10 new beta apps developed using Esri technology. The demo in this video shows a UAV shark driven by a Flex Mapping app, the shark is filled with helium and being “flown” around the room powered by a cool Flex mapping app.
Check on the ArcGIS Resource Center for the new 2010 U.S. Census datasets with their new geometry and attributes that are now available as layer packages on ArcGIS.com. The following are all represented as polygons: Block Group, Tract, County, and State with over 40 attribute fields containing population totals by age and race, along with family and household information. Census Blocks are represented as points with total population and household information.
Keith Besserud, AIA, is the director of BlackBox, a research-oriented computational design resource within the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM). With design partner, Ross Wimer, Keith set up the BlackBox studio in 2007 to lead the development and integration of advanced computational concepts within the multi-disciplinary design processes of the office. This includes reviewing computational tools used in architecture and how they apply in urban design.
The Change Matters viewer from Esri can show how your area has changed over a given time period, say for instance, from 1988 to 1990. Las Vegas is known for its phenomenal sprawl over the past four decades. Time-lapseimages from the Landsat earth monitoring satellites reveal in false-color, multispectral imagery how urban sprawl has stretched out from Nevada’s “Sin City” over the past four decades.
This latest video was posted by NASA in honor of the 28th anniversary of Landsat 5’s launch on March 1, but the pictures actually go back to 1972, when the Landsat program began.
This past week, 3500 people attended the Esri Federal GIS Conference held in Washington, D.C. Attendees came from virtually every federal agency, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), GIS companies and other agencies that support federal and state agencies.
Esri president Jack Dangermond kicked off the plenary with a reminder that the world is rapidly changing and we are confronted with new issues such as loss of biodiversity. GIS helps to build intelligence about these issues.
“If we take raw data we can turn it into information by mapping it, that’s why it’s so exciting to look at maps,” said Dangermond. “And now with the dawning of the cloud web world pattern for GIS we’re seeing how we can share this knowledge and create better understanding. GIS drives understanding.”
Some user work was showcased such as the first global dataset of biomass – in Woods Hole, and the relationship between hydrology and biofuels.
Presenters focused on topics such as integration, collaboration and breaking down government silos.
U.S. ethnic and racial diversity maps are available from Esri between 2000 and 2010 and show that between those years, diversity increased most dramatically.
According to Esri, a Census Bureau index measures diversity from zero to 100. The diversity score for the U.S. in was 49 in 2000, which means there was a roughly 50 percent probability that two people randomly chosen from the population belonged to different race or ethnic groups. Hispanics, which totaled 35.3 million in 2000, accounted for a significant proportion of this overall diversity.
Social Media and Authoritative Citizen Data
Crowdsourced data, initially met with skepticism and concern by the geospatial community, is now going mainstream. GIS practitioners have long been the keepers of “authoritative” data, and are now beginning to take crowdsourced data very seriously. This is in large part due to the tremendous utility of crowdsourced data we’ve seen during responses to recent disasters. Crowdsourced data enriches GIS, and Esri is constantly looking at how our users can use, manage, interpret, and incorporate it into their work.
The Cloud
With the advent of cloud computing as a new platform, geospatial applications in the cloud are driving a powerful new modality for GIS. With it, there is an opportunity to reinvent the way the GIS application is built and consumed, as well as influence the discovery and availability of spatial data and geospatial analyses.
Cloud computing provides the potential for access to and publication of dynamic data. This includes the consumption of real-time information for analyses and modeling, which can then be leveraged in applications that serve multiple purposes and audiences. Esri is seeing this more with disaster response operations that are standing up mission-critical geospatial applications hosted in the cloud. With access to seemingly unlimited compute capacity using cloud infrastructures, analytical calculations can be performed in a fraction of the time as traditional processes, which may potentially offer more economic viability as a result of the economies of scale that the cloud affords.
This may seem only attractive to small- to medium-sized businesses, educational institutions, non-profits, and startups. But as cloud computing moves increasingly into mainstream operations for business, the potential for cloud-hosted content and cloud-delivered content is becoming a significant reality for organizations, regardless of size. For a geospatial technologist, cloud GIS can ideally mean that data is always available, always accessible. For the mobile worker, the cloud offers an expansive field to speed workflow productivity and collaboration. Shared data and applications in the cloud can be immediately accessed to discover, view, edit, save changes and invoke geoprocessing functions for on-demand results.
Esri recognizes the opportunities that cloud computing can afford the geospatial professional and technologist. As such, we intend to continue to invest significantly in research and development of cloud-based solutions and services across multiple vendors to satisfy the requests by the geospatial community, and to foster growth of GIS into industries and within communities that may have not been cultivated as yet.
It is important to underscore that our current attention to the cloud does not forego interest and investment in on-premises desktops, servers and mobile applications. Rather, the cloud is another enabling platform to help complement and augment an organization’s sales, marketing, and technology portfolio capabilities.
Business Intelligence and Analytics
Commercial/business applications of GIS have long lagged behind more traditional GIS applications such as planning, government, and environment. But we are starting to see GIS reach much deeper into the business arena due to the focus on integration of GIS with enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, and enterprise content management (ECM) applications. The majority of these integrated applications let end users work either in their business application environment or the GIS environment, so they are not disruptive to existing enterprise workflows.
Esri’s approach in this arena has been to partner with companies who have deep expertise in their respective BI, ERP, and ECM environments. We also recently acquired SpotOn Systems, a company that brings interactive mapping to IBM Cognos business intelligence applications. By making it easier to unite Esri’s spatial analytics, data, and maps with IBM Cognos BI, we think that this acquisition provides business users of GIS with the analytic element that has long been missing.
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