Spatial Data Management Group Notes - March 11, 2004

Present:

Theresa Valentine, Terralyn Vandetta, Matt Gregory, Matt's baby girl, Kelly Christiansen, Dave Hockman-Wert, Ray Drapek, Luca Moiana, Jon Bowers, Sean Gordon, Ken Vance-Borland

Treats:

Terralyn's DYNAMITE M&M rocky road brownies!

Notes:

Ken

Speaker:

Dave Hockman-Wert: Visualization techniques for studying landscape pattern and fish distribution.
Powerpoint of Dave's Talk
Spatially explicit data are needed to quantify habitat relationships and evaluate status and trends in the abundance of coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki clarki ). From 1998-2003, streams in forty-eight mid-sized watersheds (500-1000 ha) throughout western Oregon were surveyed in a spatially continuous manner, resulting in the measurement of habitat characteristics and fish abundance for approximately 42,000 channel units (e.g., pools, riffles, and cascades) in 300 km of stream. A temporal component was added to the study by performing annual surveys in three watersheds. With high-resolution spatial data that cover a broad extent and vary through time, multiple GIS visualization and mapping techniques are needed for exploratory data analysis and pattern identification. We will discuss geospatial techniques--including dynamic segmentation, kernel density estimation, 3-D animation, and 3-D scenes with extruded points--that were useful for viewing and analyzing relationships between fish distribution and stream habitat at multiple spatial scales.

Awards:

David Hockman-Wert received a Certificate of Achievement for his presentation

Training

Possibility of an ArcScene workshop, inspired by the cool videos in Dave's presentation. Note that ArcGIS9 may be out in April and will include ArcGlobe, the new and improved version of ArcScene.

Meetings

March 31: Statewide Digital Orthophoto Quad (DOQ) meeting, Salem
April 9: Organizational meeting of a campus-wide OSU GIS users group, Wilkinson Hall 108, 3pm.
May 11-13: GIS in Action, Portland.

FORGIS Listserver

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Joint meeting request

The State GIS Project Leaders group requested a joint meeting with the SDMG, because they are supposed to be coordinating with other groups. Theresa will invite them to attend one of our meetings and give a presentation.

N-drive space limitations

Terralyn elaborated on the following notice which went out to College of Forestry computer users last week:
In an effort to hold the line on costs, the Forestry Computing Committee asked that the Forestry Computing Resources group look at the possible implementation of a user quota on network disk space. Following careful analysis of current usage and consideration of options, we would like to postpone any quota setting in favor of working with large disk space users to clarify their data storage and backup needs.

Saying "no" to a disk quota means saying "yes" to improved data management and refined backup schedules. While servers and disk space aren't cheap, about 2/3 of the expense in supporting large volumes of data comes with the backup system and media. We hope to postpone a disk quota and associated fee for large volume users by moving a significant volume of data to a backup schedule which is less frequent than the standard monthly baseline and nightly incremental backup. If your disk usage puts you in roughly the top 10% of users by data volume, expect to receive notification and a request that you discuss data management strategies with a network administrator."

Round table

Theresa has place new Oregon 1:24,000 hydro framework data in /data/fordata/Oregon/hydrography24k. There are three coverages for each basin: water bodies, water points, and water courses. The latter are single line and routed.
She has also recently revised the SDMG website. Check it out!

Matt is putting the final touches on the vegetation modeling program he and Janet are developing. He will give us a presentation on it at the April meeting.

David Hockman-Wert says the new National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD 2001) is a big improvement, and includes canopy cover among other new attributes. See National Land Cover Database. David also provided the following urls:
USGS The National Map Viewer satellite data, air photos, geospatial data
The National Map
USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observation Systems) Data Center
Earth Explorer Site to query and order satellite images, aerial photographs, and cartographic products
Global Visualization (Landsat and Aster browse and order)
Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC)
Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium
NASA home page
Air photo search by place name and address

Other interesting GIS websites:

USGS Geography Products List and links to all USGS GIS/mapping products
NOAA Coastal Services Center Features a number of tools, e.g., Impervious Surface Analysis Tool, LIDAR data handler tool, C-CAP (Coastal change analysis program) data handler tool, N-SPECT (Nonpoint Source Pollution and Erosion Calculation Tool not available yet)
View USGS Maps and Aerial Photo Images Online (Nifty list of viewer tools/companies(TerraFly is quite cool. Automatically "fly" over a high-res image.)
Geospatial One Stop Metadata portal for federal, state, and local geographic data
Interactive Visualization Systems Very cool 3-D images and animations

Kelly says Sharon Clarke recently bought two ESRI map books, which are available for perusal in FSL 269.

Ken says the Aquatic and Land Interactions team has completed their coho and steelhead habitat (intrinsic potential) modeling for the CLAMS area.

Luca is working on a multivariate watershed classification related to coastal coho life-cycle monitoring basins. Ray says the climate change group has their new model, BIOMAP, about ready; it is the successor to MAPPS and MC1.

Speakers for Next Meetings

April 8: Matt Gregory on vegetation imputation software. May 6: Matt Doggett on a mapserver application.

Next Meetings :

April 8 and May 6, 2004

Treats :

April 8, Kelly Christiansen

Notes :

April 8, David Hockman-Wert