Do you know where you're at?

 Jason Kottke posted recently on knowing more about where you are at. As he acknowledges, it isn't a new idea. 

But, if you want to answer it, could you? Do you have the resources to look up the soil where you are? To map the water movement around you? What resources would you need?

 

Water quality

Water quantity is easy to monitor with river gauges. The USGS has plenty of these online.

But how do we know about water quality? Water quality monitoring is work and this resource from Hudson River Park gives some insight. After explaining the work it also reports that "Hudson River Park’s water quality supported indirect contact for recreation 286 out of the past 366 days."

But for a large watershed, it might not just be a single point or a single level of accomplishment. Massachusetts's Charles River Watershed Association uses a report card system for reporting on 39 sampling sites throughout their watershed. 

Since it is continuously changing, Orange County, Florida maintains a Water Quality Dashboard. An amazing interface, but not something that every community has enough data to populate.

Creating a base

While we are talking in class about creating base maps, it might be worth checking out the great work done by the Environmental Modeling Center at UPenn. The base datum created with UAV mapping for the Galapagos is both award-winning and amazing. Some fun toys too. 

Map samples

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.

FloodCam

Sea Isle City has installed a live cam to help the general public observe coastal flooding on neighborhood streets. While a coastal storm can cause flooding, keep an eye on the tide charts for sunny day flooding.

Phil Lewis

 Prepping for a lecture that includes a few minutes on Phil Lewis and found this nice memorial note from a few years back as well as an older appearance he made in the NY Times. Incredible contributions.

For a snow day

You can save this one for a snow day. Someone has built a Wikipedia History game. As a public participatory experience, there is a Github site for improving the game by reporting bad histories.

First egg of the new year

The Duke Farms bald eagles have laid the first egg of the year. You can watch live: 

But sometimes they watch back

The road ahead for nondelegation

Supreme Court watchers are keeping an eye on an interesting case that is under consideration from the US Supreme Court. The case, WV v EPA, is a challenge of greenhouse gas regulations under the unmbrella of the Clean Air Act. The case being considered is actually looking at 4 different lawsuits that have been cosolidated into a single SCOTUS decision, so it could get complicated as it accounts for subtle diffrences in the cases. Or, the court could decide not to decide, since the original Obama-era regulations are no longer in play. But, some are waiting ot see whether the court uses this as a time to make sweeping changes in the how governmental regulations function. 

Some of the analyses (and guesses) about what will happen are pretty complicated, technical, and tough to follow for readers who don't already know about Chevron deference and nondelegation. Add to it some rhetoric (from either side) and the reading can be fraught. Even the WV v EPA Wikipedia page is getting lengthy, and the case hasn't been heard yet. But I thought Leslie Kaufman's recent update did a good job of introducing some of the pieces:

“There is a possibility that the court can write an opinion,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, “that really reflects a core challenge to the fundamental basis of the regulatory state — for the ways in which our federal bureaucracy or federal agencies have evolved and operate.” In other words, if the Supreme Court applies the most conservative interpretation of the constitutional challenge, it could entirely knock out the system by which we protect air and water in the U.S. — not to mention scores of other federal laws.

Assuming that the oral arguments really happen, the news will be interesting to read the next day. Watchers will keep a particularly close eye on the comments and questions from Justice Gorsuch whose mother had a difficult time as EPA Administrator.

Not a little bridge

Found this uncomfortably remarkable bridge in Carrilho da Graça's project list. Makes Covilhã, Portugal seem worth a visit.

Intriguing: 24 hours of mapping science

What: a global event celebrating science maps and macroscopes
Who: artists, scientists, visual storytellers from eight countries
When: Sat, Dec 11, noon EST - Sun, Dec 12, noon EST
Where: https://24hoursciencemap.info
Background: https://scimaps.org

Our Changing Vocabulary

While it is no surprise that pandemic-specific words, like COVID and vax, have seen dramatic increases in their usage, it is interesting to reflect how some common words have undergone changes in their usage as well. Here is a google trends chart for a few. Words like unmute went through a dramatic jump, but are still at a low level compared to these. What else?

More grad school?

The interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Geospatial Analytics at the Center for Geospatial Analytics (geospatial.ncsu.edu) at North Carolina State University is now accepting applications for Fall 2022 enrollment. We expect to admit a cohort of twelve students, all with fully funded graduate research assistantships with $25,000 salary, benefits, and tuition support, renewable for up to four years.

The application deadline is February 1, 2022.

The Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State is an internationally recognized hub for interdisciplinary data scientists pushing the boundaries of spatial data science to advance discovery and inform real-world decision-making. Ph.D. students receive multidisciplinary advising and the opportunity to work with over thirty faculty fellows with diverse expertise from a dozen departments across NC State. 

Faculty at the Center develop and apply innovative techniques to advance new research frontiers (geospatial.ncsu.edu/research). For example, we develop new ways of gathering and processing large datasets, forecasting future conditions based on "what-if" scenarios, and putting forecasts into the hands of the people who need them most to collaboratively explore alternative futures of planning and change. Our work involves deep collaboration with government, industry, and community partners to address interdisciplinary environmental and societal challenges.

Applicants are encouraged to reach out to faculty with similar research interests but are not required to secure an advisor prior to admission. Students with quantitative and computational backgrounds in geography, informatics, or remote sensing are strongly encouraged to apply. We welcome applicants interested in pushing the boundaries of geospatial analytics and technology from a variety of perspectives, including design, cognitive science, natural resources and the environment, computer science, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and more. We are especially committed to increasing the representation of students that have been historically excluded from participation in U.S. higher education.

Additional details and complete application instructions are available at go.ncsu.edu/geospatial-phd. Interested students are encouraged to contact Rachel Kasten, Graduate Services Coordinator (rachelkasten@ncsu.edu or 919-515-2800), with any questions. 

A Watershed Moment in Watershed Mapping

 Landscape Architecture Magazine has a great feature (Sept 21) on a map that is changing how we read the changing issues for a major watershed. 

A team of five has produced a remarkably rich, peer-reviewed map of the Colorado River Basin and the the changing conditions threatening its future. Produced by the Babbit Center of the Lincoln Land Institute, this is an information-filled explanation of an incredibly complex landscape.

Open records are getting bigger

 Government Technology has posted data-rich story that shows how open records requests are becoming more complicated. But at the end, it seems to lack a celebration that of this as representing more open government. I appreciate that many of the readers of GovTech are open records officials who are overworked. But is the lack of emphasis on transparency meant to indicate that these datasets and videos are not helping democracy?

Ephemeral Architecture

 The Daily Dose of Architecture has a thoughtful piece reflecting on the temporary wonders built for festivals and biennales. While the exposure of emerging designers is great, Andreea Cutieru points out that there is an added value in the "opportunity to enact architectural lines of inquiry that wouldn't otherwise find an expression in everyday architecture." I know that I find exploring ephemeral art and architecture to be its own special experience. It focuses the memory and the senses, knowing that there will not be an opportunity to repeat this experience.

The Passing of Doc Hamilton

 We are sad to share the news that Dr. Bruce "Doc" Hamilton has passed away. He was a fixture on the faculty in the Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture and the various permutations of Cook College. He was the Director of Rutgers Gardens, moving it towards a larger goal of serving the state as a university public garden while lovingly pruning, mowing, and planting as much he could possibly take on himself. He is remembered with the Hamilton Award, the university’s national horticulture recognition that bears his name.   

For years we had offices across the hall from one another and had countless of those end-of-the-day moments that ranged from touching to humorous. But the real treat was going on field trips with him, from Boston to Washington DC. Revisiting Dumbarton Oaks with him was a revelation and discovering newly built parks in Boston broadened my first look at them. 

Mapping COVID attitudes

 Check out this fascinating map of Covid on Campus: Instructor Reports by Hannah Alpert-Abrams.

Variants

Stay alert. There is still so much we don't know. The Danes have great data (lots of genome sequencing) and say that the Alpha variant is to be taken seriously. And the concern about Delta in schools seems worth watching.

 

Indigenous mapping conference

Save the Date: 3rd Ruderman Conference, October 20-22, 2021

The third biennial Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography will focus on the theme of Indigenous mapping. The conference, to be held digitally, is hosted by the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Libraries, which sits on the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. It is sponsored and co-organized by Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc., whose shop is located on the ancestral land of the Kumeyaay peoples.

This theme is of paramount importance, especially as Indigenous peoples around the world continue to fight for their recognition and rights to land and resources. Simultaneously, institutions are increasingly examining their roles in exploitative imperial expansion and settler colonialism. The history of colonial encounter and of indigenous agency can both be glimpsed in historical maps, many of which were made by Indigenous peoples or thanks to crucial, and often unacknowledged, Indigenous contributions. More recently, mapping technologies are helping Indigenous groups to monitor resources, protect language, survey territory, govern, and provide evidence for reclamation and recognition procedures. Scholars, many of them Indigenous, are voicing their critiques and interventions using geographic and cartographic frameworks.

All of these interpretations of Indigenous maps and mapping will be highlighted at the conference, held October 20-22, 2021. Each day of the conference will have a keynote, followed by panels that speak to a specific strain of scholarship: history of Indigenous maps and mapping, critical approaches to Indigenous geography, and digital applications. Our keynotes will be Alex Hidalgo (Texas Christian University), Mishuana Goeman (UCLA), and Eric Anderson and Carrie Cornelius (Haskell Indian Nations University). The conference will offer new insights into the ways in which maps and mapping are used by and have affected Indigenous peoples globally. Together, the three days of the conference hope to highlight exciting research, showcase a variety of maps and mapping practices, and to explore the thrust of this important field of study.

https://library.stanford.edu/rumsey/public-events/barry-lawrence-ruderman-conference-cartography