Geodetic Task Force

Here is a great chance for GIS professionals and students to get more involved in a process that could shape NJ GIS and mapping for decades to come:

A new task force is forming, so that a comprehensive understanding of the new datums being put forth by the National Geodetic Survey, and the potential impacts, can be provided to the NJGF community.

All who are interested are welcome to join the Geodetic Task Force. Please contact the Task Force Chair, Edith Konopka, for more information and/or to sign-up.

The first meeting of the New Jersey Geospatial Forum Geodetic Task Force has been scheduled for Wednesday, March 11, 2020, 1:30 - 3:30 pm at 300 Riverview Plaza, Trenton, Room 402, which is on the fourth floor. Please bring photo ID with you, and allow time to sign-in with the guard at the front desk.

The agenda for the first meeting is:

- create list of specific goals for the task force, referencing the mission statement provided by the NJGF Executive Committee

- discuss briefly the US National Geodetic Survey proposed alternatives for the new NJ State Plane coordinate system.

The mission statement of the Geodetic Task Force is:

To get a comprehensive understanding of the new datums being put forth by the National Geodetic Survey and potential impacts and plan to implement statewide.

Directions and a map to 300 Riverview Plaza

https://njgin.state.nj.us/oit/gis/NJ_NJGINExplorer/docs/RV_Directions2016.pdf

The current proposed alternatives from NGS for the new State Plane coordinate system

ftp://www.ngs.noaa.gov/pub/SPCS/DistortionMaps/NewJersey_2019-01-29.zip

Climate talk

Diane McKnight

Title:  Trouble Ahead Trouble Behind: Acid Mine Drainage & Climate Change in the Rocky Mountains

Diane M. McKnight is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, a member of the Environmental Engineering program faculty and a Fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. Her research focuses on the coupling of hydrology and water quality in streams and lakes, and the consequences for aquatic ecosystems and water supplies.

March 4th, 2020

Poster Session 3-4:30pm; Weeks Hall of Engineering, 2nd Floor Atrium

Lecture 5pm 102 Weeks Hall of Engineering

Registration:  https://tinyurl.com/yzms78hh

National Parks and Parklands about 1 person

Someone asked me yesterday if there were many National Parks devoted to one person. Well, I said, there are lots about individual presidents (Adams NHP would count as 2 or 3?) so we should exclude them.

Harriet Tubman
Booker T. Washington
Eleanor Roosevelt
Maggie L Walker
Frederick Law Olmsted
Thomas Edison
Edgar Allen Poe
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Martin Luther King Jr.
Thaddeus Kościuszko
César E. Chávez
John Muir
Eugene O'Neill
Thomas Stone
Jean Lafitte
Frederick Douglass
George Rogers Clark
Clara Barton
Charles Pinckney
Carter G. Woodson *
Carl Sandburg *
Mary McLeod Bethune *

The NPS uses a short "nickname" for parks. All of these use the person's name as the nickname except for the three marked with asterisks. These each add a variation on house to the name, but I don't think it represents a major change in the way that the Park Service treats those sites. Similarity, I don't know why Edgar Allen Poe couldn't be the Edgar Allen Poe House.

Almost none of these are really just about one person. That person represents something else. Olmsted is about landscape architecture and parks and cities. Edison is about the ways that innovation transformed America.
 
Who else represents a truly American Experience? When you include arts, it opens up some interesting conversations. Who should get a single person National Park site?

Frank Lloyd Wright
Ed Orgeron
George Lucas
Elvis
Ernest Hemingway

Development moratorium

The Wall Street Journal writes about a Southern boomtown, Lake Wylie, South Carolina, which recently issued a 16-month moratorium on new development. Is that legal? Seems like this is in line with the 2002 Supreme Court decision about the moratoria used by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

How rapidly is development happening?

It isn’t clear whether a moratorium will have the intended effect. There are more than 3,000 homes and apartments approved for Lake Wylie that are in various stages of construction.

And the water/sewer bills are reportedly skyrocketing as they struggle to accommodate the rapid increase in demand.

Presumably the WSJ thinks this case is a harbinger of things to come. But which parts?

USGS Topo Quad Maps

In class today we will be talking about ways to access the free USGS topographic quads for NJ online.

It is amazing to me to think how much the use of these has changed aver the years even though the maps themselves have changed so little. For those that are new to the maps, I am sharing some different scenes from around New Jersey that may be of interest. Just click on each and they'll expand.










A special thanks goes out to Mike Siegel and the Rutgers Cartography Lab.  This is a great resource for students and for pros.  A national resource is the Libre Map Project, but it is a bit harder for first time users.

Sandy River Flood

In class, we talked briefly about a great video by Alexandra Erickson that makes the dangerous flooding of the Sandy River look more beautiful than threatening.

Here is a map of the Sandy River near its confluence with the Zigzag River.

 

And, they say it will happen again.

One star reviews of National Parks

National Parks are amazing. But not everyone on Yelp agrees. The Adventure Journal has collected 20 notable bad reviews of parks.

GIS Job at Rutgers

Interested in working at Rutgers? The Rutgers Office of Advanced Research Computing and the  RU-NB Libraries are hiring a GIS Specialist.

The School of Architecture at Taliesin

After 88 years of rich tradition, The School of Architecture at Taliesin is going to close.

Coronavirus dashboard

The news conversations about the spread of coronavirus clearly describe it as a spatial and temporal phenomenon. To help you see that fully, Esri has created an online dashboard that maps the confirmed cases worldwide (currently just at 4,473, but sure to go up). Open the dashboard and pan over to the US to see if the suspected cases in NJ or OH become something more.

Planning Board Meetings

A few municipal planing board meetings that will be close to campus in the coming weeks:

• New Brunswick - Feb 10 and March 9 (Mondays)
• North Brunswick - Feb 11 (Tuesday) 
• East Brunswick - The Board holds public hearings on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 8 p.m. in the Municipal Building.
• Edison - Feb 19 and March 18 (Wednesdays)

In the meantime, you might find the East Brunswick guide to meetings useful.

The author speaks

This semester I am asking my students to read The Living Landscape by Fritz Steiner. But instead of thinking about him abstractly as an author, I recommend this talk he gave at the Geodesign Summit. Well worth taking a break and watching for a few minutes.

MLK Jr., NHP

Atlanta is home to the National Historic Park that includes Martin Luther King Jr's Ebeneezer Baptist Church and his burial site. It stands as a powerful symbol of the diversity of issues that he worked on, from labor issues to anti-semitism to civil rights. And, situated in his neighborhood, reminds us of his humanity.

I anticipated seeing the sanctuary, just like in the photos. But I was taken aback by the Fellowship Hall, which looked like so many other basement meeting rooms. While his sermons and writings got featured at the park's museum, I couldn't help but imagine the less historic meetings that the pastor held in the basement with small bible study groups or struggling families.

In his final Christmas sermon, in the pulpit picture above, he famously said:

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective." 

 The National Park Service's mission is: "The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations." While totally different than Yosemite, this site seems essential to fulfilling that mission.

Tissot's indicatrix

The world of GIS and cartography has lots of little treats hidden away for you to discover. One of them is the development of Tissot's indicatrix. The simple description is that these are ellipses that illustrate map projection distortion. But if you read up on it, there much more going on than is at first obvious.

And if reading about it isn't enough for you, it also inspired a song.

Snow hype

All winter we are deluged with teases of news reports about whether the coming storm will leave a little or a lot of snow. Lots of hype comes with that. In NJ, High Point State Park can often get 6-12" more than Rutgers gets in New Brunswick, which means that the news can regularly announce in advance that some parts of New Jersey could get 9" even though the forecast for Central New Jersey is just a dusting.

Rather than getting worked up by a quick headline on the radio, let me encourage readers to simply check the National Weather Service snow maps for our areas. The maps are regularly updated, easy to read, and not pegged to just wherever the broadcaster or blogger is located. It will be one less thing to stress out about over the spring semester. They are also a nice looking map product.

A breach of public trust?

The prominent landscape architecture firm, Nelson Byrd Woltz, appears to be caught in a controversy brewing in midtown Manhattan. According to the NY Times, the latest plans the NYC's Hudson Yards has added a previously unmentioned 20 foot high concrete wall stretching along 720 feet of the High Line. The article includes a site map and some diagrams to help explain the proposal.

For a sense of how dramatic this change might be, the Times offers this perspective:

Corey Johnson, speaker of the City Council, who represents the district, called it a breach of public trust. Luxury buildings that have sprouted beside the High Line have increasingly walled off what was the park’s original charm and fascination — the urban adjacencies and “Rear Window” views into and onto old warehouses and tenements. To wall off the remaining northern- and westernmost stretch of the park, Mr. Johnson said, would betray “what public officials negotiated a decade ago.”

The High Line and the Hudson Yards represent an incredibly complex public-private relationship that has taken decades to develop, but has also seen increased tension in recent years. This could still boil over or blow over. Keep an eye on it.

Good books

The New York Public Library is celebrating its 125th anniversary with a list of the all-time most checked out books. While the numbering seemed off on the website, the list is pretty interesting.

Panoramic maps

Start the year by wasting some time looking at panoramic maps hosted by the Library of Congress.

This 1903 map of Ocean City, N.J. purports to show "its unrivalled location, beautiful sea-shore, protected sailing waters, and famous fishing grounds, also railroads and ferry connections, artesian water, sanitary sewage [sic], electric lights, gas, electric cars."

IsoCity

Take some time and build a city with this isometric city builder from Victor Ribeiro. (h/t Kottke) It is easy, pointless, and uses a few different brain cells. Although our readers will quickly notice the lack of green infrastructure and urban forestry.