The GIF welcomes our new Executive Director Nancy Thomas, who joins us Monday November 10th. Nancy comes to us from the Spatial Analysis Center at Stanford. She has over 18 years of experience in managing successful remote sensing and GIS projects in both consulting and academic arenas. She was a early employee of Pacific  Meridian, one of the first remote sensing companies on the west coast. She has extensive experience in the development and analysis of geospatial data to map, monitor, and model land use and land cover for a variety of domestic and international natural resource management applications. She's given numerous presentations and workshops on geospatial technologies, and has facilitated numerous successful collaborations and training of geospatial research methods.

Please stop by the GIF and welcome her to the Berkeley community!

AB1327 is a bill that could potentially impact the work that we do in regards to remote sensing and aerial imagery collection, etc… in the near future. See the link below for more detail. The office of the California CIO, Scott Gregory, is in the process of providing the Legislature a summary analysis of the bill. In our analysis we want to highlight civilian use (non-public safety governmental) cases for UAV technology as a rebuttal to some of the limiting language in the bill.

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1327
 
If this bill will affect your organization’s future data collection needs, please provide them a brief summary to be incorporated into the analysis.

Here is what I have sent to Scott Gregory:

Maggi Kelly

Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management

UC Berkeley

The use of civilian accessed UAV technology is commonly used for research purposes to aquire imagery at critical times over inaccessible field sites such as wetlands and forests, or over agricultural fields throught the growing season. This remote data acquisition using UAVs has several advantages: 1) it limits damage of the site, 2) it allows for mutliple returns in a cost-effective way, and 3) it allows for important very high resolution imagery to be collected. Here is a paper where we perfected techniques to find weeds in an agricultural field using UAV imagery. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077151

Basically, they are looking for the organization name, use case and description of that use case. Please circulate to the user community within your respective organizations to solicit feedback. Please email or call if you have any questions. He would like to have these complied by 10am Friday (3/14/14).

Thanks for your help.

Forestry education at UC Berkeley began in 1914 with the “Division of Forestry” in the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Forestry was established in 1939 and the School of Forestry in 1946. Forest Summer Camp, the hallmark of the undergraduate program, began at Quincy, California, in 1915 and moved to Meadow Valley in 1917.

Today, alumni of Cal’s forestry program hold critical positions for the management of 95% of the industrial forestlands in California. The research of our alumni and faculty has grown knowledge in the areas of fire, remote sensing and GIS, ecology, climate change, forest economics, the social sciences, and numerous others.

Over the past 100 years, the Cal Forestry program has had an impact on every dimension of the field, and has produced the profession’s most influential thinkers and doers.

For more information, please see: http://nature.berkeley.edu/forestry100/about-us