- Author: Sean Hogan
Hello Everyone,
IGIS is pleased to announce its second offering of DroneCamp! This three-day intensive workshop will take place at UC San Diego, between June 18th and the 21st, 2018, and will cover everything you need to know about drones for mapping, research, and land management. This intensive bootcamp style workshop will include instruction and hands on training in the following areas:
- Technology - The different types of drone and sensor hardware, costs and applications
- Drone science - Principles of photogrammetry and remote sensing
- Safety and regulations - Learn to fly safely and legally, including tips on getting your FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate
- Mission planning - Flight planning tools and principles for specific mission objectives
- Flight operations - Hands-on practice with both manual and programmed flights
- Data processing - Processing drone data into orthomosaics and 3D digital surface models; assessing quality control
- Data analysis - Techniques for analyzing drone data in GIS and remote sensing software
- Visualization - Create 3D models of your data
- Latest trends - Hear about new and upcoming developments in drone technology, data processing, and regulations
The cost of this three-day event will be $500 for UC Employees and $900 for everyone else.
Additional information and registration info can be found at http://igis.ucanr.edu/dronecamp/. Registration requires a short application (no fee), that will inquire about your background and learning goals. Anyone interested in attending is encouraged to submit an application by April 15, 2018 for early priority registration. Be aware, last year's event filled up very quickly.
We hope to see you there!
Sean Hogan
UC ANR IGIS
Drone Service Coordinator
- Author: Andy Lyons
- Author: Sean Hogan
Last week at the Hasting Natural Reserve in Monterey County, IGIS joined forces with The Wildlife Society Western Section for a workshop on drone mapping for wildlife biologists. Over three days, 25 participants learned about drone technology, the science behind mapping with drones, regulations at both the federal and state levels, flight operations, data processing and analysis, and 360 drone photography. The workshop was hugely successful.
The workshop once again proved the value of collaboration. The Hastings Natural History Reservation, a UC Berkeley field station under the UC Natural Reserve System, was a superb location for the workshop, and Resident Director Vince Voegeli took good care of us. IGIS team members Sean Hogan, Andy Lyons and Jacob Flanagan, provided the core of the technical material building upon earlier workshops include last year's DroneCamp. Steve Goldman, UAS Coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) spoke about the use of drones in CDFW including their recently finalized regulatory policies and procedures. Steve Earsom from the US Fish and Wildlife Service recorded a similar presentation for participants. Professor Emeritus David Bird from McGill University educated and entertained the audience with several presentations about UAVs in wildlife research over his long and distinguished career. All of this was put together by TWS Western Section Workshop Coordinator and master planner, Ivan Parr.
We are looking forward to more drone mapping workshops and love the collaborative model that combines institutions, technical backgrounds, and applications. Our next multi-day drone workshop will be another offering of DroneCamp coming this summer. Stay tuned for an announcement in the near future.
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Super fun. We at IGIS and the Kellylab are working with Drone Scholars on the #Fly4Fall project. Fly4Fall: A citizen science experiment for crowd sourcing UAV data.
Consider being a participant! Here are the contributions so far:
- Author: Andy Lyons
Our colleague Greg Crutsinger at Drone Scholars recently launched an initiative to mobilize the large network of amateur UAV enthusiasts for an exciting campaign called Fly4Fall.
Under the Fly4Fall campaign, amateur drone hobbyists across the globe are invited to take aerial 360 photos with their drone and contribute them to a collection of fall landscapes that will grow over time.
Never taken an aerial 360 photo before? Me either, but fortunately it recently got a whole lot easier with a free iOS app called Hangar 360. The Hangar app flies your DJI drone for you, climbing to the height you program and then taking about 25 photos in a circle at three different angles to the horizon. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes, and you can collect multiple panos per flight. You then land the drone (but don't turn it off just yet!), transfer the photos from the drone to your phone over the WiFi, and then upload the photos to Hangar. Hangar stitches the photos for you in the cloud (also free!), and sends you a link. The results are stunning! See the panoramic photo below of Kearny REC made by IGIS's Robert Johnson earlier this week.
Inspired by citizen science initiatives like the Christmas Bird Count and Project BudBurst, where large numbers of naturalists record observations in a coordinated way, Fly4Fall is part non-professional science project, part art, part community building, and a whole lot of fun. Crutsinger discussed some of the potential science angles in a recent LinkedIn post.
Full instructions can be found at Fly4Fall.com. Currently, the Hangar app only works on iOS, unfortunately, and only with DJI drones (but the list includes most of the popular ones). Android enthusiasts can check out Litchi, which includes similar functionality but costs $25 and you have to process the images on your own (look for tutorials online).
Of course like any drone flight you have the follow the rules - only fly in permitted areas, don't fly directly over people, and be safe!
We look forward to seeing the Fly4Fall panoramas coming in. Feel free to use the comment box below to share your experiences and thoughts!
Many of us have watched in horror and sadness over the previous week as fires consumed much of the beautiful hills and parts of the towns of Napa and Sonoma Counties. Many of us know people who were evacuated with a few minutes' notice - I met a retired man who left his retirement home with the clothes on his back. Many other friends lost everything - house, car, pets. It was a terrible event - or series of events as there were many active fires. During those 8+ days all of us were glued to our screens searching for up-to-date and reliable information on where the fires were, and how they were spreading. This information came from reputable, reliable sources (such as NASA, or the USFS), from affected residents (from Twitter and other social media), and from businesses (like Planet, ESRI, and Digital Globe who were sometimes creating content and sometimes distilling existing content), and from the media (who were ofen using all of the above). As a spatial data scientist, I am always thinking about mapping, and the ways in which geospatial data and analysis plays an increasingly critical role in disaster notification, monitoring, and response. I am collecting information on the technological landscape of the various websites, media and social media, map products, data and imagery that played a role in announcing and monitoring the #TubbsFire, #SonomaFires and #NapaFires. I think a retrospective of how these tools, and in particular how the citizen science aspect of all of this, helped and hindered society will be useful.
In the literature, the theoretical questions surrounding citizen science or volunteered geography revolve around:
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Accuracy – how accurate are these data? How do we evaluate them?
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Access – Who has access to the data? Are their technological limits to dissemination?
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Bias (sampling issues)/Motivation (who contributes) are critical.
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Effectiveness – how effective are the sites? Some scholars have argued that VGI can be inhibiting.
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Control - who controls the data, and how and why?
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Privacy - Are privacy concerns lessened post disaster?
I think I am most interested in the accuracy and effectiveness questions, but all of them are important. If any of you want to talk more about this or have more resources to discuss, please email me: maggi@berkeley.edu, or Twitter @nmaggikelly.
Summary so far. This will be updated as I get more information.
Outreach from ANR About Fires
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ANR has a number of programs dedicated to fire preparedness, recovery, and prevention.
Core Geospatial Technology During Fires
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Wildfire products
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Fire perimeters from https://www.geomac.gov/services.shtml
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The Active Fire Perimeters layer is a product of Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination (GeoMAC). In order to give fire managers near real-time information, fire perimeter data is updated daily based upon input from incident intelligence sources, GPS data, infrared (IR) imagery from fixed wing and satellite platforms.”
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MODIS hot spots from USFS Active Fire Mapping Program. MODIS The MODIS instrument is on board NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra (EOS AM) and Aqua (EOS PM) satellites. In addition to lots of other data, MODIS delivers Channel 31 brightness temperature (in Kelvins) of a hotspot/active fire pixel.
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For more on how these are made: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=b4ce4179b04f47e4ba79e234205565c1
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WebGIS sites
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Media using maps (super short list)
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http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2017/interactive-map-wine-country-fires/
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NYTimes: Minutes to Escape: How One California Wildfire Damaged So Much So Quickly. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/21/us/california-fire-damage-map.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
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NYTimes: How California's Most Destructive Wildfire Spread, Hour by Hour. OCT. 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/21/us/california-fire-damage-map.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
- SFGate focusing on SkyIMD: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/incredible-aerial-photos-wine-country-fires-12285123.php
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Social media
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Twitter: #sonomafires, #napafires, #tubbsfire
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Flickr: SonomaFires, TubbsFires, NapaFires, etc.
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Core Technology for Post-Fire Impact
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High resolution imagery collection and analysis
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From satellite
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Planet has made fire imagery available: https://www.planet.com/pulse/northern-california-wildfire-satellite-data-available-for-access/
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Digital Globe + MapBox made a post-fire tool: (Author: @robinkraft
Email: rkraft4@gmail.com, Github repo, Source: Overview News // DigitalGlobe 2017): https://robinkraft.github.io/norcal-fires-imagery/compare.html; https://blog.mapbox.com/santa-rosa-fire-satellite-imagery-a31b6dfefdf8
- Digital Globe - Open Data Program: https://www.digitalglobe.com/opendata
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Sonoma Veg Map Program has a few links to interesting stuff including ArcGIS Server Drone and Digital Globe Imagery: http://sonomavegmap.org/blog/2017/10/17/fires/
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From aircraft
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I know SkyIMD was flying the entire time.
- First Map - Flights 10/11-10/14/17 Here: http://www.skyimd.com/napa-sonoma-fire-imagery-map/
- Second Map - Flight 10/20/17 - Here: http://www.skyimd.com/napa-sonoma-fire-imagery-map-2/
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From drone:
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Greg Crutsinger from @droneScholars made this available: Aftermath of #TubbsFire: https://www.mapbox.com/bites/00382/#18/38.4763/-122.74861
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Open Aerial Map has one drone image not sure the source https://map.openaerialmap.org/#/-122.7497720718384,38.471986484020334,16/square/023010201213/59e62be93d6412ef7220c4c0?_k=hm0j7l
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