T.Dubya.

Thought I would point out another article about Ecotrust’s involvement in the Calfornia marine life protection act initative (MLPAI).  Specifically our work interviewing fisherman in the south coast region.  The goal was to capture which areas are most important to these fisherman, by species and by port, so that people lobbying for the fisherman have the best information available and the impact of marine reserves on their bottom line can be reduced in an analytical way.

I wish I was able to show you the maps we’ve produced, they’re really something, and I really think they’re going to help the decision making process.  I should create some sample maps to display.

It’s important to remember that all of interviews are done under a very strict privacy agreement and only the summarized maps are made available so that individual fishing spots are not identifiable as much as possible.  The maps are also made available to a very small number of people for decision making.  The article doesn’t seem to make this key point very well as you’ll notice from peoples comments.

Open OceanMap Screenshot

It’s nice to see some news sources running stories on our software development at Ecotrust.  We received a Mellon Award last week in DC for our work on Open OceanMap.  OPB and and San Francisco Chronicle were kind enough to interview and run stories presenting the case for our software and its use to capture fishermen’s knowledge to try and minimize the impact of implementing marine reserves on fishing communities.

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Wandered up to Nanaimo, BC this week.  They don’t make it to easy to get there sometimes.  Stephen and I ended up hopping the max train to the airport, plane to vancouver, cab to the ferry, ferry to south nanaimo, cab to dowtown Nanaimo.  Geez.  Both cabs were little Prius’, nice.

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I cruised down to Eugene on Friday for the Hot Apps conference sponsored by Oregon URISA. Anselm Hook was along for the ride. The theme this year was open source GIS and was focused particularly on the web. Paul Ramsay was invited down to do the morning workshop which was essentially a crash course in web GIS. It included the use of free software and free API’s like Google maps.

There was excitement on the faces of some workshop attendees when we showed up at the end of the morning session.  Most of them work for local and state government agencies and had never had the opportunity to get their hands on this stuff.

I demoed the Inforain watershed locator and Forestland carbon calculator web tools along with the OpenOceanMap desktop tool based on QGIS.  They really liked seeing a web-based GIS being used to do more than just visualization and attribute display.  The carbon calculator is destined for greater things.  Most were also happy to know that OpenOceanMap has been field tested, being used for interviewing fisherman down in California as part of the process of defining marine protected areas.

It was time once again tonight to preach the open source GIS gospel to the masses.

I felt much better prepared this time with a variety of new demos using QGIS, PostGIS, and Grass. The students really seemed to respond to the extra dose of demos, much needed I think around 8-9pm at night… Also just three months ago I really had no polished applications from work to show off, tonight I had at least three including the Watershed Locator, ODFW demo and Aaron Racicot’s Open Ocean Map. They really show the progress Aaron and I have made in the last few months.

Download Slides

Download Base Data

Students, your comments on my presentation are more than welcome, you can leave them right on this site. Especially the stuff I can do better. I really enjoyed your questions, it was clear some of you were actually paying attention. I hope I inspired at least a single person to try some of the tools out.

We’ve been working hard at Ecotrust on a revamped version of Inforain.

There’s a new mapbook interface providing access to high-resolution images of a number of maps Ecotrust has produced. It allows you to search by name, keyword, region and theme. A variety of presentation, reports and datasets are also available.

Finally, we’ve created a Watershed Locator tool for the site, that allows users to explore watersheds within the Coho salmon territory of North America. It allows you to search by address, watershed name or just by clicking around on the map. Watershed boundaries, major rivers and perennial streams are displayed within an OpenLayers mapping client. One of the most useful features is the watershed ‘ladder’ which allows you to move up and down between watershed ‘levels’. Searching for a particular watershed will also bring up a number of statistics. Some of the more interesting ones include miles of anadromous streams, number of minor and major dams within the watershed, the number of LEED certified buildings, sq.miles of development/farmland/forestland/native land, etc.

A number of open source tools are used in the Watershed Locator including OpenLayers, Mapserver, TileCache, PostGIS, Prototype and Sript.aculo.us. A number of free services were also used including the Google terrain layer for the map and the Yahoo! geocoder for converting addresses to latitude/longitude locations. The terrain map layer is particularly useful for overlaying watershed boundaries. It becomes very clear to the user how the terrain delineates those boundaries. Thank you Google for releasing the terrain layer just weeks before Inforain went live!

In the future we’d like to allow users to access additional watershed resources including links to watershed councils, information on restoration projects, etc. The watershed locator code is available free and open source on our development site The hope is that the concept of a watershed locator as an exploratory educational tool will be replicated in different regions and possibly for different purposes.

I’ve been busy at the ‘ol office. I just wrapped up the second release of Delphos (version 0.2). It’s available here free and open source under the GPL license. Windows and mac binaries are available, but you can run it from source on Linux as well.

Here’s the blurb I cooked up about what it is, still tweaking it:
“Delphos is a database management and decision-support tool that utilizes multicriteria analysis (MCA) to select the best alternative from a group. Delphos is developed by Ecotrust in partnership with Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The documentation included with Delphos is tailored for the selection of fisheries and marine protected areas. However, Delphos is general enough to be used towards the analysis of any type of alternatives.”

Screenshots

It’s been a lot of fun using the QT framework for this tool, especially in a Python environment using PyQT. I’ll admit I don’t yet have a Pythonic mindset and I’m not yet correctly using the MVC design pattern, but I’m getting there. Let’s just say that if and when I bust out another release of Delphos I have a list of things to gut and re-implement.

For the last week I’ve been learning the Ext javascript framework and its really been a joy. Version 2.0 is very polished and it “just works”. I put together a very basic tool demo for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Alaska Department of Fish and Game that uses Ext for the layout, OpenLayers for the mapping component and Mapserver/PostGIS on the backend for serving up map tiles and doing spatial queries. The library is a beast but its everything you want in one place (think jQuery+Prototype+YUI).

Now to find a robust framework for the backend (I’m tired of PHP), maybe Pylons.

ODFW Demo - Try selecting the Coos Bay or Tillamook Bay Coho Population in the menu and then opening the Adult tab to view different metrics queried from the DB.

More tool are in the works, stay tuned.

Tonight, I gave a rousing talk on open source GIS to a group of students at Portland State University.

I have not doubt they will seek out the things of which I spoke! I hope you students enjoyed it, I’ve never talked for 45 minutes straight in my entire life.  Feel free to leave me a comment!

Here is the presentation for your viewing pleasure (download)