https://geojournalism.org/picks/ Best tools for multimedia reporting Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:31:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://s0.wp.com/i/webclip.png https://geojournalism.org/picks/ 32 32 239681374 https://geojournalism.org/picks/iseechange-a-social-platform-for-recording-climate-change/ Willie Shubert Tue, 13 Sep 2016 18:42:26 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1657 <p>In an effort to bring local context to climate reporting in Western Colorado, Julia Kumari Drapkin started iSeeChange--an online weather and climate journal--in 2012 to help identify how the listeners of her local community radio station were being impacted by changes in the environment. Four years later, iSeeChange is a hybrid citizen-science, social media platform used by people around the world to document and share their experience of environmental change. Using geotagged photos coupled with data on the weather and atmospheric conditions, iSeeChange is working to create a collective climate journal for present and future generations.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/iseechange-a-social-platform-for-recording-climate-change/">iSeeChange: A Social Platform for Recording Climate Change</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p><a href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/980x.gif"><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1658" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" height="512" src="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/980x.gif" width="911"/></a></p> <p>For a simple term, “climate change” carries a lot of baggage to unpack. The ecological and economic <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/">implications of a warming planet</a> are far-reaching, the <a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/key-terms-you-need-understand-climate-change">jargon is confusing</a>, and the local impacts of climate change on weather patterns are <a href="https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/climatechange/are-storms-getting-stronger/19836226">often hard to verify </a>at the speed demanded by the news cycle. These challenges push environmental reporters to get creative in pursuit of climate stories relevant to their audiences.</p> <p>In an effort to bring local context to <a href="https://kvnf.org/programs/iseechange">climate reporting in Western Colorado</a>, Julia Kumari Drapkin started <a href="https://www.iseechange.org/">iSeeChange</a>–an online weather and climate journal–in 2012 to help identify how the listeners of her local community radio station were being impacted by changes in the environment. Four years later, iSeeChange is a hybrid citizen-science, social media platform used by people around the world to document and share their experience of environmental change. Using geotagged photos coupled with data on the weather and atmospheric conditions, iSeeChange is working to create a collective climate journal for present and future generations.</p> <p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wTjqtlWTFmk?feature=oembed&amp;enablejsapi=1" title="iSeeChange: The Almanac" width="500"></iframe></p> <p>“When I started iSeeChange, we talked to old ranchers, farmers and gardeners,” Drapkin said. “As the weather started getting weirder and weirder, people let us know. They said, ‘Hey dandelions are blooming earlier than I ever remembered’ and these tips put us ahead of mainstream media and government reports on the fact that we were dealing with the earliest spring on record for the continental U.S.”</p> <h2><strong>Sharing Sightings of Environmental Change</strong></h2> <p>The observations posted on iSeeChange range from those early blooming flowers, the impacts of drought on favorite trees, nuisance flooding in the neighborhood, and unexpected sightings of migratory bird species or algae blooms on the coast. People use the platform to flag their sightings and pose questions about the changes they are experiencing. Often, these posts start a conversation, which include scientists and journalists looking into the issue. Multiple observations in a community on the same topic can help draw attention to a potentially larger pattern.</p> <p>“We are all experts in our backyards and our own lives,” Drapkin emphasized. “Over the past few years we’ve come to create something utterly unique: a way to combine stories and remote sensing data like carbon data that puts communities in charge of their own climate records.”</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> <p dir="ltr" lang="en">.<a href="https://twitter.com/iseechange">@ISeeChange</a> &amp; NASA launch a new citizen science app. Download for iOS: <a href="https://t.co/72n1tKYkiZ">https://t.co/72n1tKYkiZ</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/climatechange?src=hash">#climatechange</a> <a href="https://t.co/lzogx53ndI">pic.twitter.com/lzogx53ndI</a></p> <p>— NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASAEarth/status/752246022861156352">July 10, 2016</a></p></blockquote> <p>In June 2016, iSeeChange launched their tracker app <a href="https://civichall.org/civicist/nasa-partners-iseechange-citizen-science-climate-project/">in a partnership with NASA</a>. The app enables users to report their observations including pictures, the metadata from their mobile phone, and related CO2 data taken from outer space. As part of the partnership, iSeeChange observations add an element of on-the-ground data collection to NASA’s CO2 monitoring mission (OCO-2). “NASA’s satellites provide a vital service as they routinely assess the state and health of Earth’s systems from the remote reaches of space, but is important to ‘ground-truth’ what we are detecting from space by comparing those measurements with observations from the Earth’s surface,” said Amy Kaminksi, senior policy advisor in the Office of the Chief Scientist at NASA Headquarters. “Citizens taking note of developments in their communities can help with that process.” </p> <h2><strong>Partnering on Community Investigations </strong></h2> <p>This social approach to climate data research has opened up new opportunity for journalists reporting on the environment to build a community around their coverage. For example, this summer iSeeChange is teaming up to <a href="https://www.iseechange.org/investigations/5797f94f787db5d27a4bd77d">investigate how the summer heat</a> is affecting the health of residents of Harlem, New York in collaboration with radio stations <a href="https://www.wnyc.org/">WNYC</a>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">, </span>the climate news service <a href="https://www.adaptny.org/">AdaptNY</a>, and community organizations including<a href="https://www.weact.org/"> WE ACT for Environmental Justice</a>. The investigation includes experimental sensor-based data reporting techniques to capture hard-to-access residential temperature data with the help of community-based citizen scientists. “We were asking residents in Harlem to help us keep track of urban heat islands. Some of those residents don’t have computers, they’re using iSeeChange on their phones so we see it’s an experiment working with a community group as well as a local radio station,” Drapkin said. “We are working with the community first as opposed to just an afterthought and we’re seeing what it takes to engage in this collaborative way. We want to to answer peoples’ curiosity, start with what they’re seeing on the ground first, and then reach back up to the scientists who are looking at the bigger picture trends and the data.” </p> <blockquote class="iseechange-embeddable" data-post-id="57aa4d7929348ebf1f94d6bc" data-type="post"><p><a href="https://www.iseechange.org/p/57aa4d7929348ebf1f94d6bc">Since “It Will Feel Like 100 Degrees This Week as ‘Warm and Humid Airmass’ Arrives” then “Here’s How to Open a Fire Hydrant Without Getting Arrested”: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160809/midtown/it-will-feel-like-100-degrees-this-week-as-warm-humid-airmass-arrives https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150728/bed-stuy/heres-how-open-fire-hydrant-without-being-jerk </a> — <a href="https://www.iseechange.org/u/579192dc2bb5173120f0e8f0">Carlos M. Jusino</a></p></blockquote> <p></p> <p>The focus on connecting the dots between climate data and the important anecdotes that reveals the human story of climate change have the potential to change the way climate stories are typically covered. Traditionally, climate journalism begins when a new policy is proposed or a scientist’s work is published in a research journal. With this source material in place, reporters then contextualize this information for the public interest and hopefully include the perspective of vulnerable communities in their story. By starting the coverage with the concerns and curiosity of the community and building a record of observations side by side with environmental data, iSeeChange is a social media platform with an important purpose and an exciting app for any GeoJournalist.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/iseechange-a-social-platform-for-recording-climate-change/">iSeeChange: A Social Platform for Recording Climate Change</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1657 https://geojournalism.org/picks/using-climate-data-to-answer-common-questions/ Willie Shubert Fri, 22 Jul 2016 18:05:47 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1562 <p>By comparing maximum temperatures today against predictions for 2050 and 2070, this new map helps answer a simple question with a complicated answer. As the climate changes, what is weather going feel like where I live?</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/using-climate-data-to-answer-common-questions/">Using climate data to answer common questions</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <div class="clearfix contain single-post pad4y limiter" data-swiftype-name="body" data-swiftype-type="text"> <div class="col10 margin1 pad2y"> <div class="space-bottom4"> <div class="prose prose-big"> <p>By comparing maximum temperatures today against predictions for 2050 and 2070, this new map helps answer a simple question about our complicated weather system. As the climate changes, what is the temperature going to feel like where I live?</p> <p><a href="https://www.mapbox.com/about/team/#damon-burgett">Damon Burgett</a>, a designer and developer at <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/">Mapbox</a>, created this fresh look on climate data using the <a href="https://www.worldclim.org/">WorldClim</a> dataset. By taking a new approach to raster data styling (triangles!) and a clear layout to incorporate the time scales needed to communicate climate predictions  (a double challenge), this map is a great example of using data driven design to communicate complex subjects.</p> <p>Drag the marker over a land area to see the predicted annual max temperature at each of the three dates. The map will dynamically highlight areas that currently share this approximate max temperature. For example, if you drag the marker to New York, Louisiana turns red. This shows that New York is predicted to have the same highest temperatures in 2070 as Louisiana has now. Move the maker to  your city and see how the future climate compares to the weather in other places today.</p> <p><iframe height="600" src="https://www.mapbox.com/bites/00271/" width="100%"> </iframe></p> <p>Climate models predict massive shifts in temperature and precipitation over the next 100+ years and it is a challenge to visualize climate change over space and time. These changes will not be the same everywhere; they will appear in complex patterns across the earth’s landscapes.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>If you’d like to learn more about how this map was created check out the full <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/blog/vector-tiles-from-raster-datasets/">blog post on Mapbox’s website</a>.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/using-climate-data-to-answer-common-questions/">Using climate data to answer common questions</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1562 https://geojournalism.org/picks/eyes-on-the-forests-an-interview-with-dr-matthew-hansen-university-of-maryland/ Gustavo Faleiros Fri, 22 Jul 2016 15:53:01 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1563 <p>Monitoring the state of the world’s forests is a monumental task with challenges in data collection, interpretation and display. Read our exclusive Interview with Dr Matt Hansen from University of Maryland about the power of remote sensing</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/eyes-on-the-forests-an-interview-with-dr-matthew-hansen-university-of-maryland/">Eyes on the forests: an Interview with Dr. Matthew Hansen, University of Maryland</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_16075" style="width: 250px"><a href="https://infoamazonia.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/matt-hansen.jpg"><img alt="Professor Matt Hansen: " aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16075" class="size-full wp-image-16075" decoding="async" height="209" loading="lazy" src="https://infoamazonia.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/matt-hansen.jpg" width="240"/></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-16075">Professor Matt Hansen</p></div> <p>by Rollin Hu</p> <p>Monitoring the state of the world’s forests is a monumental task with challenges in data collection, interpretation and display. <a href="https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest" target="_blank">The Global Forest Change (GFC)</a>, a project developed by <a href="https://geog.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Hansen/Matthew%20C." target="_blank">Professor Matthew Hansen</a> of the University of Maryland´s Geography Department, tackles this issue by using algorithms to distinguish forest cover and change in satellite imagery.</p> <p>From this data, GFC is able to display trends in forest cover loss and gain over time. Hansen, a remote sensing scientist with a specialization in land use change mapping, has also contributed greatly to other monitoring projects such as the<a href="https://www.globalforestwatch.org/" target="_blank"> Global Forest Watch</a>, an interactive online forest monitoring and alert system. In the realm of media and Geojournalism, this work provides highly detailed maps of the state of the world’s forests. This information is especially important in places where forests are at risk, as covered by news sites such as InfoCongo and InfoAmazonia.</p> <p>At InfoAmazonia, we are excited to announce the integration of GFC’s data into our media platform.</p> <p>See our map here using GFC data</p> <p><iframe frameborder="0" height="400" loading="lazy" src="https://infoamazonia.org/embed/?map_only=1&amp;map_id=13463&amp;width=600&amp;height=400&amp;lat=-5.00339434502215&amp;lon=-62.13867187499999&amp;zoom=4" width="600"></iframe></p> <p>On this interview, Professor Hansen tells more about his work.</p> <p><strong>The Global Forest Change (GFC) displays a world map with data on forest cover, loss and gain over different years. What was the process in creating GFC?</strong></p> <p><strong>Matt Hansen:</strong> Well, you have to have really good imagery so we had a NASA and USGS (US Geological Survey) satellite series called Landsat that is really well engineered and provides time-series images of the Earth. We’re really good at processing that data, extracting thematic information like where trees are, where they aren’t, where they’re lost and where they’re gained. The kind of expertise that you need, you need to be a geographer, have to know something about environmental science, have to be able to interpret images, process images, do some programming, be good at math and statistics, so it’s a very interdisciplinary skill set. But in the end, the satellite is taking the picture very similar to the way our eyes look at the world. We know a forest because we see a certain pattern and that process is very similar for the satellite.</p> <blockquote><p>So we try to train an algorithm to identify trees and then we train it to see when the trees are gone and when they grow back.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>What are important distinctions or contributions that GFC is able to provide?<br/> </strong><strong><br/> MH:</strong> It’s the first [forest monitoring system] in 30-meter resolution. We divide the world up into 30 meter squares, so you’re at a scale at which humans act on landscapes. So when they clear cut, we see it very clearly, so that’s the first thing. It’s the first global land change record at that spatial resolution, now for fourteen years. We will process it every year moving forward and we will develop trends on which way things are progressing. We’ll see if deforestation rates are going up or if regrowth patterns are changing. There are so many different amazing stories in forests globally and this resolution in this product helps us track and quantify those stories.</p> <div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_16095" style="width: 630px"><img alt="View of the Global Forest Change Map - See online at https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16095" class="wp-image-16095" decoding="async" src="https://infoamazonia.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/GFC-Print.jpg" width="620"/><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-16095">View of the Global Forest Change Map – See online at<br/><a href="https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/" target="_blank">https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/</a></p></div> <p><strong>There has been some criticism that GFC classifies any vegetative growth higher than five meters as a tree and therefore counts plantation trees as forests. How do you plan on differentiating between vegetation higher than 5 meters such as plantation forestry and natural forests?<br/> </strong><br/> <strong>MH:</strong> Plantations will be identified soon. It’s kind of intuitive. If you have trees systematically coming and going in a landscape, we can draw a line around that and call that a plantation. That’s not going to be a problem. The real problem is that we need to get a long enough record. We’ll have a place like Sweden that might have slower regrowth than places like Indonesia. We need a longer record to get net change. We will get the net change dynamic.</p> <p>We will identify the landscapes where trees are a crop and reforestation and afforestation differences will come out. Even on a spatial scale, if you look at our website, and you look at the RGB where the trees are green, loss is red, gain is blue and pink is both loss and gain, you see the plantation landscapes. They are really obvious. Southeast US, it’s really pink. It’s all green, red and blue, then pink, then green, red and blue, then pink. These are the landscapes where trees are crops. It’s not hard to imagine us putting some work in there and formally defining them.</p> <p><strong> How do you see GFC impacting the policies of countries at the hotspots of deforestation in places such as the Amazon, the Congo and Southeast Asia?</strong></p> <p><strong>MH: </strong>I always give Brazil a lot of credit because they stand alone for having a policy that has fought deforestation, especially to the degree it has, from almost 30,000 square kilometers [of deforestation per year] down to 5,000 per year. That’s still a lot but it is great progress. So the question is, is it sustainable and can they keep pushing it down? They do have aspirations to keep doing that.</p> <blockquote><p>Other countries don’t have anywhere, I think, close to the maturity of the monitoring capabilities yet to do what Brazil has done. Other countries have more often been increasing their forest clearing and that includes other Amazon basin countries such as Peru and Bolivia. The question is who is going to follow Brazil’s lead?</p></blockquote> <p>When you compare Brazil and Indonesia, Indonesia passed Brazil in 2012 [in deforestation rate] and Brazil has a lot more forest left than Indonesia. Indonesia clears more primary forest than Brazil with less than a quarter of the rainforest area. Then you go to a place like the Congo and the Congo has 3,500 square kilometers per year and that is not agro-industry. That is just people, small-holder farmers and that is an amazing thing [that the deforestation rates are] approaching the scale of Brazil.</p> <p>So each place is different with very interesting sets of drivers and trends. I think, in general, Latin America has the capacity, the civil society [to combat deforestation]. I think they have a more multi-stakeholder approach.</p> <blockquote><p>If I were to predict where forest conservation and economic development would be better balanced in the future, it would be Latin America. In Africa and Southeast Asia, it is not so clear in terms of that kind of balance they have between appropriating the natural forest and serving it.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Deforestation is an important factor to track when looking at the health of forests. However, forest degradation, or the loss of quality in forests, is also a very important factor. How can GFC track forest degradations?</strong></p> <p><strong>MH: </strong>It depends on how you define degradation but in our change map, there are a lot of degradation dynamics. We see fires, that may or may not be crown fires. We see logging which depends on the intensity of the logging, but a lot of logging in the tropics is selective not a clearing. That’s a degradation. A lot of small holder agriculture is not truly deforestation, it’s rotational shifting cultivation and that is called degradation.</p> <p>So we see a lot of degradation and then a degradation that can be indirectly mapped with our product is fragmentation. So when you have a big clear cut in a rainforest, it bleeds the humidity and creates an edge effect. That edge effect leads to the degradation of a certain buffer around the clearing and our product, because it maps the edges well, can quantify it. So there’s a lot of aspects of degradation that are in our map. For sure there’re certain small exploitations that we miss such certain selective logging activities. We don’t see every tree that’s removed at every pixel.</p> <p><strong>One of your more recent projects – GLADS – is the development of a forest alerts system. How does this add to your overall work?</strong></p> <p><strong>MH:<a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034008" target="_blank"> </a></strong><a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034008" target="_blank">The alerts are a product</a> just like the annual updates. The annual updates are meant, in the end, when we get really good at this, to be something like an area estimator. There’ll be a map, just wall-to-wall, and should be taken and used for looking at trends and that sort of thing. The alert system is in between annual updates. We are trying to report disturbance as we see it. We don’t report the entire globe every week but we will report where we have good data. It’s designed to have near real time actionable information where you could see a road going into a national park or what have you. If a government or some agency sees something that looks like illegal logging, it’s meant to be fast enough so you could go down to the landscape to see what’s going on.</p> <p><strong>The GLADS weekly forest alerts</strong><br/> <iframe frameborder="0" height="400" loading="lazy" src="https://www.globalforestwatch.org/embed/map/10/-8.31/-74.92/ALL/grayscale/umd_as_it_happens?tab=analysis-tab&amp;begin=2015-01-01&amp;end=2016-06-09" width="600"></iframe></p> <p><strong>With the increase in commercial satellite companies such as Planet, do you see improvements in data gathering?</strong></p> <p><strong>MH: </strong>The commercial companies are offering some pretty cool data in terms of spatial data and <a href="https://www.planet.com/" target="_blank">Planet</a> plans to have very high temporal frequency. For us, the data could be use in research in terms of what information you gain out of those sort of observations. They could be used to either calibrate or more importantly validate our Landsat products so I think there’s a role for them. But, the idea that we would be able to map the globe with them is very far off in the future if ever. The value of our USGS, NASA and Landsat data is that it is free and that means we could use it all globally and that is going to be a hard thing to imagine with a commercial data set.</p> <p><strong>How do you see your work in forestry monitoring impacting Geojournalism and just media in general?</strong></p> <p><strong>MH:</strong> Global Forest Watch was built for this kind of purpose for getting information out to the world, hopefully to improve governance and natural resource management. When you look at the user base, the media is, I think, their greatest one user so what we’ve done is brought transparency to the biophysical dynamic, the biophysical reality of what’s happening in a forest. I think what’s happening is media is taking it and telling those stories.</p> <p>There are other users like businesses, industry is using it. NGO and governments are not really the big users. They typically like to generate their own data. I think media is huge, it’s great. Data and stories don’t reach some places very easily so the media serves that purpose.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/eyes-on-the-forests-an-interview-with-dr-matthew-hansen-university-of-maryland/">Eyes on the forests: an Interview with Dr. Matthew Hansen, University of Maryland</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1563 https://geojournalism.org/picks/big-data-and-the-planetary-nervous-system-an-interview-with-planet-os-ceo-rainer-sternfeld/ Willie Shubert Wed, 23 Mar 2016 23:51:18 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1549 <p>Accessing useful data about the status of our planet’s environment is often a struggle. From with the variety of sources to the diversity of formats and tools out there, journalists interested in using data in their environmental reporting often spend more time finding and downloading the information than actually analyzing it. Over the past few [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/big-data-and-the-planetary-nervous-system-an-interview-with-planet-os-ceo-rainer-sternfeld/">Big Data and the Planetary Nervous System: An Interview with Planet OS CEO Rainer Sternfeld</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p><a href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Planet-OS_API_Open-Dataset.jpg"><img alt="Planet OS_API_Open Dataset" class="aligncenter wp-image-1552" decoding="async" height="338" loading="lazy" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" src="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Planet-OS_API_Open-Dataset-1024x576.jpg" srcset="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Planet-OS_API_Open-Dataset-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Planet-OS_API_Open-Dataset-300x169.jpg 300w" width="600"/></a></p> <p>Accessing useful data about the status of our planet’s environment is often a struggle. From with the variety of sources to the diversity of formats and tools out there, journalists interested in using data in their environmental reporting often spend more time finding and downloading the information than actually analyzing it.</p> <p>Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of services providing near real-time data come online and in March 2016 Planet OS announced the launch of its first product, the <a href="https://planetos.com/blog/an-api-for-the-worlds-weather-climate-data/">Planet OS API</a> – an new tool created to simplify access to the world’s weather and climate data; designed for all geospatial and Earth Observation data.</p> <p>We sat down with Planet OS CEO Rainer Sternfeld to discuss how the company achieved this milestone and his vision for future of earth observation.</p> <h3><strong>Why is the creation of Planet OS API important?</strong></h3> <p>Where I come from, I didn’t start my career in data integration, I actually started with product development and machine design. In these fields there is a concept of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys">the 5 whys</a>“ or what Elon Musk refers to as the “<a href="https://jamesclear.com/first-principles">first principles</a>” concept. It starts with a problem:</p> <p>It is super hard to find and access Earth observation data.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Why? </em>Not enough data has been put out in a machine-readable way.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Why? </em>Well, because the interface for integrating data isn’t very friendly.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Why</em>? The metadata is bad and protocols are too complicated across the formats.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Why? </em>Because the creators of the formats are scientists, who are not trained to create consistent APIs since they have been working on solving their own problems, in silos at big organizations.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Why? </em>The technology wasn’t mature enough to simplify the process and the demand for geospatial IoT has changed only recently.</p> <p>The last “why” made us realize that APIs need to be solved first. Once we solve the APIs issue and provide reasonable access then everything else will follow because you enable more people to build applications and algorithms on top of this commonly accessible data.</p> <p>With the announcement of <a href="https://data.planetos.com/">Planet OS API</a>, yes, we are putting out a ton of datasets, but we are signaling is that we are going after a problem that no one has solved—to create consistent APIs for Earth observation data. There is no one size fits all approach but the middle ground is very important.</p> <p><iframe height="576" loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fdNYz5OQfXk" width="800"></iframe></p> <h3><strong>Can you walk me through the key achievements that enabled you to launch the Planet OS API?</strong></h3> <p>In order to understand how we’ve made this leap forward, we need to look back over the last few years. We began four years ago with <a href="https://marinexplore.org/"><strong>Marinexplore.org</strong></a> focusing on ocean data. We developed a specialist community of about 8,000 users including many NOAA and NASA peers who were exploring, visualizing and accessing their public data through our system.</p> <p>We came to the realization that many business communities other than the ocean community are also in need of big data infrastructure to support their environmental intelligence. So we renamed ourselves <strong>Planet OS</strong> to expand our services to include the full range of Earth observation data such as weather, climate, and geospatial IoT at large.</p> <p>In April 2014, we were one of the few selected to be a part of the <a href="https://planetos.com/blog/planet-os-joins-amazon-web-services-in-data-discovery-for-noaas-big-data-project/"><strong>NOAA Big Data Project</strong></a> because of our experience with both data integration and data discovery. This step brought us into partnership with Amazon Web Services, ESRI, the Weather Company, and others such as IBM, Microsoft and the Open Cloud Consortium. We were one of the smallest company of the batch and are honored to be included.</p> <p>That collaboration sparked a lot of interest from the private sector and we worked on a series of projects focused on developing an economically feasible means to access only the portions of data needed from large-scale datasets without writing code.</p> <p>For example, we worked with a company in <strong>Brazil</strong> to assist an <a href="https://planetos.com/blog/offshore-operator-bravante-delivers-data-80-percent-faster/">environmental research vessel</a> that was conducting a survey of potential offshore drilling sites to understand if it was safe or not to drill. For this project we streamed their data via satellite connection on their Planet OS cloud-based account where data was refreshed every 3 hours. This meant that managers could look at a timely updated dashboard instead of an occasional Excel spreadsheet to determine where to send the expensive vessel. Now also managers and executives could suddenly participate in decision-making. This saved them a lot of time, and that translates to money.</p> <p>Another key milestone came this February by signing a strategic partnership agreement with <strong>RWE</strong> – the 5^th largest power company in Europe – to <a href="https://planetos.com/blog/rwe-planet-os-partnership-big-data-infrastructure-geospatial-internet-of-things/">aggregate data for their wind farms</a>. Like all wind farm operators, they too have a challenge on how to manage to their turbines efficiently – a handful of separate systems each with their own data streams are generally not integrated on a software level. Each turbine itself is producing an enormous diversity of data. Then there are weather stations, commercial weather forecast models, and marine vessels all streaming in data. In all, we integrate these streams of data into a secure Planet OS environment and aggregate them in a dashboard designed for operator workflows. The efficiencies generated through data integration and analyses are now putting more electricity on the grid, reducing operating costs and increasing safety.</p> <p>The common denominator for all these projects was <a href="https://planetos.com/technology/">data integration services</a>. Meaning we were able to set up a common cloud-based infrastructure for a diversity of data types ands formats, elegantly combining proprietary, pubic and commercial data on our customers’ Planet OS accounts. Previously, there was no single location where this information was available.</p> <h3><strong>What does an operating system for the planet mean to you? </strong></h3> <p>A useful analogy for it is the nervous system of our own body. If you pinch yourself and you don’t feel anything, you know that’s dangerous. If we don’t have a well-connected <a href="https://planetos.com/blog/creating-a-planetary-nervous-system/">planetary nervous system</a>; people won’t know how to respond well to changes in the environment.</p> <p>Right now, we are seeing the mass proliferation of sensors quantifying many aspects of our planet health. The more sensors that exist the more sensitive we get and in many places around the world we are numb.</p> <h3><strong>What role are sensors playing in Planet OS now?</strong></h3> <p>Sensors are playing a vital role in Planet OS since they are the source of this vast volume of environmental data. In our case, we work with sensors from the sea floor to space. Data is coming from ships, buoys, high frequency radar stations, drones, satellites, and other geospatial IoT devices (like bus traffic).</p> <p>But in the grand scheme, data in your area of interest is likely still sparse at a global scale, and a planetary nervous system is still in an early stage of development. Ground-based sensors put out by governments and companies add granularity when integrated with global scale open data. For us to be successful, it’s critical to be at the intersection of the digital and physical world. You can’t only stare at a computer screen and understand the planet without also being attuned to what is happening across the Earth’s dynamic living system.</p> <div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_1551" style="width: 778px"><a href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/11_Earth-Fleet_Operating-June2015-80.jpg"><img alt=" NASA has more than a dozen Earth science spacecraft/instruments in orbit studying all aspects of the Earth system (oceans, land, atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere), with several more planned for launch in the next few years. SOURCE: NASA JPL " aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1551" class="size-full wp-image-1551" decoding="async" height="576" loading="lazy" sizes="auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" src="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/11_Earth-Fleet_Operating-June2015-80.jpg" srcset="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/11_Earth-Fleet_Operating-June2015-80.jpg 768w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/11_Earth-Fleet_Operating-June2015-80-300x225.jpg 300w" width="768"/></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-1551"><br/>NASA has more than a dozen Earth science spacecraft/instruments in orbit studying all aspects of the Earth system (oceans, land, atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere), with several more planned for launch in the next few years. SOURCE: NASA JPL</p></div> <p> </p> <h3><strong>As a journalist, the majority of my experience is with open data. Can you tell me a bit more about the role of commercial data in Planet OS?</strong></h3> <p>Fundamentally, we intend to be the clearinghouse for the most important open and commercial datasets in the weather, climate, and environmental domain. By building Planet OS, we are aggregating data and supporting access so people can use this data with peace of mind. We believe that data is a commodity that should be accessible like electricity, wired into the system to the point where you can flip a switch and turn it on.</p> <p>There were a <a href="https://data.planetos.com/datasets#vendor-data-section">number of commercial vendors</a> in our community who were interested in listing their data to gage people’s interest. If someone wants to buy a dataset now, the customer would identify a point of interest and the company would manually clip, zip and ship that information to you typically on a hard drive or an FTP server. If you have to deal with each customer individually, that process is not going to scale.</p> <p>So far, we’ve signed up 20 commercial data vendors (6 are providing metadata now) that are going to be listing their data in Planet OS. But before we integrate everything we are hoping to understand which datasets people really want to use. Access to commercial data in addition to open data is really important for us. The more open data is available in a friendly way, the more commercial data companies are going to produce unique data products or derivatives that fill in the gaps to address a specific need or area.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/big-data-and-the-planetary-nervous-system-an-interview-with-planet-os-ceo-rainer-sternfeld/">Big Data and the Planetary Nervous System: An Interview with Planet OS CEO Rainer Sternfeld</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1549 https://geojournalism.org/picks/learning-by-doing-a-history-of-the-dustduino-sensor-pilot-in-sao-paulo/ Willie Shubert Fri, 18 Mar 2016 23:41:30 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1517 <p>The MakeSense project began in early 2014 with a proposal to the Feedback Labs experiment fund, seeking to test the following hypothesis: Citizen-led sensor monitoring of environmental factors will strengthen feedback loops by providing structured, accurate, and reliable data to compare against government measurements and news stories in the Amazon basin. The funding amount of $60,000 [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/learning-by-doing-a-history-of-the-dustduino-sensor-pilot-in-sao-paulo/">Learning by Doing: A History of the DustDuino Sensor Pilot in Sao Paulo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="450" loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/158494365?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="800"></iframe></p> <p>The MakeSense project began in early 2014 with a proposal to the Feedback Labs experiment fund, seeking to test the following hypothesis:</p> <blockquote><p>Citizen-led sensor monitoring of environmental factors will strengthen feedback loops by providing structured, accurate, and reliable data to compare against government measurements and news stories in the Amazon basin.</p></blockquote> <p>The funding amount of $60,000 was initially meant to support the following:</p> <p><strong>&gt;Research</strong> to determine which pollutants to measure by <a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://groundtruth.in" href="https://groundtruth.in">GroundTruth Initiative</a>, <a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://infoamazonia.org" href="https://infoamazonia.org">InfoAmazonia</a> and <a data-linktype="internal" data-val="2099209f82664f33940137755cd22134" href="https://earthjournalism.net/projects/citizen-science-sensors">Internews</a> in partnership with communities and researchers</p> <p><strong>&gt;Design</strong> and construction of several low-cost sensors by Internews and its academic partners</p> <p><strong>&gt;Creation</strong> of the technical back end in FrontlineCloud by <a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://simlab.org" href="https://simlab.org">SIMLab</a> to interpret incoming data, and create APIs useful for InfoAmazonia</p> <p><strong>&gt;Support</strong> from InfoAmazonia to GroundTruth to connect its platform to FrontlineCloud</p> <p><strong>&gt;Formalization</strong> of the standing informal partnership between GroundTruth Initiative, InfoAmazonia, Internews, and Social Impact Lab</p> <p>The initial concept, drafted by <a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://frontlinesms.com" href="https://frontlinesms.com">FrontlineSMS</a> (later SIMLab, its nonprofit institutional home), was meant to lay the groundwork for a further estimated $500,000 consortium project to build and expand on this sensor pilot. So, this small pilot was also envisioned as the beginning of a fund raising campaign and preparation for donor engagement that would grow substantially.</p> <p>In the one and a half years that followed, the project made several detours from the initial plan, which explains its current dormant status. At the same time, however, it also made headway in certain key areas. This evaluation reviews this trajectory, and draws several lessons learned.</p> <p>It is our hope that this open evaluation will be useful to others as they deploy similar projects, and fulfills our commitment to be as transparent as possible in our work</p> <p>The report was written by Erica Hagen of GroundTruth Initiative, and is based on her knowledge of the project as a participant as well as interviews with each consortium member and reviews of project documents.</p> <h2>Download the Report:</h2> <blockquote><p><a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://earthjournalism.net/images/documents/dustduino-learning-report/at_download/file" href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Sensors-Report_FeedBack-Labs_Final.pdf">Full Report – PDF </a></p> <p><a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://earthjournalism.net/images/documents/dustduino-learning-report-inputs-and-outputs/at_download/file" href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Sensors-Report_FeedBack-Labs_INPUTS-OUTPUTS.pdf">Inputs and Outputs – PDF</a></p> <p><a data-linktype="external" data-val="https://earthjournalism.net/images/documents/dustduino-learning-report-lessons-for-future-projects/view" href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Sensors-Report_FeedBack-Labs_Lessons-Learned.pdf">Lessons for Future Projects – PDF</a></p></blockquote> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/learning-by-doing-a-history-of-the-dustduino-sensor-pilot-in-sao-paulo/">Learning by Doing: A History of the DustDuino Sensor Pilot in Sao Paulo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1517 https://geojournalism.org/picks/dust-in-the-wind-how-data-visualization-can-help-the-environment/ Willie Shubert Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:43:49 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1435 <p>A recent study using NASA’s CALIPSOsatellite described how wind and weather carry millions of tons of dust from the Sahara desert to the Amazon basin each year – bringing much-needed fertilizers like phosphorus to the Amazon’s depleted soils. To bring this story to life, NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization team produced a video showing the path of [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/dust-in-the-wind-how-data-visualization-can-help-the-environment/">Dust in the Wind: How Data Visualization Can Help the Environment</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p>A recent <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/2015GL063040/">study</a> using NASA’s <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/calipso/main/">CALIPSO</a>satellite described how wind and weather carry millions of tons of dust from the Sahara desert to the Amazon basin each year – bringing much-needed fertilizers like phosphorus to the Amazon’s depleted soils.</p> <p>To bring this story to life, NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization team produced a <a href="https://youtu.be/ygulQJoIe2Y">video</a> showing the path of the Saharan dust, which has been viewed half a million times. This story is notable because it relies on satellite technology and data to show how one ecosystem’s health is deeply interconnected with another ecosystem on the other side of the world.</p> <p>Stunning data visualization like this one can go a long way to helping communicate scientific wonders to the wider world. But even more important than the technology driving the collection and analysis of this data is how the team presented its findings to the public – as a story. NASA’s CALIPSO data offers a model of how scientists, technologists and journalists can come together and make use of data to help us respond to this a slow-motion crisis like air pollution.</p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="338" loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ygulQJoIe2Y?rel=0" width="600"></iframe></p> <p>Being able to see the dust blowing in the wind has broad implications. Today, one in eight people in the world dies from exposure to air pollution, which includes dust. This stunning fact, issued by the World Health Organization last March, adds up to 7 million premature deaths per year. Air pollution is now the <a href="https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/">single largest environmental risk</a> in the world, and it occurs both indoors and outdoors.</p> <p>The WHO report, which more than doubles previous estimates, is based on improved exposure measurements including data collected from satellites, sensors and weather and air flow information. The information has been cross-tabulated with demographic information to reveal, for example, that if you are a low- to middle-income person living in China, your chances of dying<a href="https://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/FINAL_HAP_AAP_BoD_24March2014.pdf?ua=1"> an air pollution-related death skyrockets</a>.</p> <p>These shocking statistics are hardly news for people living in highly polluted areas, though in many of the most severely affected regions, governments are not eager to confirm the obvious. The availability of global scale particulate matter (dust) monitoring could change this dynamic in a way that we all can see.</p> <div class="image-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="" decoding="async" height="337" loading="lazy" src="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/blogs/assets/guest-blog/File/dustduino_proto_2_desk.jpg" width="600"/><figcaption>DustDuino can help individuals with limited resources monitor PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations, indoors or outdoors. (Source: <a href="https://www.publiclab.org/wiki/dustduino">Public Lab</a>)</figcaption></figure> </div> <p>In addition to the volume of satellite data generated by NASA, sensor technology that helps create personal pollution monitors is increasingly affordable and accessible. Projects like the <a href="https://airqualityegg.com/">Air Quality Egg</a>, <a href="https://www.specksensor.com/">Speck</a> and the <a href="https://www.publiclab.org/wiki/dustduino">DustDuino</a> (with which I collaborate) are working to put tools to collect data from the ground in as many hands as possible. These low-cost devices are creating opportunities for citizen science to fill coverage gaps and testing this potential is a key part of our upcoming installation of DustDuino units in Sao Paulo, Brazil later this summer. Satellite data tend to paint in broad global strokes, but it’s often local details that inform and motivate decisions.</p> <p>Satellites give us a global perspective. The official monitoring infrastructure, overseen by large institutions and governments, can measure ambient air at a very high resolution and modeling exposure over a large area. But they don’t see everything. The nascent field of <a href="https://medium.com/@dangerbui/a-working-typology-of-sensor-journalism-projects-c0042a0410af">sensor journalism</a> helps citizen scientists and journalists fill in the gaps in monitoring networks, identifying human exposures and hot spots that are invisible to official infrastructure.</p> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="" decoding="async" height="354" loading="lazy" src="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/blogs/assets/guest-blog/File/DustDuino%20unit.jpg" width="600"/><figcaption>A DustDuino sensor installed in São Paulo, Brazil (Photo courtesy of Willie Shubert)</figcaption></figure> <p>As program officer of the <a href="https://earthjournalism.net/">Earth Journalism Network</a>, I help give training and support to teams of data scientists, developers and environmental journalists around the world to incorporate this flood of new information and boost local environmental coverage. We have taken this approach because the skills that we need to communicate about slow-motion crises like air pollution and climate change require a combination of experts who can make sense of data and journalists who can prioritize and contextualize it for their readers.</p> <p>Leveraging technologies, skills and expertise from satellites, sensors and communities alike, journalists, scientists and technologists need to work together to translate data into the knowledge needed to address environmental crises.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/dust-in-the-wind-how-data-visualization-can-help-the-environment/">Dust in the Wind: How Data Visualization Can Help the Environment</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1435 https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-big-and-small/ Willie Shubert Wed, 22 Apr 2015 11:15:09 +0000 https://geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1425 <p>How GeoJournalism is changing the way we understand and communicate environmental information. With so many systems out there tracking the status of the planet’s health, telling this story with vigor and imagination should be more feasible than ever.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-big-and-small/">Data Big and Small</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_1426" style="width: 810px"><a href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Detail-deforestation.png"><img alt="Mapping deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, via InfoAmazonia.org. InfoAmazonia is a primary example of GeoJournalim, the practice of contextualizing local news with visuals derived from satellites, sensors, and open data." aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1426" class="wp-image-1426" decoding="async" height="546" loading="lazy" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" src="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Detail-deforestation-1024x699.png" srcset="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Detail-deforestation-1024x699.png 1024w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Detail-deforestation-300x205.png 300w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Detail-deforestation.png 1064w" width="800"/></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-1426">Mapping deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, via InfoAmazonia.org. InfoAmazonia is a primary example of GeoJournalim, the practice of contextualizing local news with visuals derived from satellites, sensors, and open data.</p></div> <p class="graf--p graf--first" id="a5ae">Given the planetary impacts of environmental change on our oceans, biodiversity and climate, virtually every environmental story these days has a global context. Climate change, in turn, has become “the<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/the-biggest-story-in-the-world" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/the-biggest-story-in-the-world" rel="nofollow"> biggest story in the world</a>,” according to Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor in chief.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="7632">But relating stories about slow-motion environmental crises like climate change is notoriously difficult. “The problem with this story is it’s so big, and it doesn’t change much from day to day. Journalism is brilliant at capturing momentum, or changes, or things that are unusual. If it’s basically the same every day, every week, every year, I think journalists lose heart.”</p> <p class="graf--p" id="8bab">Yet at the same time we have more information about how our interconnected planet is changing than ever before. Satellites, sensors, and networks (both professional and social) are gathering important environmental data at an unprecedented level, from the sky to the earth.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="341a">Satellite and sensor technology are growing in number and advancing in precision. Recently, NASA has made a<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/february/new-nasa-earth-science-missions-expand-view-of-our-home-planet/#.VQsRUfzF98E" href="https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/february/new-nasa-earth-science-missions-expand-view-of-our-home-planet/#.VQsRUfzF98E" rel="nofollow"> series of announcements</a> about their new earth observation missions and<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/20150105_supercomputer.html" href="https://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/20150105_supercomputer.html" rel="nofollow"> NOAA has announced</a> two new supercomputers to process the data into global forecast and climate models.</p> <p class="graf--p"><em>The website earth.nullschool.net utilizes NOAA’s Global Forecast System to provide near-real time visualizations of the Earth’s environmental conditions</em></p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="615" loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B3Ot6B9nzNI" width="800"></iframe></p> <p>As the program officer for Internews’<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.earthjournalism.net/" href="https://www.earthjournalism.net/" rel="nofollow"> Earth Journalism Network</a> (EJN), I collaborate with a global community of journalists, technologists, and scientists who face the challenge of telling the story about our changing planet.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="03d8">One of the main trends we see is that visualizing the context of this change with data — big and small — is a key component to understanding this evolving story. This February at EJN’s 10th anniversary celebration in San Francisco, Rebecca Moore of Google Earth Outreach told how she used mapping to explain how a planned development project would cut down acres of redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Seeing it is a game changer,” she said. Journalists are also now using this publicly available information to support their environmental coverage.</p> <p class="graf--p graf--last" id="75d2">One of the key methods we have employed to help journalists understand and cover the environment is<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://geojournalism.org/" href="https://geojournalism.org/" rel="nofollow"> GeoJournalism</a>.</p> <div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_1427" style="width: 810px"><a href="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Captura-de-Tela-2014-01-27-às-12.20.35.jpg"><img alt="By contextualizing local news with visuals derived from satellites, sensors, and open data, GeoJournalism has been used to explain the drivers of deforestation in the Amazon, track rhino poaching in South Africa and see how marine protected areas affect ship traffic in Indonesia." aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1427" class="wp-image-1427" decoding="async" height="449" loading="lazy" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" src="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Captura-de-Tela-2014-01-27-às-12.20.35-1024x574.jpg" srcset="https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Captura-de-Tela-2014-01-27-às-12.20.35-1024x574.jpg 1024w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Captura-de-Tela-2014-01-27-às-12.20.35-300x168.jpg 300w, https://geojournalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Captura-de-Tela-2014-01-27-às-12.20.35.jpg 1418w" width="800"/></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-1427">By contextualizing local news with visuals derived from satellites, sensors, and open data, GeoJournalism has been used to explain the drivers of deforestation in the Amazon, track rhino poaching in South Africa and see how marine protected areas affect ship traffic in Indonesia.</p></div> <p>With so many systems out there tracking the status of the planet’s health, telling this story with vigor and imagination should be more feasible than ever. But in many parts of the world, it’s not quite that easy to understand the background to this slow motion crisis.</p> <section> <div class="section-content"> <div class="section-inner layoutSingleColumn"> <p class="graf--p" id="0db9">Data on its own is not knowledge. Stories from and about people living closest to environmental hotspots breathe life and urgency into the data by adding local context. How, why, what and who is driving the changes? When that classic journalistic information is included, data can become evidence that engages people in the issues.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="17ac">But for many of the local journalists in the EJN community, access to critical evidence needed to support their stories is a challenged by a lack of communications infrastructure, underfunded research institutions or reluctance by authorities to provide open data. Even the United States is not immune to this issue.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="3ce1">Last month, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden testified before the Senate about the 2015 Budget. He was questioned by Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Senate Space, Science and Competitiveness subcommittee. In response to the senator’s proposal for NASA to adopt a “‘<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/ted-cruz-tells-nasa-to-stop-worrying-about-climate-change-and-focus-on-space-20150312" href="https://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/ted-cruz-tells-nasa-to-stop-worrying-about-climate-change-and-focus-on-space-20150312" rel="nofollow">more space, less earth</a>” strategy, Bolden said, “It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place that we have to live.”</p> <p class="graf--p" id="4a87">Clearly, the Earth’s changing environment is a high stakes affair, and local media will have an increasingly important role in telling this story. Big global outlets are shrinking in size and smaller ones often lack the capacity to report on international environmental issues. Local media are often the best qualified to make sense of what’s happening on the ground, especially when a satellite can’t clarify it.</p> <p class="graf--p" id="7c78">We’ve gotten to the point where data and the tools for explaining it are in the hands of journalists and communicators around the world. But to transform the global issues of climate change, deforestation, and air pollution into local, compelling stories it helps to see the big picture from the earth to the sky.</p> <p class="graf--p graf--last" id="9c7d">Leveraging technologies, skills, and perspective -from satellites and sensors, to community of knowledge — is at the core of not just understanding but responding to slow-motion crises and why journalists, scientists, and technologists need to work together to communicate this important human story.</p> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section--last"> <div class="section-divider layoutSingleColumn"> <hr class="section-divider"/> </div> <div class="section-content"> <div class="section-inner layoutSingleColumn"> <p class="graf--p graf--first graf--last" id="84cc"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Willie Shubert is Program Officer for </em></strong><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://earthjournalism.net" href="https://earthjournalism.net/" rel="nofollow"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.</em></strong></a><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> Visit </em></strong><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://geojournalism.org" href="https://geojournalism.org/" rel="nofollow"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Geojournalism.org</em></strong></a><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> online resources and training for</em></strong><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-journalists" href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-journalists" rel="nofollow"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">journalists</em></strong></a><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">, </em></strong><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-designers" href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-designers" rel="nofollow"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">designers</em></strong></a><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> and </em></strong><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-developers" href="https://geojournalism.org/about/#for-developers" rel="nofollow"><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">developers</em></strong></a><strong class="markup--strong markup--p-strong"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> to dive into the world of data visualization using geographic data.</em></strong></p> </div> </div> </section> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-big-and-small/">Data Big and Small</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1425 https://geojournalism.org/picks/open-data-in-asias-water-tower-data-thethirdpole-net/ Willie Shubert Mon, 26 Jan 2015 21:45:59 +0000 https://dev.geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1304 <p>In an effort to help understand and react to the rapid changes taking place in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, Earth Journalism Network (EJN) and The Third Pole launched an open source geospatial database</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/open-data-in-asias-water-tower-data-thethirdpole-net/">Open Data in Asia’s Water Tower: data.thethirdpole.net</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p><img alt="" class="aligncenter" decoding="async" height="230" loading="lazy" src="https://earthjournalism.net/images/ThirdPole_ProgramPageBanner.png" width="670"/></p> <p>“There was drought so we had to share the little water brought a long distance from irrigation canals to the field. This delay in rice planting is resulting in a late harvest,” explains Ratna Darai, 47, a farmer in Daraipadhera, Nepal during <a href="https://www.thethirdpole.net/nepals-farmers-wait-for-rain/">an interview</a> with thethirdpole.net reporter Ramesh Bhushal. The effects were clear, an erratic monsoon means an uncertain harvest in a <a href="https://www.wfp.org/countries/nepal">nation where agricultural production is not on pace with population growth</a>.  Water insecurity is a major driver of conflict and uncertainly in the world’s most populous continent.</p> <p>In an effort to help understand and react to the rapid changes taking place in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, also known as “Asia’s water tower,” <a href="../">Internews’ Earth Journalism Network</a> (EJN) and its partner <a href="https://www.thethirdpole.net/">The Third Pole</a> are launching an open source geospatial database. Located at <a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/">data.thethirdpole</a>.net, this compendium of scientific data on water issues is sourced from leading organizations monitoring water in Asia.  Supported by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, the Third Pole Data Network is part of a growing cadre of open data sites focused on the region, including the recently launched <a href="https://rds.icimod.org/">ICIMOD Regional Database Initiative</a> and WRI’s <a href="https://www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct">Aqueduct</a>.</p> <p>“The most exciting thing about this site is that its publication represents a beginning rather than an end. The data is interesting when it has real world application and knowledge value,” says Willie Shubert, EJN’s Senior Coordinator and a leader of the project. “This website is a fundamental step toward the adoption of open data in one of the world most critical bioregions.”</p> <p>See an animation of the <a href="https://ekuatorial.cartodb.com/">India Cyclone Track 1990-2013</a></p> <p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="520" loading="lazy" src="https://ekuatorial.cartodb.com/viz/af5a6dc8-69de-11e4-a196-0e4fddd5de28/embed_map" width="100%"></iframe></p> <p>The Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain range is known as the “Third Pole” because it contains the world’s largest store of ice outside the polar region. Glaciers that sit atop the watersheds <em>provide irrigation, power and drinking water for over 1.3 billion people – nearly 20% of the world’s population.</em></p> <p>The region’s river systems are also interrelated and cross numerous national boundaries. Many countries are already suffering serious water stress; planned infrastructure projects, including dams, are raising both regional and cross-border tensions and may have severe environmental impacts.</p> <p>People in the Himalayan watersheds also face higher risks from flooding, water shortage and pollution. Future population growth, climatic variation and increasing demands on scarce water resources from agriculture and industry are increasing these risks. For instance, the situation facing farmer Ratna Darai is all too common: the shifting of temperatures and seasons means water often doesn’t arrive when it used to, or in the expected quantities.</p> <p>However, access to information in this region is segmented and constrained by licensing schemes in various countries. The accuracy of information is also frequently contested by different government agencies in different countries. Mitigating common water threats will demand high levels of cooperation and historic tensions serve as an impediment to effective action on what is clearly a major threat to the region’s resilience.</p> <p>Acting wisely in response to these threats requires broad access to credible information. data.thethirdpole’s  simple, searchable catalog of datasets covers the Hindu Kush Himalaya region and so far includes over 125 of the most fundamentally important datasets about <a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/layers/?subject=&amp;topics=Water+Infrastructure">hydropower</a>, <a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/layers/?subject=&amp;topics=Cryosphere">glacier status</a>, <a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/layers/?subject=&amp;topics=Groundwater">groundwater depletion</a>, and<a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/layers/?subject=&amp;topics=Floods+and+Natural+Disasters">natural disaster</a> that provide the context for many of stories produced by a network of journalists for thethirdpole.net.</p> <p>“This project allows journalists to think more creatively and simplify information that is generated through complex science,” says Project Manager Ramesh Bhushal. “It provides the freedom to visualize stories that are of great importance and make them readable and understandable by the public, to inform the public and policymakers for better decision making.”</p> <p>All data hosted on the site is available for download in multiple formats and sourced from a network of data providers. Partnership agreements have been signed with <a href="https://data.thethirdpole.net/partners">10 organizations</a> including regional centers like the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). Global organizations like International Rivers and the World Resources Institute (WRI) are also actively engaged in providing data to the public using data.thethirdpole.net. With data sharing agreements in place, EJN and thethirdpole.net fully expect this database to expand in size over time.</p> <p>“We now have an open source database that enables any media house, journalist, think tank, university, government department or anyone else to prepare attractive maps of the Himalayan region on a subject of their choice with some very user-friendly software,” says Joydeep Gupta, South Asia Director of thethirdpole.net. “And it’s all free of cost. The next step is to let all these potential users know so that they start using this database. In return, we want the users to tell us how they have used this information. We’ll then geo-tag those stories and reports on our maps, thus enriching the database all the time, and also enabling our partners to reach wider audiences.”</p> <p>“The sharing of information is an important step in resolving differences,” adds EJN Executive Director James Fahn. “Our hope is that this data site, the future information products we’re planning and the network of communicators, researchers and policy experts we’re building can help the region overcome some of the many sustainability challenges that lie ahead.”</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/open-data-in-asias-water-tower-data-thethirdpole-net/">Open Data in Asia’s Water Tower: data.thethirdpole.net</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1304 https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-driven-journalism-project-land-quest-maps-drilling-profits-and-aid-in-kenya/ Gustavo Faleiros Fri, 23 Jan 2015 20:51:51 +0000 https://dev.geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1300 <p>In Kenya's poor, dry Turkana region, recent discoveries of water and oil could change the lives of residents who depend on food aid for survival. Land Quest, a cross-border investigative journalism experiment is using data to illuminate the competing financial interests in Kenya. It maps the flow of aid money from Europe to Kenya, and the flow of profits from Kenya back to Europe.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-driven-journalism-project-land-quest-maps-drilling-profits-and-aid-in-kenya/">Data-driven journalism project Land Quest maps drilling profits and aid in Kenya</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p>In Kenya’s poor, dry Turkana region, recent discoveries of water and oil could change the lives of residents who depend on food aid for survival.</p> <p>In March 2012, the country’s President Mwai Kibaki announced that oil had been discovered in Turkana after exploratory drilling by an Anglo-Irish oil firm. And last year, UNESCO announced that large reserves of groundwater had been discovered in the drought-ridden area.</p> <p><iframe frameborder="0" height="480" loading="lazy" src="https://landquest.internewskenya.org/embed/?map_id=4&amp;width=660&amp;height=480" width="660"></iframe></p> <p>How much will the new resources help Kenyans, and how much of the new wealth will flow back to European investors? The answer is complex, but a team of data journalists is working to make it more clear.</p> <p>Land Quest, a cross-border investigative journalism experiment is using data to illuminate the competing financial interests in Kenya. It maps the flow of aid money from Europe to Kenya, and the flow of profits from Kenya back to Europe.<a href="https://lab.oeco.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/turkana.jpg"><img alt="turkana" class="size-full wp-image-277 alignright" decoding="async" height="208" loading="lazy" src="https://lab.oeco.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/turkana.jpg" width="300"/></a></p> <p>The site pulls European aid data to map the impact of land acquisition by international oil and water interests. It also shows the location and other information about development aid and private sector projects in Turkana and surrounding Lake Naivasha nearby. There, transnational companies cultivate much of Europe’s annual flower supply, while European-funded nonprofit organizations seek to protect water quality, defend labor rights and resettle internally displaced people.</p> <p><strong>How it works</strong></p> <p>The site is powered by mapping platform JEO, created by Brazil-based InfoAmazonia.</p> <p>Land Quest is built to be easy for journalists to use. Developers created a “script that allows Google Doc spreadsheets to render directly onto map layers,” says Gustavo Faleiros, who founded InfoAmazonia and helped with the Land Quest project. “In practical terms, the points you see on the map are living on Google Spreadsheets,” Faleiros says, “and that means it’s easier for journalists to update the data.”</p> <p>When site visitors hover over some points on the map, they can also explore investigations and multimedia features that give them a deeper understanding of what’s happening at that location.</p> <p>The project is a cross-border investigative journalism experiment created by a group of Kenyan, European and American journalists. The investigation was financed by the European Journalism Centre and its Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Program. The platform was co-funded by the African Media Initiative’s Sandbox Fund, and spearheaded by Internews in Kenya in collaboration with Spain’s El Mundo and ((o))ecoLab. El Mundo’s website is publishing much of the content in Spanish. Kenyan media outlets will be able to access the Land Quest content in English and publish it on their own sites.</p> <p>Eva Constantaras, an Internews Data Journalism Advisor based in Kenya and one of Land Quest’s creators, says the project hopes that in the near future, Kenyan journalists can post on Land Quest their own data-driven investigations of natural resources and land ownership in Kenya.</p> <p>“We also hope to find funding to continue identifying and uploading new data sets to the map for journalists to analyze and visualize for their own stories,” Constantaras told IJNet. “Data access is a huge challenge for journalists in Kenya, and we seek to facilitate data access.”</p> <p><em>Jessica Weiss, a former IJNet managing editor, is a Buenos Aires-based freelancer</em>.</p> <p>Photo of men in Turkana courtesy of the DFID – UK Department for International Development, under a Creative Commons license.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/data-driven-journalism-project-land-quest-maps-drilling-profits-and-aid-in-kenya/">Data-driven journalism project Land Quest maps drilling profits and aid in Kenya</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1300 https://geojournalism.org/picks/ekuatorial-uses-geographic-data-to-cover-climate-change-in-indonesia/ Gustavo Faleiros Fri, 23 Jan 2015 20:27:27 +0000 https://dev.geojournalism.org/?post_type=pick&p=1298 <p>Frequent flooding and critically low crop yields are just two of the warning signs of climate change in Indonesia, home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest and some of the highest levels of biological diversity on the globe. To shed light on these crucial issues, data journalists have launched the news site Ekuatorial, which offers the latest environmental news and engaging, easy-to-understand interactive maps of oceans, forests and natural disasters in Indonesia.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/ekuatorial-uses-geographic-data-to-cover-climate-change-in-indonesia/">Ekuatorial uses geographic data to cover climate change in Indonesia</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> <p>by Jessica Weiss</p> <p>Frequent flooding and critically low crop yields are just two of the warning signs of climate change in Indonesia, home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest and some of the highest levels of biological diversity on the globe.</p> <p>To shed light on these crucial issues, data journalists have launched the news site <a href="https://ekuatorial.com/en" target="_blank">Ekuatorial</a>, which offers the latest environmental news and engaging, easy-to-understand interactive maps of oceans, forests and natural disasters in Indonesia.<br/> <iframe frameborder="0" height="480" loading="lazy" src="https://ekuatorial.com/embed/?map_only=1&amp;map_id=5015&amp;width=800&amp;height=480" width="800"></iframe></p> <p>Ekuatorial worked with <a href="https://hot.openstreetmap.org/projects/indonesia-0" target="_blank">Indonesian Humanitarian OpenStreetMap</a>, a volunteer group that assists in the collection of geographic data during and following humanitarian disasters. That group was also working with the local government disaster management organization <a href="https://www.bnpb.go.id/" target="_blank">BPBD</a>. They quickly passed along local data to the Ekuatorial team, which used it to create a multi-layered map.</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.siej.or.id/" target="_blank">Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists (SIEJ)</a> and Internews’ <a href="https://earthjournalism.net/projects/program-section-pages/ekuatorial" target="_blank">Earth Journalism Network (EJN)</a> created Ekuatorial with technical assistance from InfoAmazonia. It also received financial support from the <a href="https://www.packard.org/" target="_blank">David and Lucile Packard Foundation</a></p> <p style="text-align: center;">.<a href="https://lab.oeco.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jakartafloods.png"><img alt="jakartafloods" class="size-medium wp-image-364 alignleft" decoding="async" height="205" loading="lazy" src="https://lab.oeco.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jakartafloods-300x205.png" width="300"/></a></p> <p><strong>How Ekuatorial works</strong></p> <p>Ekuatorial is powered by <a href="https://ijnet.org/blog/how-journalists-are-using-jeo-mapping-platform-build-sites-powered-geographic-data">JEO</a>, an open source WordPress theme and geojournalism platform created by InfoAmazonia.</p> <p>To create its <a href="https://ekuatorial.com/maps" target="_blank">maps</a>, Ekuatorial first obtained data from a <a href="https://ekuatorial.com/datasets" target="_blank">range of sources</a>, such as governments, NGOs and community groups.</p> <p>Then, they hired cartographers from a company called <a href="https://axismaps.com/" target="_blank">Axis Maps</a>, which used geographic data platforms <a href="https://cartodb.com/" target="_blank">CartoDB</a> and <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/" target="_blank">MapBox</a> to design the maps. The cartographers published the maps directly onto JEO. <a href="https://twitter.com/miguelpeixe" target="_blank">Miguel Peixe</a>, Infoamazonia senior developer, designed the JEO theme for Ekuatorial and led its implementation.</p> <p>“This is a very advanced project with a large network of journalists and lots of data,” says Faleiros. “So that resulted in a lot of JEO innovation.” The Indonesian site was the first JEO-powered site to mix CartoDB and MapBox. As a result of the collaboration with Ekuatorial, JEO also improved its content filtering and launched an application programming interface (API). The API allows other publishers to use JEO’s database as the infrastructure for an app or a new interactive map.</p> <p><strong>Partnerships and syndication</strong></p> <p>Syndication is a key part of Ekuatorial’s strategy. Ekuatorial has more than a dozen partner publications whose news stories are shared on the site. Partners can share breaking environmental news and transmit local perspectives to international audiences. Users can also suggest published stories for Ekuatorial to feature on the site. The site does not publish press releases.</p> <p>“One unique element of this project is its incorporation of small local media houses in the regions closest to environmental change,” Internews project manager <a href="https://twitter.com/WillieShubert" target="_blank">William Shubert</a> told. “Our hope is that a platform like Ekuatorial can help amplify the voices of local journalists to a global audience by using the site as a syndication service.”</p> <p>The site’s Share a Map feature gives users custom embed codes that can be used to republish Ekuatorial’s maps on other websites. Ekuatorial updates its data frequently and allows users to download it for free.</p> <p>Indonesian journalist <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarbondioxide" target="_blank">Clara Rondonuwu</a>, who is the Ekuatorial project’s coordinator, notes that the site can also help journalists find story ideas.</p> <p>“All the maps are layered with rich data, which also means there is a two-way dialogue in it,” Rondonuwu said: “Journalists can reveal stories from the ground or spot issues that emerge from the map.”</p> <p>And that, she says, “generates a narrative that is more understandable for the public.”</p> <p><em><a href="https://www.twitter.com/jessweiss1" target="_blank">Jessica Weiss</a>, a former IJNet managing editor, is a Buenos Aires-based freelancer.</em><span id="more-1298"></span></p> <p>The post <a href="https://geojournalism.org/picks/ekuatorial-uses-geographic-data-to-cover-climate-change-in-indonesia/">Ekuatorial uses geographic data to cover climate change in Indonesia</a> appeared first on <a href="https://geojournalism.org">geojournalism.org</a>.</p> 1298