GIS in Education

RapidEye, the only geospatial solutions provider to own and operate a constellation of five identical Earth Observation satellites, announced today that they have penned a contract with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to image a substantial portion of the state of Colorado.

“USGS will be replicating a study that was done in 2008 to better understand how climate changes are impacting the conifer forest conditions in Colorado, and we are excited that our higher resolution imagery and unique Red Edge band have been chosen, which should give them improved results,” commented Joerg Widmer, Sales Team Member of RapidEye.

The contract stipulates that over 130,000 km² (about 50,200 mi²) of imagery collected from June through August 2009 over the state of Colorado will be delivered to the USGS this month. The imagery will be used to support the 2009 Colorado Forest Heath Assessment project, which is being led by the USGS and the Rocky Mountain Geographic Science Center (RMGSC). Additionally, the contract is open for the same time frame in 2010.

RapidEye's remote sensing based solutions for the forest industry range from supporting carbon credit trading to customized alert services. Drawing on the experience of their forestry experts, RapidEye has developed a series of products and services specifically designed to meet the information requirements of individual foresters, private and governmental forest managers, and international institutions.

More about RapidEye's Forest Industry solutions can be found by visiting their website at www.rapideye.de/home/solutions/forestry/index.html, or by sending an inquiry via email to sales@rapideye.de.

I visited the American Geophysical Union (AGU) website to renew my membership that will expire next month. To my surprise, the AGU site (www.agu.org) did not exist. I tried to access it from different links but it goes to nothing.

The first thing I thought was there could be a site outage. Or maybe the AGU servers are down. This is normally the reason for websites to be inaccessible.

I checked its domain availability and found out that www.agu.org is available for sale. Check the screen shot below (you can click it for a larger view) . I thought of buying the domain but had second thoughts.

Should I buy an expired domain name? Maybe not. Whois.net says otherwise. It says agu.org was renewed on November 4th and will expire on the 10th of July 2019.

Domain Name:AGU.ORG
Created On:11-Jul-1991 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:04-Nov-2009 16:11:59 UTC
Expiration Date:10-Jul-2019 04:00:00 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:23291245-NSI
Registrant Name:American Geophysical Union
Registrant Organization:American Geophysical Union
Registrant Street1:2000 Florida Avenue, NW

Why is the domain available for sale? Is this another scam purporting to help anyone interested to buy an expired domain name when in actual fact the site is taken?

A team of engineering students from southern India have been designing a small light-weight satellite that is set to be sent into space soon. The Indian Space Research Organization is supporting the project in the hope that it will encourage more students to be more interested in space technology.

About 40 students, mostly engineering under-graduates from seven top colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad are working together at Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology in Bangalore.

Under the guidance of the research organization, the students hope to build one of the smallest satellites ever designed. It will be used for remote-sensing applications. It will orbit the earth at an altitude of 700 kilometers and will send 30 minutes of data everyday.

The students have already built a master-control ground station to track the location of the satellite in space. The satellite is expected to be launched before the end of the year through the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Once the satellite is launched and placed in its final orbit, all its systems will be monitored by the students themselves.

Surveyors in Great Britain are using emapsite to continue to access the locations and heights of traditional benchmarks despite their removal from the latest Ordnance Survey digital map data. emapsite has reintroduced benchmarks as an additional layer in the latest OS MasterMap data which can be viewed online in emapsite’s Plans Ahead mapping service.

Benchmarks were the mainstay of traditional survey control information in Great Britain until the growth of GPS. They record height above Ordnance Datum and are most commonly found on buildings or other semi-permanent features. Nearly 200 ‘fundamental’ bench marks were built and maintained, establishing more than 500,000 ‘lower order’ marks for measurement purposes over several decades.

As it was not economically viable to continue maintaining the physical network given the move to GPS, Ordnance Survey eventually began removing benchmark information from the updates to its large-scale OS MasterMap Topography Layer dataset in summer 2009.

Superior and Douglas County made its geographic information system data available online at douglasco.mapping-online.com.

The information available through GIS includes a variety of data not available on a typical map. While the city’s information is readily available, the county is still working to put a policy in place that will make the information readily available to the public. However, both provide a wealth of information such as county forest lands, recreation areas, political boundaries, wetland and soil inventories, parcel ownership and value information, survey records where available and zoning information.

By making that information available to public online, the city and county benefit on a variety of levels, whether it’s correcting data, or protecting historic survey records that have been scanned to make them easily available. Large format scanning equipment allowed the county to make 100-year-old maps readily available through 21st Century technology, protecting the aging maps.

However, all the information comes with disclaimers because not all the information available is survey grade and boundaries could be off slightly.

The City of Ottawa received the Award of Excellence by ESRI for integrating geographic information system (GIS) technology with enterprise business systems to enhance municipal operations including public works, surveys and mapping, and urban forestry management. The ESRI enterprise GIS, which uses a services-oriented architecture (SOA) approach, will enable the City to more easily incorporate and adopt new technologies in the future.

The City of Ottawa has been using ESRI ArcGIS technology since 2002 and has extensively used GIS in its operations including urban mapping, land use and natural resource planning, and sewer, water and wastewater management. The City also uses GIS for health and public safety program planning and has leveraged the technology to monitor, track and develop appropriate action plans to protect its citizens from infectious diseases such as the West Nile virus in 2003. GIS is also applied in the City's urban tree preservation programs and is a key tool in managing and addressing the current emerald ash borer infestation in Ottawa and surrounding areas.