UC ANR's IGIS program hosted 36 drone enthusiasts for a three day DroneCamp in Davis California. DroneCamp was designed for participants with little to no experience in drone technology, but who are interested in using drones for a variety of real world mapping applications. The goals of DroneCamp were to:
- Gain an broader understanding of the drone mapping workflow: including
- Goal setting, mission planning, data collection, data analysis, and communication & visualization
- Learn about the different types of UAV platforms and sensors, and match them to specific mission objectives;
- Get hands-on experience with flight operations, data processing, and data analysis; and
- Network with other drone-enthusiasts and build the California drone ecosystem.
The IGIS crew, including Sean Hogan, Andy Lyons, Maggi Kelly, Robert Johnson, Kelly Easterday, and Shane Feirer were on hand to help run the show. We also had three corporate sponsors: GreenValley Intl, Esri, and Pix4D. Each of these companies had a rep on hand to give presentations and interact with the participants.
Day 1 of #DroneCamp2017 covered some of the basics - why drone are an increasingly important part of our mapping and field equipment portfolio; different platforms and sensors (and there are so many!); software options; and examples. Brandon Stark gave a great overview of the Univ of California UAV Center of Excellence and regulations, and Andy Lyons got us all ready to take the 107 license test. We hope everyone here gets their license! We closed with an interactive panel of experienced drone users (Kelly Easterday, Jacob Flanagan, Brandon Stark, and Sean Hogan) who shared experiences planning missions, flying and traveling with drones, and project results. A quick evaluation of the day showed the the vast majority of people had learned something specific that they could use at work, which is great. Plus we had a cool flight simulator station for people to practice flying (and crashing).
Day 2 was a field day - we spent most of the day at the Davis hobbycraft airfield where we practiced taking off, landing, mission planning, and emergency maneuvers. We had an excellent lunch provided by the Street Cravings food truck. What a day! It was hot hot hot, but there was lots of shade, and a nice breeze. Anyway, we had a great day, with everyone getting their hands on the commands. Our Esri rep Mark Romero gave us a demo on Esri's Drone2Map software, and some of the lidar functionality in ArcGIS Pro.
Day 3 focused on data analysis. We had three workshops ready for the group to chose from, from forestry, agriculture, and rangelands. Prior to the workshops we had great talks from Jacob Flanagan and GreenValley Intl, and Ali Pourreza from Kearney Research and Extension Center. Ali is developing a drone-imagery-based database of the individual trees and vines at Kearney - he calls it the "Virtual Orchard". Jacob talked about the overall mission of GVI and how the company is moving into more comprehensive field and drone-based lidar mapping and software. Angad Singh from Pix4D gave us a master class in mapping from drones, covering georeferencing, the Pix4D workflow, and some of the checks produced for you a the end of processing.
One of our key goals of the DroneCamp was to jump start our California Drone Ecosystem concept. I talk about this in my CalAg Editorial. We are still in the early days of this emerging field, and we can learn a lot from each other as we develop best practices for workflows, platforms and sensors, software, outreach, etc. Our research and decision-making teams have become larger, more distributed, and multi-disciplinary; with experts and citizens working together, and these kinds of collaboratives are increasingly important. We need to collaborate on data collection, storage, & sharing; innovation, analysis, and solutions. If any of you out there want to join us in our California drone ecosystem, drop me a line.
Thanks to ANR for hosting us, thanks to the wonderful participants, and thanks especially to our sponsors (GreenValley Intl, Esri, and Pix4D). Specifically, thanks for:
- Mark Romero and Esri for showing us Drone2Map, and the ArcGIS Image repository and tools, and the trial licenses for ArcGIS;
- Angad Singh from Pix4D for explaining Pix4D, for providing licenses to the group; and
- Jacob Flanagan from GreenValley Intl for your insights into lidar collection and processing, and for all your help showcasing your amazing drones.
#KeepCalmAndDroneOn!
First of all, Pearl Street Mall is just as lovely as I remember, but OMG it is so crowded, with so many new stores and chains. Still, good food, good views, hot weather, lovely walk.
Welcome to Day 2! http://neondataskills.org/data-institute-17/day2/
Our morning session focused on reproducibility and workflows with the great Naupaka Zimmerman. Remember the characteristics of reproducibility - organization, automation, documentation, and dissemination. We focused on organization, and spent an enjoyable hour sorting through an example messy directory of misc data files and code. The directory looked a bit like many of my directories. Lesson learned. We then moved to working with new data and git to reinforce yesterday's lessons. Git was super confusing to me 2 weeks ago, but now I think I love it. We also went back and forth between Jupyter and python stand alone scripts, and abstracted variables, and lo and behold I got my script to run.
The afternoon focused on Lidar (yay!) and prior to coding we talked about discrete and waveform data and collection, and the opentopography (http://www.opentopography.org/) project with Benjamin Gross. The opentopography talk was really interesting. They are not just a data distributor any more, they also provide a HPC framework (mostly TauDEM for now) on their servers at SDSC (http://www.sdsc.edu/). They are going to roll out a user-initiated HPC functionality soon, so stay tuned for their new "pluggable assets" program. This is well worth checking into. We also spent some time live coding with Python with Bridget Hass working with a CHM from the SERC site in California, and had a nerve-wracking code challenge to wrap up the day.
Fun additional take-home messages/resources:
- ISO International standard for dates = YYYY-MM-DD
- Missing values in R = NA, in Python = -9999
- For cleaning messy data - check out OpenRefine - a FOS tool for cleaning messy data http://openrefine.org/
- Excel is cray-cray, best practices for spreadsheets: http://www.datacarpentry.org/spreadsheet-ecology-lesson/
- Morpho (from DataOne) to enter metadata: https://www.dataone.org/software-tools/morpho
- Pay attention to file size with your git repositories - check out: https://git-lfs.github.com/. Git is good for things you do with your hands (like code), not for large data.
- Funny how many food metaphors are used in tech teaching: APIs as a menu in a restaurant; git add vs git commit as a grocery cart before and after purchase; finding GIS data is sometimes like shopping for ingredients in a specialty grocery store (that one is mine)...
- Markdown renderer: http://dillinger.io/
- MIT License, like Creative Commons for code: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
- "Jupyter" means it runs with Julia, Python & R, who knew?
- There is a new project called "Feather" that allows compatibility between python and R: https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/03/29/feather/
- All the NEON airborne data can be found here: http://www.neonscience.org/data/airborne-data
- Information on the TIFF specification and TIFF tags here: http://awaresystems.be/, however their TIFF Tag Viewer is only for windows.
Thanks for everyone today! Megan Jones (our fearless leader), Naupaka Zimmerman (Reproducibility), Tristan Goulden (Discrete Lidar), Keith Krause (Waveform Lidar), Benjamin Gross (OpenTopography), Bridget Hass (coding lidar products).
Our home for the week
Our third GIF Spatial Data Science Bootcamp has wrapped! We had an excellent 3 days with wonderful people from a range of locations and professions and learned about open tools for managing, analyzing and visualizing spatial data. This year's bootcamp was sponsored by IGIS and GreenValley Intl (a Lidar and drone company). GreenValley showcased their new lidar backpack, and we took an excellent shot of the bootcamp participants. What is Paparazzi in lidar-speak? Lidarazzi?
Here is our spin: We live in a world where the importance and availability of spatial data are ever increasing. Today’s marketplace needs trained spatial data analysts who can:
- compile disparate data from multiple sources;
- use easily available and open technology for robust data analysis, sharing, and publication;
- apply core spatial analysis methods;
- and utilize visualization tools to communicate with project managers, the public, and other stakeholders.
At the Spatial Data Science Bootcamp we learn how to integrate modern Spatial Data Science techniques into your workflow through hands-on exercises that leverage today's latest open source and cloud/web-based technologies.
The GIF is highlighting 2 brand new workshops in the upcoming weeks. Because these are the first time we've done these sessions, I'm happy to announce that we are offering them free of charge to UC Berkeley students, researchers, faculty, and staff. The workshop seats will be filled on a first come first serve basis. Space is limited, so please register at: http://gif.berkeley.edu/support/workshops.html
New Workshop: Intro to Geospatial Analysis using R
This new workshop is designed for participants who are already familiar with GIS and spatial analysis concepts who are interested in using R. The presentation will introduce attendees to major spatial packages and concepts within the R environment. We will step through hands-on exercises exploring tools and methods for analyzing environmental data within R, and supply information for participants to continue their exploration of these methods in their own research projects.
Location: 124 Mulford Hall
Day: Friday, November 20th
Time: 1:00-4:30 pm
New Workshop: Web GIS and Mobile Data Collection using ArcGIS Online
This workshop is designed for participants with little to no GPS, GIS or web mapping experience. The workshop will include an interactive exercise that will have you building your own mobile data collection survey to be used with your Smartphone GPS. You will then see how this survey application seamlessly integrates with ArcGIS Online to create a web map that displays the survey results in real time.This course content is the result of a collaborative effort between UC ANR IGIS Statewide Program, and the UC Berkeley, Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF).
Location: 124 Mulford Hall
Day: Friday, December 4th
Time: 1:00-4:30 pm
Register for these new training opportunities today! Space will fill up quickly, so make sure you register soon if you are interested. Also, feel free to pass this email onto your colleagues who may also be interested. If you have any questions, contact Nancy Thomas at nethomas@berkeley.edu.
The GIF began in November 2015 on a wave of excitement around geospatial technology. In the months leading up to our first GIS Day in 2005, Google Maps launched, then went mobile; Google Earth launched in the summer; and NASA Blue Marble arrived. Hurricane Katrina changed the way we map disasters in real time. The opening up of the Landsat archive at no-cost by the USGS revolutionized how we can monitor the Earth's surface by allowing dense time-series analysis. These and other developments made viewing our world with detail, ease, and beauty commonplace, but these were nothing short of revolutionary - spurring new developments in science, governance and business. The decade since then has been one of intense innovation, and we have seen a rush in geospatial technologies that have enriched our lives immeasurably. In November 2015 we can recognize a similar wave of excitement around geospatial technology as we experienced a decade ago, one that is more diverse and far reaching than in 2005. This GIS Day we would like to highlight the societal benefit derived from innovators across academia, non-profits, government, and industry. Our panel discussion on the 18th has representatives from several local innovators in the field, including: Stamen Designs, Geowing, PlanetLabs, 3D Robotics, NASA, iNaturalist.org, and Google, who will discuss their perspectives on the boom in Bay Area mapping.
Please think about joining us at GIS Day!
