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March 27 · Issue #12 · View online
Email digest of all things spatial, remote sensing, and GIS
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Hello! It’s been a while! It has been a very busy time for me, so I have lapsed in sending Spatial Reader - still, the links have accumulated and there has been quite a lot of news in the world of GIS: multiple satellite launches, product releases, new tools, and tech demos. The usual. Because I’ve accumulated so many links over the last few months, I’m trying a new format - a highlight link for each section, then a summary of other items of interest in that area. Hopefully it makes the newsletter less overwhelming with quite a bit more content. Enjoy!
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Esri 2017 Developer Summit Tech Sessions - YouTube
Esri has published a subset of its videos from the 2017 Developer Summit that took place this month. These are always worth a look, even if you’re not a software developer, because you can keep up with new features and trends in GIS. Esri also released ArcGIS Pro 1.4 recently - This article takes a look at what’s new.
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The Library of Congress Is Putting Its Map Collection on the Map
A new partnership with the Digital Public Library of America will put three major Library of Congress map collections online.
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Other GIS News items:
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Crowdsourced Space Archaeology. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a thing.
- The Internet Archive has free viewing of an old US Air Force Documentary describing methods for mapping and surveying the world.
- Forbes took a look at how GIS is used in political resistance and protests
- Take a look at an interactive map of historical slavery in the United States compared with modern prison incareration rates. It tells a pretty clear story.
- The CIA didn’t want the Library of Congress to get all the map archive glory and released an archive of their own.
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Descartes Labs: Search
Remember TerraPattern, where you could click on features in a city and find similar ones all over the same region? Descartes Labs took that technology and made it global at 30 meter resolution using Landsat, and then higher resolution in the US and China using other datasets. Worth checking out, even if you can’t detect the same resolution of features at the Landsat scale as you could in TerraPattern.
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Other new products and tools
- Knight Labs has a beautiful new competitor for Esri’s StoryMaps, and it’s free.
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MapStory, a small platform for sharing maps and information online
- A new, “cheap”(er) RTK GNSS receiver for accurate location collection.
- As Google retires the Google Earth Pro product, they open sourced the Google Earth Enterprise server.
- A company that can alert you when an agricultural field is irrigated.
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First Light from GOES-16 : Image of the Day
The future of weather monitoring and forecasting just got more colorful and a whole lot clearer. Take a look at the first images from GOES-16.
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Other stories in Remote Sensing:
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Sentinel 2B launched, which along with the already launched 2A, will provide multispectral imagery of the earth every 2-5 days.
- Planet labs launched 88 tiny satellites to capture the entire earth on camera every day.
- Can you detect atmospheric winds from space? Yes, you can, with the new Aeolus satellite.
- Get a quick tutorial on classification techniques in remote sensing.
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WWTSD (What Would Tech Support Do?)
Esri published their workflow for Tier 1 tech support. I spend a lot of time on these debugging strategies with my students, but these suggestions still apply even to veteran GIS users - highly recommended if you use ArcGIS.
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Other things to learn this month
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Self-Promotion alert: I put out a free work in progress book of tutorials on using GIS for water and watershed/ecosystem analysis.
- Some notes on how to process Landsat Imagery using free and open source tools.
- A video from the University of Vermont on how they detected buildings in the state using LiDAR.
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folium: Python Data. Leaflet.js Maps
folium is a library I’ve been wanting to experiment with for a while - take Python objects and quickly make maps from them - currently, I spend plenty of time translating Python data back to mappable formats. A library that can handle that for me would be amazing.
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You might also be interested in:
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ArcMap Raster Edit Suite: Arbitrarily edit raster data directly in ArcGIS.
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Winnow: Run SQL queries against GeoJSON without a database.
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Geoplot: A quick data visualization library for Python.
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Amaptor: A Python mapping library that works in ArcGIS 10.x and ArcGIS Pro.
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DOD successfully tests terrifying swarm of 104 micro-drones
This item needs its own “WTF” section here - The US Department of Defense has funded development of a tiny drone swarm meant to coordinate for monitoring large areas. The technology is fascinating and, as the headline indicates, pretty terrifying. No single drone has enough processing power to make decisions, but together, these drones coordinate behavior.
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If terrifying drone swarms aren’t your thing, maybe you’re interested in “ Stonehenge Streets” - find out which streets in your city or town align with the sun on winter solstice - or XKCD’s latest Bad Map Projection“ simulating use of Photoshop’s Content Aware Resizing to remove blank space on the map.
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