In 1998 Al Gore made his now famous speech entitled The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century. He described the possibilities and need for the development of a new concept in earth science, communication and society. He envisioned technology that would allow us "to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of information about our planet and a wide variety of environmental and cultural phenomena.” From the vantage point of our hyper-geo-emersed lifestyle today his description of this Digital Earth is prescient yet rather cumbersome:
"Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. After donning a head-mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to see continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual houses, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a "magic carpet ride" through a 3-D visualization of the terrain.”
He said: "Although this scenario may seem like science fiction, most of the technologies and capabilities that would be required to build a Digital Earth are either here or under development. Of course, the capabilities of a Digital Earth will continue to evolve over time. What we will be able to do in 2005 will look primitive compared to the Digital Earth of the year 2020. In 1998, the necessary technologies were: Computational Science, Mass Storage, Satellite Imagery, Broadband networks, Interoperability, and Metadata.
He anticipated change: "Of course, further technological progress is needed to realize the full potential of the Digital Earth, especially in areas such as automatic interpretation of imagery, the fusion of data from multiple sources, and intelligent agents that could find and link information on the Web about a particular spot on the planet. But enough of the pieces are in place right now to warrant proceeding with this exciting initiative.”
Lots of exciting sharing this week!
A new high-resolution global map of forest loss and gain has been created with the help of Google Earth. The interactive online tool is publicly available and zooms in to a remarkably high level of local detail - a resolution of 30m. Snapshot of Russia here (green = forest, blue = gain, red = loss):
Results from time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat images from 2000–2012 characterize forest extent and change. Between 2000 and 2012, according to this analysis, the Earth lost a combined "forest" the size of Mongolia. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934790
Here is the abstract from the accompanying paper in Science:
Quantification of global forest change has been lacking despite the recognized importance of forest ecosystem services. In this study, Earth observation satellite data were used to map global forest loss (2.3 million square kilometers) and gain (0.8 million square kilometers) from 2000 to 2012 at a spatial resolution of 30 meters. The tropics were the only climate domain to exhibit a trend, with forest loss increasing by 2101 square kilometers per year. Brazil’s well-documented reduction in deforestation was offset by increasing forest loss in Indonesia, Malaysia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Zambia, Angola, and elsewhere. Intensive forestry practiced within subtropical forests resulted in the highest rates of forest change globally. Boreal forest loss due largely to fire and forestry was second to that in the tropics in absolute and proportional terms. These results depict a globally consistent and locally relevant record of forest change.
Hansen, M.C.; Potapov, P.V.; Moore, R.; Hancher, M.; Turubanova, S.A.; Tyukavina, A.; Thau, D.; Stehman, S.V.; Goetz, S.J.; Loveland, T.R.; Kommareddy, A.; Egorov, A.; Chini, L.; Justice, C.O.; Townshend, J.R.G. High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change. Science 2013, 342, 850-853
NASA has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services that the agency hopes will spark wider collaboration on climate research. In an effort that is in some ways parallel to Google's Earth Engine, NASA has uploaded terabytes of data to Amazon's public cloud and made it available to the anyone.
Three data sets are already up at Amazon. The first is climate change forecast data for the continental United States from NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) climate simulations, scaled down to make them usable outside of a supercomputing environment. The other two are satellite data sets—one from from the US Geological Survey's Landsat, and the other a collection of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data from NASA's Terra and Aqua Earth remote sensing satellites.
More Here
For class discussion: here is one look at the difference between Google Maps and Open Street Map.
From http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/openstreetmap-google-maps-technologies#
UC Berkeley is establishing a new institute to enable university researchers to harness the full potential of the data-rich world that today characterizes all fields of science and discovery. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) will be part of a multi-million dollar effort supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The new 5-year, $37.8 million initiative was announced today at a meeting sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) focused on developing innovative partnerships to advance technologies that support advanced data management and data analytic techniques.
The ambitious Moore/Sloan partnership, which also includes New York University and the University of Washington, will spur collaborations within and across the three campuses and other partners pursuing similar data-intensive science goals. The three PIs who lead the respective campus efforts – Saul Perlmutter at UC Berkeley, Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington, and Yann Le Cunn at NYU – will promote common approaches to form the basis for ongoing collaboration between the three campuses.
To provide a home for the new Berkeley Institute for Data Science UC Berkeley has set aside renovated space in a historical library building on the central campus in 190 Doe Library. The Institute is expected to move into its new quarters in spring 2014. In order to help address challenges related to creating and sustaining attractive career paths the new Institute will offer new Data Science Fellow positions for faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and staff to be shared with departmental partners across the campus. The new Institute will also offer support for graduate students, and organize short courses, boot camps, hack-a-thons and many other activities.
More information about specific BIDS programs will be forthcoming in the coming weeks. The new Institute will be launched at a campus event on December 12, 2013. If you or your students and collaborators are interested in participating in the Data Science Faire that day, please be sure to register at http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/datascience/dec12-registration. The deadline is November 25, 2013.
For updates and more information, please visit http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/datascience/overview-data-science and contact data science@berkeley.edu with any questions you may have.
