Everything is spatially important part 1: Honoring the Fallen Ones

In order to tribute the importance of the location, I am starting the a section on the topics that are spatially important. This section focuses on certain topics that are spatially important.
This morning, Sean Askay, an engineer at Google, released a kmz file (a layer specially designed for Google) that has a great visualization of the casualties during war. The layer was released to honor the fallen ones on the eve of memorial day. The layer contains information on more than 5700 service members from north America who last their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. This interactive layer in Google has a great visualization on the detailed information of those people with their origin locations and estimated death locations. With the option of 3D visualization, the Google Earth offers very detailed information of those locations. The file can be downloaded here. . In order to view the file, you have to have Google Earth Version 5.0 installed which can be found here. The visualization in Google Earth looks like this:

visualizing the "Fallen Ones"

The map (layer) contains the information with the legend containing people from and estimated location of their death. Visualization of their places of origin looks like this:


And the visualization of their estimated death:


The data for the layer was collected from icasualties.org, Department of Defense and other honorary websites for military. The detail information on the data acquision can be found at the MaptheFalen blog and featured news story at cnet.com

It is unfortunate to lose human being in the war whatever the group they belong to. However, the spatial media like Google Earth, news and blogging media have made the information available to those people interested in being up-to-date with the worldly matter. Sean Askay, the author of the MaptheFallen blog has recently updated the site with some incidents of the errors in the layer he provided.

Since time immemorial, location is the key to visualizing information on/about war. Neo geography and technology have made it just better!

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Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) to offer pre-conference Workshops at NO COST

The 12th annual society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) is offering free pre-workshops on different aspects of the Conservation GIS courses. One of the courses that I particularly found interesting is that the workshop no 1 "Working with ModelBuilder and Python for Productivity". It is interesting because the non-programmer conservationist with GIS background can will get benefits from it. If you are new to GIS and have rarely used model builder, I bet it will take you to the next level in the use of model builder. I myself, am not a python programmer, I think the workshop will help anyone build their confidence in digging into those crazy codes that appear, sometimes right before the common "ARC Atom Bomb Crashes".

So, if you are attending the conference, do not miss these workshops. There are some other including Marine GIS. I wonder if any of those workshops involve the use of Marxan. The deadline to apply for the pre-conference workshop is June 26th. The conference itself starts from July 18th to 21st. The last day to register for the conference is June 17th.
If you are interested and would like to know, here is the breakdown for the registration fees:
$110—SCGIS members
$135—Non-members
Conference Venue and Date Once again:
SCGIS Annual Conference
July 18-21, 2009
Northwoods Resort and Conference Center
Big Bear Lake, California

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Great Lake Protection Plan.....Will this plan effectively address the pollution at Lake Ontario?

Great Lake Protection Plan is recently released. There is a five-point action plan that includes "tripartite table" of municipal,federal and provincial coordination for the enhancement of natural areas on the lake fronts. However, based different media news ,"investment in Great Lakes protection and restoration can have a 2:1 rate of return on investment". Definitely, it is a slow process.But, the "tripartite" should not ignore that how much change in the pollution level of Lake Ontario has happened since the studies done in 1968. Pro.K. Wayne Forsythe and Chris H. Marvin have done some research on the historical change in the pollution level of the Lake Ontario. There have been significant changes over time. For my graduate work, I myself was involved in a research project with a spatial interpolation of Zinc sediment in Lake Ontario. The data was collected by Environment Canada in 1997/98. Though zinc is a necessity for healthy being, too much is definitely not good. Our initial analysis showed that the concentration of zinc is in the central part of the Lake, and near Hamilton, the reasons ranging from the sediment movement and the industrial past.


On the map TEL and PEL for Zinc refer to Threshold Effect Level (123ug/g)and Probable Effect Level (PEL) (314.8 ug/g)respectively. The spatial analysis was done using ordinary kriging. There are so many resources on the web discussing kriging, but I will also discuss about them in coming blog...Stay tuned!!!
Overall, the lakes have seen so many changes over the past 40 years.Let's have faith on the Great Lakes Protection Plan.

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