Organizations responsible for environmental monitoring, especially when it comes to ‘smart development’ in environmentally sensitive areas, are increasingly using the right geospatial data, tools and processes to ensure minimal impact.

The study, assessment and monitoring of natural resources and habitats is of the utmost importance in ecosystem management. In the United Kingdom, a high priority has been placed on managing natural resources, and maintaining a balance between sustainable energy sources and a sustainable environment in which to live. It is understood that a healthy, properly functioning natural environment provides the foundation for sustainable economic growth, prospering communities and personal wellbeing.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in the UK is the government department responsible for policies on environmental regulation and sustainable development.

DEFRA reflects UK government key priorities to:

• Support and develop British farming and encourage sustainable food production
• Enhance the environment and biodiversity to improve quality of life
• Support a strong and sustainable green economy and thriving rural communities, that are resilient to climate change

In order to ensure that these criteria are effectively met, many agencies within the UK are tasked with preserving the natural environment, and have become increasingly involved in the use of satellite, aerial imagery, infrared and LiDAR datasets. All of these data products are highly effective in mapping, monitoring change and supporting the assessment of natural habitats.  
Environmental organizations and contractors now collect and store gigabytes and even terabytes of geographic data, which must be stored and disseminated properly to the right technical experts for analysis such as vegetation health detection, slope stability risk analysis and species change. Through these customized and highly-specialized spatial models, experts are able to understand clearly the anthropogenic impact to our environment.

Some aerial surveys involve the collection of thousands of aerial images in one study. To manage these massive volumes of data, environmental monitoring organizations in the UK are turning to comprehensive data management, analysis and delivery solutions.  These solutions must enable the organization to create a catalog of human-understandable metadata, where data can be easily searched, discovered and securely disseminated to the proper end users and technical experts.

Along with serving imagery very fast, these solutions should also provide the ability to dynamically edit data, perform analytics and extract information products on-demand. Organizations can use next-generation software for performing advanced remote sensing analysis and spatial modeling to create new information. A key benefit of these kinds of solutions is that users can visualize the results in 2D, 3D, movies, and on cartographic-quality map compositions.

Impact of Wind Farm Development

The environmental impacts of wind farm development are always a major consideration when countries are exploring alternative energy sources.

The UK is currently a world leader in offshore wind power generation.  Wind farms tend to be ideally suited for expansive regions and coastlines where wildlife is abundant. While a good alternative source of energy, they are not without their impacts to the wildlife populations in those areas. 

Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm, 4 km from Gunfleet Sand. Image by Ashley Dace from geograph.org.uk

Understanding the environmental impacts of development is a vital step in moving forward with energy solutions. To perform proper assessment and ensure minimal impact in site selection, a number of organizations are already using geospatial solutions and imagery analysis for natural habitat evaluation and site selection.

For one such project, APEM Ltd. in the UK is monitoring bird populations living in areas zoned for potential development, or in areas already developed for wind power generation. APEM specializes in freshwater and marine ecology assessment using aerial surveys.

Using a proprietary algorithm for identifying and enumerating birds from aerial photographs, they have collected tens of thousands of images. To date APEM have amassed over 87 Terabytes of aerial photography using 4 Leica RCD30 Medium Resolution Cameras on five aircrafts.

In order to handle this massive quantity of data, core management and delivery capabilities are required. Key solutions from Intergraph have been used to enable the customer to organize and disseminate data to the technical analysts who examine and count birds captured in every image. Other Intergraph solutions are also used for data authoring and generating terrain models of the bird habitat.

By using these products, APEM is able to understand and process massive amounts of aerial data required for supporting the planning and development, as well monitoring the impact of wind farms in this region.

Other Environmental Monitoring Uses

Through our UK partner Sterling GEO, Intergraph has been able to implement solutions in other unique ways. For example, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) monitors and reports on the state of Scotland's environment. The natural environment makes up 80 percent of Scotland’s land mass and is home to more than 1,000 different species of birds living in large wetland areas. Correspondingly, SEPA deals with massive volumes of data regarding various bird species and wildlife habitat. SEPA uses Intergraph solutions and has been able to effectively assess and monitor the country’s natural wetlands.

Natural England was able to develop enhanced 3D visualization using ERDAS IMAGINE Virtual GIS.

Scotland is renowned for its areas of outstanding natural beauty and rugged landscape. The Scottish Natural Heritage is funded by the Scottish Government to promote and care for the country’s natural environment. The nation’s peatlands and bogs provide a natural water source that help maintain steady flow rates in salmon rivers, sheep grazing and recreation areas. The organization conducts in-depth vegetation analysis to properly monitor these areas, and runs ERDAS IMAGINE to utilize unique mosaicking, stacking and powerful segmentation capabilities for environment classification and assessment.

ERDAS IMAGINE is used for the mosaicking, stacking, segmentation as well as the NDVI indexing of a bog in Scotland.

Future of Ecosystem Monitoring

Pressures of an expanding global population, increasing energy demands and the growing responsibility we must take to manage our environment drive us to create smart and sustainable policies that minimize the impacts of development on the natural world. 
Sensitive environmental regions of the world have become beacons - sign-posts even - to warn us of the impact we humans can have if development is not kept in check.  Now more than ever, it is our responsibility to constantly monitor the impacts of our man-made ‘improvements’, and ensure that our activities within nature do as little harm to the environment as possible. Whether we’re overseeing the wetlands and peatlands of Scotland, or examining nesting bird populations whose mating regions are being threatened by man; detailed analysis help us to understand where we must modify our activities in these areas, and furthermore how we should advise governments and inform useful policy-making.

Accurate, detailed geospatial data is now more available and important than ever. New lifecycle management solutions combine best-in-class products with enterprise geospatial information management; enabling environmental monitoring organizations to simplify and control how data and workflows are maintained, shared, accessed and applied. This ultimately enables rich data stores to be effectively used in ways that directly impact smart development.

As the world changes, the right geospatial data management solutions will provide key insights for sustaining the health of our planet in the near and long term.

Google released a report What is the economic impact of Geo services ? earlier this year prepared by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK.

What are geospatial services ?

Oxera incuded all interactive digital mapping and location-based data,  products, and services in its definition of geospatial services.  This includes providers of satellite imagery, digital maps, satellite positioning signals (GPS/GNSS), navigation devices, geographic information systems (GIS), and geospatial expert service providers.  Digital maps include online maps and locally stored maps, but not hardcopy maps.  Geospatial products and services generate direct revenue for companies such as ESRI, Garmen, or Digital Globe.

What is value ?

The study aims to quantify the impact of geospatial services on the world economy and consumer welfare.  It breaks these impacts down into

• direct effects - revenue generated by firms developong and providing geospatial data, products and services
• consumer effects - the benefits that consumers, business and government experience from using geospatial services from geospatial services
• wider economic benefts - productivity and efficiency improvements resulting in cost savings from geospatial services

Economic impact of global geoservices

Direct revenues

Global revenues from geospatial products and services as defined by Oxera is estimated to be $150-$270 billion per year.  The geospatial industry is estimated to be growing by 13% per year through 2016. [ There are important assumptions that led to these numbers.  The lower estimate of $150 billion/year was estimated using a bottom-up approach based on the Bloomberg BICS classification of companies worldwide and assumptions about allocating the revenue from companies that provide geospatial in addition to other services such as Trimble.  The $270 billion number was estimated by scaling up the US revenue estimated by Boston Consulting Group to come up with a world estimate.]

Gross value added (GVA) is the grand total of all revenues ( from final sales and subsidies minus direct taxes ) which are incomes into businesses.  Geospatial services are estimated to have a global GVA of $113 billion/year, which is about 0.2% of the world's GVA of $70 trillion.

Consumer benefits

Geospatial services provide benefits (not including direct purchases of geospatial products and services) to consumers.   For example, enabling consumers to find the nearest Thai restaurant in seconds rather than leafing through the yellow pages and looking up the location on a map saves time.   Finding the fastest route to the nearest hospital saves time and may actually save lives.

Some of the consumer benefts of geospatial services include time savings, fuel savings, emergency response, education, and competition.

Examples of categories of consumer benefits include more efficient navigation, estimated to provide benefits of  $22 billion/year, and educational benefits estimated to amount to $12 billion/year.  Faster emergency response to cardiac arrests is estimated to potentially save 152 lives/year in the UK.

Wider economic impact

Geospatial services also make users more efficient.  For example, a trucking company that has installed GPS trackers on its vehicles and uses location-aware routng software will be more efficient, delivering items faster and more efficiently.  There are also indirect benefits to the general public in improved safety.  By getting things to end users and businesses faster and more safely, geospatial services facilitate economic activity.

For example, GPS/GNSS is estimated to provide $10 billion in cost savings to the global economy.  Geospatial  services are estimated to save 1.1 billion hours of travel time/year and to reduce fuel demand by 3.5 billion liters of gasoline/year.

Thanks to Dr Bob Austin for pointing me to this.

The folks who brought us the awesome web video series MinutePhysics have released the first episode of MinuteEarth. I am super excited about the potential for the series based on the great content they have put together previously for MinutePhysics, including some great geospatial relevant topics.

Brought to you by the same folks behind MinutePhysics, the first episode of MinuteEarth delivers a succinct history of our planet.

Courtesy of GCN

First of four parts.

It's faster than a speeding bullet. It can measure buildings in a single pulse. It can scan the ocean floor and peer through forest canopies to measure undergrowth. It's LIDAR – light detection and ranging.

A standard LIDAR system emits a beam of light from a laser source and then captures the returned light in sensors as it bounces back from a reflecting object, measuring the distance by calculating the time required for the round trip. While LIDAR systems were used by the federal government as early as the 1960 — primarily for atmospheric studies — it wasn't until after 2000 that a combination of factors resulted in a boom of LIDAR data-gathering projects that are now bearing fruit at federal, state and local government levels.

U.S. troops have used LIDAR to map the difficult terrain in Afghanistan and a Colorado State University scientist used it in creating the first forest height map to measure carbon cycles in ecosystems.

"It's being used by just about everybody who uses a map," said John English, LIDAR data coordinator for Oregon's Department of Geology. "Every municipality and county is using it. The Department of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service use it for their forest inventory surveys." 

According to English, the agencies are increasingly turning to LIDAR because the technology has gotten both less expensive and more accurate, and, because surveys are generally done from aircraft, vast amounts of territory can be covered quickly. "It's been a huge timesaver," he said.  "The estimate of savings is incalculable."

Kirk Waters, a program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services Center, agrees. "LIDAR is a way to get fairly accurate elevations over a broad area at a reasonable price," he said.

Waters pointed to a March 2012 report by the U.S. Geological Survey that found that a national program of collecting LIDAR data would result in net benefits of between $116 million and $620 million a year. According to the study — the National Enhanced Elevation Assessment — the biggest savings are to be realized in flood risk management, infrastructure and construction management, natural resources conservation, agriculture and water supply management.

Elevation data can tell city planners where to plan mitigation for floods. It can tell farmers where to expect irrigation runoff and where to plant crops that require the most expensive fertilizers. Cities are using LIDAR to build 3D maps.  

In all, "the study came up with 600 different uses,” Waters said. “There's just tons of applications."

"It's at the beginning stages," said Steve Snow, a mapping and LIDAR specialist with geospatial tech company Esri. "Everybody is learning about the technology." Esri, in fact, just added the ability to import native LIDAR directly into its industry-standard ArcGIS software.

In principle, the technology behind LIDAR is simple. By measuring the time it takes light to bounce off an object, and knowing the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), one can detect the distance of the object. The challenge has been in developing equipment that can fire rapid pulses of light — in some cases up to 150,000 pulses per second — and that can measure the returning light with accuracy.

LIDAR systems vary in the wavelengths of light and the power of the pulses employed. High-energy pulse systems, for example, typically are used for atmospheric research, while lower-powered micropulse systems are more often employed for downward scanning, since they are considered "eye safe." 

And although most airborne LIDAR systems use 1064-nanometer laser beams, bathymetric LIDAR systems — those used to penetrate water — employ a narrower 532-nm beam. Bathymetric LIDAR also transmits two light waves, one infrared and the other green. As a result, it can detect two returning signals, one off the water surface and the other from the seabed. 

Other critical elements in the development of LIDAR systems have been the enhancements in the production of higher-resolution and more flexible scanners, optics and photoreceptors. 

Finally, collecting LIDAR data from aircraft involves a few additional challenges. Because the LIDAR sensor is moving, the changes in location between the firing of the pulse of light and its return must be accounted for in making any measurement. That required the development of fast, high-resolution GPS devices and inertial measurement units that measure velocity and orientation. 

Coordinating of this, of course, is no mean feat, nor is digesting the massive amounts of data that are produced.   

According to Waters, NOAA's LIDAR scans are shooting between 100,000 and 200,000 points per second with about up to 10cm of error. "The rest is math," Waters said. "Lots of math, but it's still just math."

NEXT: LIDAR proves its worth in the floodplains of the Red River Basin and the Forests of Oregon.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Office of Response and Recovery may seek a contractor to manage its current and future geospatial technical support services. 

FEMA released a request for information (RFI) asking for companies to indicate their capabilities and interest in supporting the Disaster Management and Support Environment (DMSE) Program Management Office, which provides enterprise geospatial services delivering a common view of important data during emergency response and recovery operations to FEMA and its partner organizations via a website called FEMA GeoPlatform. 

"DMSE is interested in developing a cloud environment that will support geospatial efforts to merge data and processes of several legacy systems and will contain information subject to Privacy Act restrictions and For Official Use Only information," the RFI said. 

The RFI asked companies about capabilities to provide managed services, scalability, elasticity, storage, secured devices, database hosting, application hosting and other support. 

The goal is to simply the delivery of geospatial information to a variety of organizations in a streamlined manner. 

"During response and recovery missions, FEMA receives massive amounts of data in a variety of formats and from a multitude of sources," the RFI said. "Commonly, the data is not delivered in a manner that readily supports geospatial representation of the data and frequently, dissemination of the information beyond the data owner is not permitted. Consequently, valuable time and resources are devoted to converting data to a geospatial compatible format or searching for other sources of mission critical information." 

Because FEMA is often unable to share data outside of government firewalls, it often resorts to "archaic methods" of distribution, such as sending a DVD or USB drive to a partner. FEMA also may result to uploading geospatial information to an FTP site and then sending documentation to explain the data. 

The situation becomes more complicated because other organizations have turned to many other geospatial information systems (GIS) for their own special mission requirements. These different systems have different data formats and make use of different data sets. 

"Subsequently, the ability to provide FEMA's geospatial partners with on-time access to critical data can be complex and problematic," the RFI observed. 

To address these problems for now, DMSE has turned to Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) for producing, discovering and storing data. As Amazon EC2 resides outside of government firewalls, it allows for rapid data exchange with other organizations. 

During Hurricane Sandy, the Amazon EC2 solution proved itself by sharing a great deal of data with emergency managers and the public. The solution successfully shared very large files, handled millions of visitors and produced thousands of Web services, according to FEMA. 

FEMA analysts use ArcGIS from Esri, Redlands, Calif., to display maps and geographic information, moving data between desktops and the Amazon cloud. "It is used for creating and using maps, compiling geographic data, analyzing mapped information, sharing and discovering geographic information, using maps and geographic information in a range of applications, and managing geographic information in a database," FEMA said. 

The agency relies upon Esri's ArcGIS Online for Organizations as the main user interface for accessing Web-based geospatial data on the FEMA GeoPlatform at fema.maps.arcgis.com. 

Companies interested in replying to the RFI were encouraged to submit questions by Thursday. They have a deadline of March 11 to submit a full response.