We’re coming down the home stretch with our GISCafe Industry Predictions, so if you haven’t sent yours in, please feel free to do so until January 20th, for inclusion in a series of editorial articles to be published in January. This article is the third installment of those articles.
Every January GISCafe Voice publishes blogs of industry predictions from our readers. This is the second installment of those predictions. This year we have extended the deadline for submissions to January 14th for entries.
The year in review is defined in large part by what drives the technology sector. Natural phenomenon such as fires and floods, earthquakes and hurricanes require continual vigilance to be able to record, predict, respond to and recover from. The effort of Digital Cities is an effort to maintain cities in a more efficient manner, with heightened emphasis on people and data.
According to ABI Research, 500 smart cities will have digital twins by 2025. Currently the cities of Boston, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Helsinki, Jaipur, Newcastle and Amaravati have deployed digital twins.
Richard Leadbeater, State Government Industry Manager for Esri spoke with GISCafe Voice recently about Esri’s approach to smart cities and takeaways from the Smart Cities DC conference held in October. Leadbeater oversees all the state government stories and the area of smart space such as redistricting and elections.
Keith Clarke, CBE, FREng, FICE, RIBA, Chairman, speaking on “Forum for the Future,” at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2019 thought leadership conference in Singapore in October, pointed out that recycling bins throughout the convention center have a sign above them stating, “the greatest threat to the planet is that we think somebody else will save it.”
Avalanches can be extremely dangerous especially for off-piste skiers as well as for small towns situated below the slopes. As ski season comes upon us, it’s a good idea to check the avalanche conditions of the ski slopes you plan on frequenting. There are over 1000 avalanches occurring every year in the Swiss Alps alone. Local communities put up steel fence barriers along the slopes to prevent avalanches from encroaching near their town. To build such snow barriers, steep rock faces and cliffs need to be surveyed with utmost precision.
Belgian company Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), specialists in 3D and mobile mapping, was recently acquired by Bentley Systems at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2019 thought leadership conference in Singapore.
Each year at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure thought leadership conference brings a new dimension to digital workflows. Digital Twins were definitely the order of the day this year, and mobile mapping and some other technologies taking front and center stage in the form of acquisitions.
In September, CoreLogic released their 2019 Wildfire Risk Report that analyzes the top regions, states and metro areas at risk for wildfire damage, including number of at-risk homes and their estimated reconstruction costs. The report also includes a breakdown of 2017 and 2018’s major wildfires, which were quite extensive through the western United States. The report focuses on homes in the western states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Some important facts from the report include (from company materials):
The report found nearly 776,000 homes with an associated reconstruction cost value of more than $221 billion are at extreme risk of wildfire damage.
The Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego metro areas ranked as the top three high-risk areas, respectively with more than 42% of residences at high-to-extreme wildfire risk.
These regions make up more than 51% of the total RCV of the top 15 metro areas analyzed.
In 2018, the highest number of acreage burn occurred in California (1,823,153 acres burned), Nevada (1,001,966 acres burned) and Oregon (897,262 acres burned).
2018 was a record-breaking wildfire year with 8,767,492 acres burned—roughly equivalent to 74 of the 75 largest cities in the United States combined.
This marked the 6th highest total since modern historical records began in the mid-1900s.