Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is LizardTech.
Today’s Top Story is Ocean Monitoring. We spend a lot of time discussing how new technologies monitor the land, but let’s not forget that oceans cover 71 percent of our planet and contain 99 percent of the living space. Ocean systems also affect land systems in almost every way, so they deserve our attention.
Under a European Commission program, a consortium of interdisciplinary experts have been designing “plug and play” sensor systems that could be deployed on any fixed or mobile platform to monitor the health and productivity of ocean waters. In this image, the NeXOS project sensors are being demonstrated on an ocean mooring that will be submerged more than 3,000 meters.
In other ocean-related news, the Turtle Island Restoration Network partnered with DigitalGlobe’s Tomnod.com crowdsourcing platform to create the first crowdsourced digital patrol of the Cocos Island Marine Protected Area to defend one of the Pacific Ocean’s most-vibrant marine-life habitats. Located 340 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, Cocos Island is home to numerous rare and endangered marine species, and has been subject to illegal fishing practices in its difficult-to-monitor waters.
In just days after announcing the initiative, thousands of volunteers have begun to search satellite imagery for boats that are illegally fishing in the area.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this LizardTech interview clip from the 2015 Esri User Conference.
The U.S. Geological Survey announced a new official height for the tallest mountain in North America, Denali, which some of you may know as Mount McKinley. The elevation is 20,310 feet, just 10 feet below the previous elevation that was established using 1950s-era technology.
My quick thoughts: It’s pretty amazing that 60-year-old technology came that close. And nowhere in the official announcement was the word McKinley, a U.S. President assassinated during his second term in 1901. The mountain was officially renamed with its native Alaskan name in late August of this year, so Denali it is. And check out the glacial scouring in this picture. You will not find a better example. Go geology.
In industry headlines, Trimble acquired Spatial Dimension, known for its FlexiCadastre software, an enterprise-scale land-management solution adopted by mining companies and governments worldwide. Trimble also introduced its ZX5 Multirotor Unmanned Aircraft System, a new aerial-imaging and workflow solution that captures and processes georeferenced photo and video data for mapping, agriculture and inspection applications.
TerraGo released TerraGo Edge 3.7, which features smart forms as well as new GPS features and GIS enhancements that automate and accelerate user entries while eliminating unnecessary or redundant steps.
Esri and FlightAware partnered to combine flight tracking and status technology with ArcGIS, increasing users’ ability to view and analyze large amounts of accurate, live-aviation data in one spatial system.
And SimActive released Correlator3D 6.2, featuring a new module for tie-point editing during aerial triangulation. Users can visually inspect and edit any link, with the ability to add tie points as an alternative to projects with low overlap or poor image quality.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a condensed version of an interesting video from the Environmental Protection Agency about its Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology. The original video has a lot more information, and I’ve posted it to GeoSpatial Stream.
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
