Please note that the URISA Journal is currently calling for contributions to special issues on
1) PPGIS
2) GIS in Spatial Planning.
For more information, please visit
http://www.urisa.org/urisajournal
Author: Olaf Schroth
Case Study: Sea Level Rise Adaptation in Delta at AAAS Conference – Feb 19
The case study, Sea Level Rise Adaptation in Delta, BC, Canada, will be highlighted at the AAAS Conference during a Press briefing on Sunday Feb 19th at 3:00 pm. David Flanders from CALP, who produced multiple very influential 3D landscape visualizations during the project, will be interviewed. More details on this case study.
Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2012, Vancouver February 16-20
Although the AAAS Annual Meeting 2012 is not specifically focused on landscape visualization or geodesign, it is so huge and has such a broad variety of themes that I would like to point it out here. The communication of climate change (Mike Hulme, University of East Anglia) through scenarios (Richard Moss, IPCC author), landscape visualization (Stephen Sheppard, UBC) and in virtual globes (Rebecca Moore, Google) will be discussed in the Beyond Climate Models: Rethinking How To Envision the Future with Climate Change session.
The full program can be browsed on the AAAS 2012 website. Online Registration is still open this week until January 26.
An Online Landscape Object Library to Support Interactive Landscape Planning
The following post is by Chris Pettit from the ISPRS WG II/6 blog and follows up with Philip Paar´s post about the Future Internet Special Issue "Landscape":
The sixth of a series of papers as part of a special issue of the Open AccessJournal Future Internet on the theme “Internet and Landscapes“, as edited by the ISPRS Working II/6 on Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality (Chris Pettit and Arzu Coltekin) has now been published by Subhash Sharma, Chris Pettit, Ian Bishop, Pang Chan and Falak Sheth. This paper examines how geo-visualisation tools can provide useful participatory planning support in addressing issues of land productivity and sustainability. The research team have developed an online landscape library, which has been integrated with a suite of geo-visualisation tools including a GIS based Landscape Constructor tool, a modified version of a 3D game engine SIEVE (Spatial Information Exploration and Visualisation Environment) and an interactive touch table display. The paper includes some preliminary evaluation of the tools and outlines some further research directions. The full manuscript can be accessed via the journal through the following link: http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/319/
Addendum to the previous post about the CIRS Opening Conference
The David Suzuki opening lecture is now available online and you can watch it on YouTube: http://youtu.be/vbjExkoDMH4. CIRS is posting conference material here:
http://cirs.conference.sustain.ubc.ca/presentations-etc/.
This will be updated with a few more presentations on Friday December 2nd and CIRS will continue to add content.
CIRS Opening Conference 2011
November 3rd-5th, the new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) at UBC had its Opening Conference under the title "Celebrating CIRS – Accelerating Sustainability". As part of this conference, the "Community Engagement and Social Media" theme hosted two sessions which are of particular interest for this blog: Social and visual media: Tools & techniques for engagement and Bridging processes and perspectives into the future. Key lessons from these two sessions are summarized below:
The first presentation on "Social and Visual Media as Tools & Techniques for Social Engagement" was given by Ian Bishop (University of Melbourne). Focus of his presentation was a project on Tasmanian forest management which involved a GIS-based scenario builder and ScenarioChooser (see my previous blog entry). The project was complemented through an evaluation showing that the overall process was effective, although some people made little use of the visualizations. In terms of interactivity, the project had chosen panoramas as a tradeoff between effort and impact and the evaluation showed that these panoramas were indeed effective.
Next, Katy Appleton from the University of East Anglia gave an overview of evaluation research with regard to climate change visualizations ("Evaluating the Use of Visualization for Communication about Climate Change"). She asked what works best and how far visualizations can improve understanding, engagement, support for policies, and individual change of behavior. Considering the technical development and the lack of evaluation research described by Lange (2011) in "99 volumes later. We can visualize. Now what?" it became clear that we need an updated research agenda on the evaluation of landscape visualization.
Finally, Joe Salomon from 350.org provided a visually strong link to activism and shared his stories how 350.org got millions of people in every country around the world except North Korea involved in climate action. Social media such as twitter did play an important role and perhaps educational games will do as well but in the end, "real life is the most exiting game".
The following panel discussion addressed questions how to integrate visualizations and social media in the best way, how to engage people, and how to evaluate such projects.
The afternoon panel was started by Arnim Wiek (Arizona State University) who addressed the question of "Effective Stakeholder Engagement in Transformative Sustainability Efforts" with a case study from Phoenix with the emphasis on transformation. There are some good scenario studies but how do we get from scenarios to actual implementation, i.e. truly transformative outcomes? Arnim Wiek finished with six recommendations how to support transformative action, i.e. 1) go beyond scenarios, 2) go beyond the usual suspects, 3) train and coach facilitators, 4) move from extraction to negotiation, 5) embrace community diversity, 6) mobilize the Decision Theatre at CIRS. For the later, he also recommended increased collaboration and a shared research agenda.
Second speaker at the afternoon panel was Michael Flaxman (MIT), who presented a project on "Climate Change Adaptation in Southern Florida's Everglades Landscape: A Spatial Resilience Planning Approach". In this project, a scenario-based participatory stakeholder process with about 200 professional community members was implemented. The goal was to simulate alternative futures considering climate change; effects on wildlife habitats and species; and provide a sensitivity analysis of policies. The three drivers for the scenario development were 1) rapid population growth, 2) planning assumptions regarding land use and water and 3) climate change. The planning process was very well structured and accompanied by an evaluation, allowing to draw most valuable insights. Visualizations, especially in the form of maps, were another integral part of the process and Michael Flaxman particularly suggested interactive web maps as a very promising tool for regional planning.
The third speaker was Jennifer Penney (formerly Clean Air Partnership) and she gave a hands-on view of "Engaging Local Government in Climate Change Adaptation".
Some suggestions from the final discussion were that we have to go beyond anecdotal evidence in our evaluation research; that we should build a shared online database of decision-support tools; and to have more collaboration in general. In planning, maps as "boundary objects" are extremely useful, especially if they are communicated together with a narrative and pictures. However, it is still open how far such processes will trigger transformative change but here, planners may learn from the Transition Town movement and researchers can contribute through more cooperative longitudinal evaluation.
Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability – Opening Conference
Please excuse the short notice but perhaps some of you are in the area and could still make it. Key notes are delivered by Steve Rayner from Oxford University and David Suzuki. In terms of visualization, the conference will host a panel on “Social and visual media: Tools & techniques for engagement” with Katy Appleton (University of East Anglia) and Ian Bishop (University of Melbourne); and another panel titled “Bridging processes and perspectives into the future” with Arnim Wiek (Arizona State University), Michael Flaxman (MIT), and Jennifer Penney (Clean Air Partnership).
What: Celebrating CIRS | Accelerating Sustainability
When: November 3 – 5, 2011
Where: University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC
For more information and to register, visit
http://cirs.conference.sustain.ubc.ca/.
Google Earth Outreach launches new tools for NGOs in Canada
Google Earth Outreach launched a program to support Canadian NGOs with software tools and support in a three-day workshop with the Tides Foundation in Vancouver, September 25-28, 2011. The workshop ended with a public event at the Woodwards featuring presentations by Rebecca Moore from Google Earth Outreach and David Suzuki.
The workshop aimed at capacity-building for NGOs and included sessions on Google Fusion Tables, Google mapping API, GIS to Google Earth basics, Advanced KML coding and and the Open Data Kit, a set of tools for mobile data collection. The Google Earth Outreach team also provided some first insights into the new Google Earth Builder, an online GIS for geodata management with tiling capabilities, and Google Earth Engine, a future environmental monitoring platform that adds more complex analytical functions such as GHG calculations.
More than 50 representatives from various NGOs participated and I was very impressed by their projects they presented after just three days: A complete Google Earth inventory of the Mountain Pine Beetle damage in British-Columbia, the cinematic fly-through of a crane in GoogleEarth illustrating bird migration routes, and many more. Therefore, I am confident that the workshop achieved its first goal which was capacity-building among NGOs. The workshop site also provides many valuable tutorials on Google’s geospatial tools and is open to everybody.
Open Data for Berlin
The idea of Open Data is not new and scientists have promoted free exchange of data for a long time. However, the term Open Data refers to the recent trend in informatics and geospatial sciences to provide geographic data free to use. Pioneers were particularly in the UK, US and Canada, where it has traditionally been claim that government geodata should be free. Vancouver for example launched a rather decent Open Data website. This initiative created many possibilities for various new location based apps such as the very successful Vantrash that gives inhabitants of Vancouver the current schedule for recycling and garbage pick-up.
Now, Berlin as first major German city has set up a website with government Open Data under http://daten.berlin.de/datensaetze and it is to hope that this will trigger similarly successful geospatial applications.
Urban Network Analysis Toolbox for ArcGIS 10
The City Form Research Group at MIT has released a state-of-the-art toolbox for urban network analysis. It comes as ArcGIS 10 toolbox and can be used to compute five types of graph analysis measures on spatial networks: Reach; Gravity; Betweenness; Closeness; and Straightness. Due to a very tight time schedule this month, I had no time to test it yet but the Youtube video looks very promising and I would appreciate any reports from users.