Laci Videmsky

Building a Digital Public Work: A New California Water Atlas

Inspired by the original California Water Atlas's elegant and comprehensive nature, we are re-imagining this historic document to give citizens and stakeholders a non-partisan owner's manual to our state's water system, through the New California Water Atlas platform. Freely available on the internet, our New California Water Atlas project will enhance and modernize a systems-based perspective by leveraging real-time feedback, citizen participation, and open data. The website will offer users dynamic maps and data visualizations, that clearly articulate the many genres of water related concerns.

In building a digital public work, many challenges exist that I want to address:

1. How to reconcile complicated data or the lack thereof?
2. What degree of translation is appropriate?
3. How to leverage citizen science and advocacy groups?

New California Water Atlas
http://ca.statewater.org

(original) California Water Atlas
http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2010/1/21/landmark-1979-california-water-atlas-debuts-online

Larry Orman

Data, Tools and Communication for Public Interest Geospatial

GreenInfo Network's Executive Director, Larry Orman, will demonstrate recent work that helps nonprofits (and others!) make an impact. Included are new approaches to GreenInfo's CPAD protected areas database, tools for rapidly reviewing and developing spatial data for non-GIS types, and concepts for confronting the quickly growing short attention spans for viewers of mapping - and other - information.

Jeanne Jones

Pedestrian Evacuation Analysis for Tsunami Hazards

Coastal emergency managers are examining community exposure to potentially catastrophic tsunami hazards. The USGS Western Geographic Science Center developed the Pedestrian Evacuation Analyst modeling tool to provide emergency managers with valuable information on the size, location, and potential evacuation challenges of at-risk population groups. The model estimates evacuation potential based on elevation, direction of movement, land cover, and travel speed and also provides the capability to evaluate the effectiveness of various vertical-evacuation structures within a hazard zone.

Dennis Klein

Parcel-Level GIS protocol adopted by Mill Valley to guide Sustainable Community Development by posing 3 questions: What’s your Walk, Transit, and Solar.

Last month the Mill Valley City Council adopted the town's new Housing Element, certified by California HCD, that contains a parcel-level Sustainable/Equitable Communities implementation protocol. The first draft was prepared by the Mill Valley Affordable Housing Committee (MVAHC) with the intent of expediting the HUD/DOT/EPA Six Livability Principles. To do this, 3MAPS rates the relative SC/EC compliance by posing three questions:

What’s your TRANSIT proximity?
What's your WALK score?
What's your SOLAR potential?

As indicated by the following statute in the Housing Element, 3MAPS has been placed at the center of the City's permit review process going forward. In addition to where to and not to build, environmental factors 40 years in the making, 3MAPs is about where, within areas acceptable for development, which areas to be developed so that we can all drive less.

Shufei Lei

Measuring learning in adaptive co-management by mapping dialogues using Self-Organizing Map: Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project

In recent years, adaptive co-management has developed as a promising approach to managing complex ecosystems through learning from iterative scientific and policy experiments. Though learning is the key to the iterative management process, methods for measuring and assessing whether and how learning takes place among participants in an adaptive co-management project are lacking. This paper proposes that the Self-Organization Map (SOM) method is an effective way to discover the relationships between and the evolution of ideas when it is applied to a body of text data generated by participants' online and offline dialogues. This study applies SOM to a large collection of meeting notes and online discussions regarding scientific research and results in the course of five years of the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP), which brings together the USDA Forest Service, environmental stakeholders, and a team of scientists to resolve contentions over how to best manage the Sierra Nevada forests. The results of organizing and visualizing the textual content from the project with SOM demonstrate that the focal contentious questions among the participating parities have changed over time and that the technical knowledge becomes more connected in the participants' dialogues over these issues. These patterns of learning and idea evolution validate the effectiveness of the participatory, transparent, and collaborative process and structure of adaptive co-management.

Michelle Koo & Falk Schuetzenmeister

Place, Space and Time: Rescuing and integrating biological and environmental data in the face of global change

With the ever-growing footprint of human activity, a central challenge of 21st century science is developing a predictive understanding of the processes that sustain Earth’s ecosystems and our impact on them. Unraveling this complexity requires a great depth and breadth of data, from specimens in natural history museums, field data, aerial and satellite imagery, measurements from environmental sensor networks, to algorithms of predictive models of global change. Despite the disparate nature of these data, all are bound by place, space, and time.

The Berkeley Institute in Global Change Biology (BigCB) is integrating these data as part of its mission to understand the complexity of the natural world and our impact on it. In support of this initiative, we are developing Holos, the Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine, which aims to provide an open technical infrastructure for researchers and students to make sense of this wealth of information and the rescue and digitization of dark data sets. We will present the current state of the project and provide information how you can use these resources.

Bruce Joffe & Reg Parks

Supporting an Accessible Geodetic Control Network for California

GIS database themes are supposed to be linked to geodetic control so that all layers align. How does the geodetic control network work? How do GPS measurements register with California's geodetic control network? A collaborative work group of surveyors, geodesists and GIS professionals explain in this one-hour presentation:

GIS Need for Geodetic Control
• What it is
• How it affects GIS layers
• Who maintains it in California?

Observing GPS
• Background of CA geodetic control
• California GPS
• Real Time Networks

Registering GPS with CSRN (CRTN)
• Monumentation
• What makes CA unique?
• CSRN/CRTN

The Present and Future of CSRN
• CSRC Background & Goals
• Current Funding
• Future Goals

Geodetic Control for GIS
• Why is it important?
• What’s in it for Land Surveyor’s?
• What’s in it for GIS Professionals?