Hello, and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 736, April 28th, 2024.
Hello, and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. This is Frank. This is Barb. And unfortunately, we will not be joined by Jesse and Sue this week, but they will be back with us at the next episode, I'm certain. So because of that, we decided to go with a bit of a news episode today. So we're going to run some through some things that we found in the news we thought you might find interesting.
First up in the news, if you are going to any upcoming conferences or meetups this year cartographer Daniel Huffman has created a spreadsheet. If you want to trade any of his projection cards, if you've gotten his projection cards, I just got mine in the mail. You can sign up and trade with other people that are interested. I know that I was excited to show these cards to my students and I was telling people about it.
And someone said, you know, that's one of the nerdiest things I've ever heard of. And I thought you really haven't met a whole lot of geospatial people because this is exciting and not the nerdiest thing I've done that's map related.
Well, I mean, it, it's pretty, I mean, trading, trading cards as somebody who's done that for fun, you know, and magic, the gathering and all that stuff, that's pretty nerdy. And I don't think many people would argue. The projections aren't You know pretty doggone nerdy when it comes to the geospatial realm. So You combine the two this this main event the nerdiest thing i've ever heard, but it's pretty doggone nerdy for gis
Okay
Yeah, well, i'm not saying it's bad. I mean, you know because it looks like it's a lot of fun and There are a few people out there. They're saying they're looking for a particular card to look at the spreadsheet so If you would like to embrace your professional or nerdy and check it out, they are kind of cool You
They are.
And I
actually said to Frank when I got mine, I'm going to send some to Sue. Also, should I keep some packs back that I don't open so they retain their value? That is the nerdy part.
It is the nerdy part.
So surface areas, rivers, and lakes database has been released. What is really significant about this is it looks at seasonal variation in the extent of rivers and lakes from 1984 to 2022. And I think unsurprising for geographers overall, but just the, the amount of change observed for seasonal river extent is larger than 32%. So we know that there's. Seasonal variation but I don't think we realized how much. that this intermittent seasonal coverage has increased since 1984.
So this is a significant amount of work. It's called the Surface Area of Rivers and Lakes, SARL database, which is going to be used for monitoring and research of hydraulic, hydrological cycles, ecosystems, and water management. So a very useful tool and you know, a lot of effort put into this, something that's. Vital today.
Yeah. So the interesting thing here to me is that it covers, it shows the statistical significance for a degree of variation for 84 percent of the global water catchments, which is weirdly simultaneously bigger than I would have expected in smaller because scientists like to think 90 percent is really where we want to live and think. But you know, this is pretty impressive.
It is. And one of the things they talk about is the fact that, you know, we have a lot of advances in remote sensing, but remote sensing can't always get down to this type of information and this type of change. So we're going to have to use. as many tools as we can get to address what's going on with climate. And then next up in the news along this theme, the American Museum of Natural History went through their collection.
Again, you know, a lot of things are still out there in different collections and they found that there are the mussel shells since like, you know, Back to the 60s, and then back to the 1800s that those mussel shells are more porous as we've seen warming waters occur.
So they've, you know, another aspect of geospatial work is they went through their collections since the early 1900s, and they identified this disparity that was going on along the the coast in the US with The North Atlantic, suggesting that this warming is causing changes in the porousness of muscles, I'm having problems and now pronouncing the porosity.
Yeah. So the, the really telling thing here is, of course, this goes back to the early 1900s. So this is about 130 years where the data and it just is sort of a auxiliary support. I think to that. The notion of climate change is in fact happening. That oceans are in fact warming and the implications of that are a lot more widespread than a lot of times. We want to imagine.
So it is a yet another piece of supporting evidence into that sort of conversation dialogue that I think is critical to show more and more of these effects to people who may. pushback on the notion of climate change and why it matters.
And something that just, you know, I just sit with a little bit cause I didn't realize how enormous this was, but they talk about how coastal ecosystems are 10 percent of the world ocean system, yet they hold 90 percent of all marine life. And I know that, you know, I know that thinking about places I've been to coastlines I've seen, and I know how much life is there, but really I don't, you know. Also up in the news along the same lines of the, the changing ocean GMR, the Hamilts.
Center for Ocean Research talking with Intergeo was proposing a digital twin of the ocean. Along with the idea that rivers are not well understood, not well researched, is also this idea that we've been focusing a lot of land on land and land issues, but they wanted to focus more on oceans. And that if you bring all the different things we studied together in a digital twins of the ocean, that we might be able to address some of the the shared. Problems going on and make some changes.
Yeah, I think that I think was kind of interesting out of that is that as a note in the link in the show notes that, you know, as we all know, we learned early on in school that oceans cover two thirds of the earth's surface, and they have a huge impact on the way that we think about the world. And we've always thought about the world and that economies have grown around the ocean being the dominant form of. What's the word I'm looking for here?
Form on, on the, on the planet that we oftentimes think of them as distinct and unrelated economic ecosystems. When in fact, there's a degree of interdependency and again, the link points this out, there's an interdependency there that a lot of times we don't really think about in our day to day operations or in day to day thinking about the world. You know, everything we know about.
Really the seasons and the climate and all that sort of stuff clearly driven by the sun and how it, how it moves relative to the earth. But it's also we have this massive heat sink in the oceans and it also releases that in various forms of energy and that sort of thing.
So. I think this is a really important thing to look into to talk about because I don't think that we think about that, particularly those of us who are landlocked, Jesse and Sue being near the coast, they may be a little more in tune with it. But those of us who are landlocked, we don't think about how critical this stuff is to our day to day existence, much less, you know, the ecosystem and the earth as it exists year to year, millennia to millennia.
They even call it the blue economy, you know, like we said, sometimes we're in the geospatial community. We need to focus on what people listen to. And sometimes what they hear is economy and economic development. But the other thing was just, I thought toddlers, you know, first law of geography, they said, you know, why is this true? It's because Humans live on land and it takes a lot of effort to measure the ocean.
So, you know, it, it tends to not be a studied but they're hoping to change that.
Next up the news and continuing on with this sort of ocean theme and a climate change thing, we've been kicking around here. Noah has confirmed that we're in our fourth global coral bleaching event. Now, if you don't know what a coral bleaching event is, and I didn't really know until this news item. Essentially, the increased heating of the ocean is causing coral reefs to bleach, and this is actually damaging their substructure and causing them to basically have a shorter lifespan.
And there's a whole lot of the ecosystem Of the ocean that depends upon chloral, Beds being very vibrant and active living creatures now, they do heal over time But you know, it's a little bit like getting exposed to like a human being being exposed to something Extreme, you know, it damaged them and it makes them so they don't live as long.
So you know this directly impacts a lot of the near coast ecosystems for a lot of the world which again gets back into the The what did the last news item call it? The
blue economy,
the blue economy is that, you know, so much of the things that we're doing in fishing, so many things we're doing in tourism, you name it, are related to this vibrant ecosystem that is surprisingly delicate. And the fact that we've had, you know, this many bleach events in a very short period of time that Noah's discovered, you know, reporting is a little frightening.
What's impressive to me is that this has been a multidisciplinary effort in NOAA and that this is based on 2018 and 2019 strategic interventions. So they have been trying to implement an increased resilience through these interventions that they set out in an earlier report. So, you know, a lot of the work we do, you know, the geospatial community does is, takes decades. Sometimes to, to implement. So this is, you know, very impressive the work that's being done here.
Yeah. And this is the NOAA coral reef watches CRW. Well so, you know, you can click on the link in the show notes and check out more about it. It's kind of a cool little site too. There's lots of interesting things in there. This is also an area that for anyone in the United States, I recently ran into somebody online saying, well, what services do we get with our taxes?
I mean, Noah in and of itself does some pretty amazing stuff with the resources they're given, which are not, you know, billions and trillions of dollars that people think maybe billions, but certainly not trillions of dollars that people think. And it's just, and yet another area that Noah's involved in, you know, it's pretty cool. Speaking of cool projects that have around forever, we've talked about Landsat so much on the website because it is a stunningly impressive.
Lung project that allows us to understand so much about our earth. And, and really it's a, an amazing feat of engineering and capability and, and store of data that we have access to. Well, they've started doing better capturing of Landsat images on the, on the poles. So, it's called the LEAP project, Landsat Extended Acquisition of the Poles, and it's an attempt to get better data about and around the poles, and it's using Landsat 8 and 9.
The interesting thing, the reason I mentioned the engineering bit is because Landsat 8 was designed to collect more data than Landsat 7. Landsat 7 could get 500 images per day and Landsat 8 and 9 are supposed to get, you know, 50 percent more than that, so 750 images per day. And so when they started thinking about what Landsat 8 could do, they realized, hey, you know, actually we can push this thing to do a little bit more to get a whole lot more information.
And that's essentially what they're doing in this polar science effort is using Landsat 8 and 9 beyond their really intended capacity and capability to collect more data to understand what's going on to poles. Now, why this matters is an awful lot of the things that we're seeing with global warming. And the impacts thereof are coming out of the poles. So as we know, the ice sheets are melting and all that sort of stuff. That's where that stuff is located at.
So we need to have better data about it. Landsat is a very nice because there's certainly other satellites that are capturing information about it and reporting that, but Landsat is very nice because we have a common Data set that we can look across anywhere on the planet to sort of see at a common scale and You know relatively common time frame and and some, you know sensor Sensitivity and all that sort of stuff.
So this is a pretty exciting little project I think and I think it just shows How amazing Landsat is as a technology that you we can just always seem to be able to squeeze a little bit more out of it that you wouldn't think we could get
well, two of the things that they mentioned that the thermal and infrared sensors, the tears can do that they, you know, again, just the Thinking about what can it do that we need is it can detect warm pools of water that are upwelling from the deep and the next, you know, huge thing I thought is that they go, it can see in the dark basically.
There are areas that they couldn't get images 'cause of the darkness of winter and they thought it would be too dark to get useful imagery, but they found out that they're able to get this and it's, you know, very. Romantic sounding name for imagery, but these twilight images of this area that they didn't think they would be able to get imagery for
next up in the news is kind of a cool project called location Europe and I don't know exactly how long it's been around, but we discovered this news item that talked about it for the first time. I think it's pretty nifty. It is a development that came out of the Gio E3 project in Europe, which was around Spain, Finland. I remember all the countries in there. It's a collaboration with Finland, Estonia, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and other EU countries.
And the idea behind this was that there are all these data sets, these very large data sets, geospatial data sets specifically, that are being collected, being, you know, reported, being stuck out there, and they're not, you know, Easily harmonized. And so what this is attempting to do is to bring on these different data sets into a common data format or data schema so that you can interact with it. It's put out under a bazillion free API is out there.
So you can use their API to query the information and get stuff back. There's it. Buildings within two and three D. There's roads and both in two and three D. There's digital train models and surface models, wind speed, sunshine temperature. There's all sorts of data out there that you can grab for location. You're obviously centered upon European continent, not just the EU, and I think it's a really exciting model for nothing else, if nothing else.
There are a lot of other things like OpenStreetMap and out there that are doing this stuff, but they acknowledge that there's all these data sets being put out there, and let's harmonize this under a common platform and just let it out there for general use. There are a lot of companies that do things like this, but, and they have free use cases that you can do, you know, if you're below a certain amount.
I've used this or, or hits or whatever it may be, but this is pretty exciting to just say, throw it out there.
Yeah. And again, it's, it's just an increasing trend. I mean, I think this goes in waves but in recent news items, I've seen a lot more interdisciplinary. Cross country work going on. And it's almost as if just our technology has improved where some of these things are seen as working better together. Also, there tends to be more communication that's leading to it.
But I'm excited to see this going on and in more and more projects where people are sharing data and working together because we know that the world doesn't stop at that political boundary. And this is really useful to take data and then take it to the next step. So you're not trying to piece things together or patchwork things.
Yeah, this is a growth in that sort of middleware, you know, is to use the nerdy programming assist admin. Terms for it is that we have this entire, there's no easy way to make one thing that works for all things. If you focused on the atomic units, there's different, different groups, there's different data set collections, all that stuff is going to use different. methodologies for collecting that technologies.
It's going to put it in different outputs, but if you have that middleware bit that says, let me talk all the, all the proper languages and proper interfaces to talk to all those things, then we can put a front end on it that you can just interact with and allow you to get at it in a common API format. That is a model that many, all several, I don't know what the right term is here. Companies are moving towards for their own stuff, but it is also a model.
I think this can become More and more dominant where that middleware bit is really the heart of what we're providing And then people can come along later and interact with those apis and make value added end products Or you know free end products for anyone to have whether you know, whatever it may be so That that architecture is incredibly powerful and I think it's going to become Hmm Well, arguably it is, but certainly even more so become the
dominant model for geospatial data and technology, because it just makes sense. There's all this data out there and it uses all these different formats and resolutions and projections and, you know, all the things that we like to do. So the slightly different extents, you name it, putting that into a common interface is so powerful and so amazing. And finally, this week there is a really cool interactive map that is now being released.
That's basically a near real time online eruption, volcano eruption interactive map. Now, this is really powerful especially given the number of mostly dormant or silent volcanoes that seem to have started springing up in activity over the last, I don't know, 10 years or something like that. You know, when Iceland and I'm trying to think of the ones that have come up recently. This is using the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory mission, HVO, to sort of basically get this data.
But the problem is, is that the USGS is not really allowed to publish information until it is truly publishable. And for the most part, volcanic eruptions are kind of one of those things that are a little bit like It's similar to earthquakes or something like that, that at about the point that, you know, that it's true, it's almost too late.
You need to, you know, you need to get information out very rapidly and in the USGS is need and I think important need to have very have verifiable, authentic, reliable information means that sometimes they can't move quite as fast as they would. They need to move or people need them to move for volcanic eruptions. So this, this. Interactive math is basically working off that data, but it's extending it a bit to give, you know, near real time information that says, Oh, okay.
In fact, you can see what's going on in a, in a way that you can digest and react to very quickly. So I hope to God nobody ever needs this map. I have to say that
what's, what's really interesting, like you said about, you know, what's available to the public is that this was made with the public in mind. So even though it's not. able to be edited you have a lot of features that you can turn on and off. So you can look at lava flow boundaries at erupting fissures, you know, you can look at flow of lava flow fonts, fronts and that's important.
Those are things that we've seen in other events where, you know, it's, if it's near where people are living, they want to know what's going on. And this is something that. They could go to as a resource to ask those questions.
Yeah, I was trying to struggle with how to talk about the distinction between what they can publish and what they can't. And the interesting thing is, is they can't publish a map. You know, until it's formally published where it has a review process and all that sort of stuff, but they can publish data. And that's really what the distinction allows this to exist. So they're publishing this, this volcanic data and it's actually going into ArcGIS Online is where it's going into.
And then you can, you know, this, this map is made in ArcGIS Online and it's just tapping into that data stream and saying, this is the data we have. So. That may translate, will translate, could translate into a formal map a bit later, but they can make that distinction going, well, we're just publishing data.
And that falls under the what's known as the USGS fundamental science practices group and the fundamental practices group you know, allows them to say, okay, we can make the distinction of data versus map and get information out. So, you know, it may not seem like a. It seemed, it seemed like a bit of a semantic distinction, but I also think it's, it can be very important and helpful for people to understand that you have that authenticity of a map.
But at the same time, we want you to get as much information as possible for the public.
I like how for this, and I think for a lot of the other interactive maps we're seeing, that the term people are using is contextualized. And that, along with the spatial storytelling and the narration, is, I think, a really powerful part of where geospatial work is going, which is for the public. They're saying, you know, we're not just, this is, you know, not a map, but this is data, and we're constructing it. contextualizing it so that you can understand what's going on very quickly.
And I think that's, you know, another trend that we're seeing is this contextualization of spatial data.
And that's it for the news. On to the events corner. If you can check out these events or any others may be happening in your area. First up in very shortly away is the West Virginia associations of geospatial professionals. I never remember if it's biannual, biennial. It's every two years. I remember what the right word is, but it's the, it's the West Virginia Geocon, which is taking place May 3rd. 13th to the 16th in Charleston, West Virginia.
There are still plenty of slots and rooms available. If you would like to go check that out.
Intergeo 2024 is happening September 24th through 26th in Stuttgart, Germany, and their call for ideas is open.
And finally commercial UAV expo is held happening September 3rd through the 5th in Las Vegas, Nevada. As always, if you would like to add any events to the podcast, you can reach us at podcastedveryspatial. com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I'm Barb at veryspatial. com. I'm Frank at veryspatial. com. And you can reach all of our contact information by heading over to contacts. At very spatial. As always, we're the folks from very spatial.
Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in a couple weeks.
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