There is some potentially big news for drone users within the university systems that came out last week.  Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024 on Thursday December 14th, which includes provisions restricting the use of Chinese drones in connection with almost all federal grant funding.  This bill will very likely be signed by the President later in the year, and while there could still be some adjustments, as the bill pertains to drones, any forthcoming changes are very unlikely at this point.

Specifically, Title 18, Subtitle B, Sections 1821-1833 will prohibit all Federal Agencies from purchasing any drone made in China, and will sunset all operations of Chinese drones in two (2) years. This will apply to all federal grants (Section 1825).  Beginning two years after the enactment of this Act, except as provided in subsection (b) pertaining to the one exception of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), no Federal funds awarded through a contract, grant, or cooperative agreement, or otherwise made available may be used to procure a covered unmanned aircraft system that is manufactured or assembled in China; or in connection with the operation of such a drone or unmanned aircraft system.

This legislation also requires the development of new federal wide policy on the purchase of drones (including grants/contracts). Likely this will be some version of the BlueSUAS list (vetted by DoD for security) that will be the new standard.  We will have to wait and see how this unfolds.

For now, assuming the current NDAA compliance requirements, we only have the following platform recommendations for multispectral/photogrammetry operations using federal funds.  However, hopefully new authorized technology will be forthcoming soon.

• eBee X (~$13k) fixed-wing, Cat 3 OOP, but requires laptop in field
• Wingtra Gen II (~$36k), VTOL with forward flight
• Freefly Astro (~$32k mapping package), multi-rotor, 1.5kg payload capacity
• Aurelia X6 Pro V2 (~$22k NDAA compliant package, no payload), 6kg payload capacity

For more information, please consider signing up for office hours with the UC ANR IGIS Statewide Program: 
https://igis.ucanr.edu/Office_Hours/

or refer to resources through UC Unmanned Aircraft System Safety site:
https://www.ucop.edu/safety-and-loss-prevention/environmental/program-resources/unmanned-aircraft-systems-safety.html

 

The thing that I possibly like the most about the ESRI Users Conference is that you not only get to see all of the recent updates that the company has recently developed but also glimpses of what is coming soon.  In particular, I am excited about the advancements that they have made in respect to web mapping applications.

Are you an ArcGIS Online user, and have been wondering when to transition from the Traditional Web Map Viewer to the new Web Map Viewer?  To answer that question, for myself, I think the time is now.  At this point, per ESRI, there are now only four remaining functionalities that remain to be added to the new Map Viewer to give it all of the functionality that the Traditional Map Viewer had, which will be discontinued in late 2025, including the abilities to:

• Calculate fields (this would be nice to have)
• Add additional relationships to related records (something I have never needed to do previously)
• Vector tile style editing (not something I have ever needed to do, but which I could see being useful for some people)
• Saving/duplicating layers (there is a relatively simple work around for this, but it would be nice to have it built into the Map Viewer)

That said, there are far more than four added functionalities that the new Map Viewer has that the old version lacks, including:

• Easier browsing of data
• Feature editing enhancements
• Analysis enhancements, both for vectors and rasters
• Shortcuts
• Improved visibility, filtering, and effects (on the fly)
• Toggleable layers
• Charts (donut and pie)
• Label enhancements (including improved bookmarks and placements)
• Blending (in a group layer); including blending layers with basemaps and multiply effects
• Added display expressions
• Multidimensional imagery support, including an imagery slider
• The ability to upload feature symbols (svg)
• Sketch layers (as opposed to Classic's notes) with snapping, and also with the ability to upload custom symbols
• The ability to add and manually georeferenced media layers (jpg or png) using control points (on which media blending and effects can also be applied)

Besides all of these additions, the interface has been thoughtfully revamped with usability and efficiency in mind.  Some of the above enhancements will now allow you to complete some work flows/functions several times faster than they could be done before.  I must admit that I am very pleased!

The IGIS Team is pleased to share our workshop schedule for Spring 2023. Workshops are the best part of our 'trilogy' of strategic goals - research, technical projects, and training - because this is where we get to share the tips and tricks we pick up every day. See descriptions below, and if you're not available to attend one that really interests you keep an eye open for the recordings on our YouTube Channel.

Have an idea for a workshop? Or a quick question about mapping, drones, or data? Send us a note or sign-up for Office Hours.  

 

Introduction to ArcGIS Online

Friday January 27, 2023 • 1:00 - 4:00pm • online • free

ArcGIS Online is the online component of the ESRI geospatial ecosystem, and the foundation for web mapping, story maps, and mobile data collection. This workshop will provide an overview of ArcGIS Online and teach participants how to create a web map. This workshop is a prerequisite for the Story Maps and Field Maps workshops, and recommended for ArcGIS Pro.

Requirements: No experience required. Participants must have an ArcGIS Online account set up prior to the workshop (free for all UCANR employees, temporary accounts available for others). Details and registration.

 

Introduction to ArcGIS Pro

Friday February 17, 2023 • 1:00 - 4:00pm • online • free

ArcGIS Pro is ESRI's powerhouse desktop application for all things GIS. It can do anything from basic cartography to advanced geospatial modeling. This introduction will get you started creating maps with local and online GIS data.

Requirements: Participants must have ArcGIS Pro installed on their personal computer prior to the workshop. ArcGIS Pro is for Windows only. Licenses are free for all UCANR employees, and temporary accounts available for others. No experience needed, but the ArcGIS Online workshop (January 27) or equivalent experience is strongly encouraged. Details and registration.

 

Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks in ArcGIS

April 7, 2023 • 1:00 - 4:00pm • online • free

Jupyter Notebooks are a user-friendly and interactive way to write Python code. ArcGIS Pro supports Juptyer notebooks natively, opening the door to a wide range of options for automation and extensibility. This workshop will get you started using Jupyter Notebooks in ArcGIS Pro to automate workflows, perform geoprocessing tasks, create data summaries, and import downscaled climate data from Cal-Adapt.

Requirements: Basic familiarity with ArcGIS Pro is expected. Licenses for ArcGIS Pro are free for all UCANR employees, and temporary accounts available for others. Experience with Python is helpful but not required. Details and registration.

 

DroneCamp 2023

June 26 - 30, 2023 • CSU Monterey Bay

DroneCamp is a unique, one-week intensive short course that covers everything you need to know to get started using drones for data collection and research: equipment, safety and regulations, flight planning, flight instruction, data processing, and data analysis. Now in our 7th year, DroneCamp is a collaborative effort between UCANR/IGIS, CSU Monterey Bay, UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced, and others.

Requirements: No experience necessary! Registration will open in January 2023. This program has always sold out so save your spot early. Scholarships available. For details, see https://dronecampca.org/.

 

Day 2 of the ESRI User Conference was filled with many technical workshops and time speakeing with the lead developers of the tools that IGIS utilize on almost a daily basis.  In this post I will highlight some of the technical session I attended and what I saw and learned in the exhibition hall.  It was a busy day and i am looking forward to what I learn tomorrow... Now to the highlights...

In the technical sessions I attended the following:

ArcGIS Insights: An Introduction
Before this session I did not know of the capabilities of this app.  With app you can take tabular and spatial data and analyze the data in really intuitive ways and share the output and models with your colleagues and the public.  For more information about ArcGIS Insights go to the following link.

Cartography Cutting Edge
This session highlighted some of the new symbology and vector tile formatting that can be used with the new map viewer.  The methods used included layer special effects, layer blending, and the vector tile base map editor.  Using the techniques in this session you could design a nice webmap, but that webmap could not be opened in ArcGIS Pro without pro stripping much of the formatting that you used in the session.

ArcGIS Pro Tasks: An Introduction
For the past several years, I keep thinking that IGIS should use Tasks to teach workshop workflow.  This session walk through creating and configuring a basic editing task.  I still see how this tool could and should be used in some of the IGIS Workshops.

ArcGIS Pro: Tips and Tricks
This was a nice technical sessionthat highlighted many tips and tricks.  As part of this workshop the presenters shared a storymap they created to highlight their tips and tricks.  Here is the storymap that they shared with the attendees, enjoy.

ArcGIS Field Maps: An Introduction and What's New
ArcGIS Field Maps continues to improve.  Field Maps is ESRI effort to combine 5 separate apps (Collector, Survey 123, Explorer, Workforce, and Navigator) into one.  To date they have added the functionality of the first three apps.  They have integrated many new features into the app since last year.  There is not enough room to discuss the new features. I will say that I am excited to integrate the new features into the IGIS Field Maps training.

Discussions with the Product Developers:

How to optimize multidimensional datasets for faster queries and rasters?
I have been having an issue querying merged netcdf and mosaic datasets of the yearly netcdf data.  Both methods have been quite slow.  The recommended way to optimize the querying of these data is to create a cloud raster format dataset from the mosaic dataset and that should drastically speed up the queryng of the multidimensional data.

ArcGIS Insights vs Dashboards?
I will have to play with the functionality of insights and see if it could replace dashboards in some of the IGIS use cases.

Sunsetting of Drone2Map?
In the past few months I have heard that ArcGIS Drone2Map is going to be phased out.  I asked the developers of the app and they stated that there are no plans to phose out Drone2Map and they are continuing to develop and release new versions.  The most recent version is Drone2map 2022.1.