Category Archives: mapping

Wilderness 4: Wilderness degradation analysis

Area with wilderness and encroachment. Visualization of change of wilderness status.

Area with wilderness and encroachment. Visualization of change of wilderness status.

Wilderness degradation happens when new encroachments are made changing the wilderness status of an area. It is a complex issue which does not easily lend it self to a GIS based analysis. I will refer to my posting on wilderness for a peek into the complex world of wilderness philosophy.

It is possible to set up a system like FME to do an analysis of changes in wilderness due to new encroachments. The procedure I made generates a wilderness degradation data set based on wilderness and (new) encroachment data. It is based on procedures used by the Norwegian government in their analysis of wilderness and encroachment. The system should however be easy to accommodate for different preconditions by manipulating the number of wilderness zones and/or their buffer distances.

To visualize the degradation of wilderness it is necessary to make a categorization and furthermore establish a cartography to carry the information to the reader. In my view this can not be done unless the author/mapmaker to some extent takes side in what is good or not good related to wilderness degradation. This will be the focus on a forthcoming posting, but I will touch into the issues here as well.

FME is but one of the potential solutions for producing the results. QGISGeoKettle and even PostGIS could be good alternatives. The GitHub project has room for alternative implementations.

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Wilderness 3: About the examples

A philosophical approach towards wilderness analysis has been written. A FME-script has been designed and appropriately discussed. Now time has come to run the script on national level data to prove the concept and also open up for a discussion on challenges with the method and its results.

I have done this for several countries and will deliver the results and discuss them appropriately.

All examples are delivered as-is. There is no governmental context to the analysis. The data used for the analysis is OpenStreetMap data.

At the time of writing this article the number of examples has yet to be decided. The following are available as of writing this posting:

General challenges with the presented data are:

  • OSM data coverage
  • Encroachment criteria selection
  • Lack of context

In later postings I will look at the following:

  • Change analysis of wilderness
  • Cartography and wilderness mapping
  • Conclusions and discussion

Wilderness 2: A practical approach to wilderness analysis using FME

Psalter World Map ca 1265

Psalter World Map ca 1265

In a former posting I discussed how wilderness is not only about politics, religion, philosophy and legal instruments. Unless we force it into a practical context, the term “wilderness” remains an intangible size. Geographers have a long history for making representations of the intangible – be it disease (John Snow), social justice and injustice, demography and more. To my knowledge one of the first impressions of wilderness or “the wild” is what we can find in some older maps. “Hic sunt dracones” (here be dragons) is an expression which can be found on the “Hunt-Lenox Globe” (c. 1503–07). Other maps bear similar indications of uncharted or remote areas. We, the geographers, have moved on. Today we paint our dragons in more sophisticated ways.

The use of technology to “find” or delimit wilderness has a long history in Norway and other countries. I will continue this tradition and do an analysis which in many ways is similar to those done in Norway. The encroachment types will be slightly different. So will the technology used to do the analysis.

In this posting I will look at how FME can be used to establish a wilderness areas data set. The results will be presented in a separate posting.

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Wilderness 1: What is wilderness?

wilderness_smallAny analysis of wilderness areas will be based on an understanding of environmental, philosophical, religious, human and political factors. In Norway this understanding has over the years led to a categorization of wilderness into different area classes based on distance to defined encroachments. Roads, railways, towers, and more represent encroachments in the context of wilderness.

Through a couple of blog posts I will look more broadly at terrestrial wilderness analysis using different GIS tools. The tools this time will be FME desktop, QGIS and Geonode. I will present methods for generating a wilderness layer and visualization. I will also present tools for analyzing changes in wilderness status based on new encroachments. The work will be done in collaboration with Tanzania Conservation Resource Centre which allowed me to use their FME license for this work.

Regreational road in Serengeti, June 2006.

Recreational road/track in Serengeti, June 2006. (photo: Ragnvald Larsen)

The term wilderness deserves more than a flat technical consideration. In my view our definition of wilderness also defines us as humans – for better and worse. In this posting, the first in this series, I will focus on the more philosophical side of the term wilderness. I did however choose to be a geographer and not a philosopher, so bear with me… Had I chosen to be a philosopher it would probably have been a lousy one – I hope I am a better geographer.

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Converting shapefiles to Mission Planner .poly-files

15-9-plannedMission Planner by Michael Oborne is an impressive piece of software. It is used to program the open-source APM autopilot. The autopilot is used to control planes, copters and rovers. I have used Mission Planner a lot and I can not do without.

Some years ago I started making a map for the Mindland island in the archipelago of Norway using a GPS, OpenStreetMap and Bing aerial imagery. The main driver for this project was to document old place names. With the drones becoming somewhat of a hobby last year I thought it would be nice to also establish a proper open license ortophoto for the island. Mission planner has what it takes to approach such a task in a structured manner, save for one thing. The polygon tool only imports .poly-files.

When working with maps some of us tend to stick with shapefiles or geodatabases. I have made a small script which allows for the conversion of a shapefile with a geographic coordinate system (wgs84) to as many .poly files as there are objects in the shapefile. Adding the functionality to Mission Planner has been indicated as possible, but has yet to materialise. So until then the script associated with this posting remains relevant. Continue reading

Hvordan skrive ut Mindlandskartet hos Japan Photo XXL

I denne lille artikkelen forteller jeg litt mer om hvordan Mindlandskartet kan skrives ut hos Japan Photo. Jeg forteller også litt om hvilke alternativer som er hensiktsmessige for utskrift av kartet. Du kan lese mer om kartet på en egen side. Continue reading

Mindlandskartet i versjon 2.0

mindland_2_0_illustrasjonMindlandskartet gir en god topografisk fremstilling av Mindland og en uovertruffen oversikt over stedsnavn på øya. De mange stedsnavnene ville ikke vært på kartet uten velvillig hjelp fra store og små på Mindland. Kartet er laget ved bruk av kartprogrammene ArcMap fra ESRI og QGIS. Uten kartdata fra OpenStreetMap og gratis kartdata fra Kartverket ville det blitt et stusslig kart.  Med dette er Mindlandskartet gjort fritt tilgjengelig. Kartet kan skrives ut og formidles videre av den som måtte ønske det. Gratis!

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QDGC global coverage level 1-4

Aqdgc_logo new set of the Quarter Degree Grid Cell shapefiles has been generated. This time the coverage is global and the publication is for individual countries.

The QDGC shapefiles contain center lon/lat coordinates and the QDGC string for the different squares. The files are offered down to level four. For a country around the equator level four covers around 45 square kilometers with length and height a little under seven kilometres.

Read more about the use of QDGC on this page:

The calculations/export  this time took around 60 hours computer pricessing time including generation of world fishnet with the different sizes, square area calculations, assigning QDGC strings, compression and more. Continue reading

Lokalkart for Mindland (heimstadkartlegging)

Skjærseth sett fra oven

Skjærseth sett fra oven

Det ble ikke heimstaddiktning denne sommeren. Ikke er jeg spesielt interessert i å skrive lokalhistorie heller. Men stedsnavn og kart har interessert meg en god del. Så da ble det heimstadkartlegging og ikke heimstaddiktning.

Øya Mindland er i likhet med de fleste andre steder i Norge godt kartlagt av Kartverket i samarbeid med kommuner, fylker og andre offentlige etater. Det er stort sett ikke mulig å konkurrere med kvaliteten på kartene fra Kartverket. Men dekningen av lokale stedsnavn er ikke alltid like god. Continue reading