Category Archives: ecology

American mink – alien species proliferation analysis

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Procedure overview for the analysis

Procedure overview for the analysis

The aim of this posting is to document the more technical aspects of establishing the knowledge basis necessary to follow up the action plan against american mink (nevison vison) – an alien species in the Norwegian fauna. It will show how the Python programming language and relevant programming libraries (ArcPy and others) are used in an analysis aiming to understand where the mink can spread under given circumstances.

The motivation for this is to document the process for other relevant projects as well as to make relevant code and methodological descriptions available for other persons/institutions involved in similar projects. The work has been made possible with access to other freely available information online and as such this posting should be considered a timely way of paying back for “services provided”. Continue reading →

Hiking and Climbing in Timor Leste

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Bouldering on water is an optionLet me at once admit that I have not done neither on my stays in Timor Leste. But on a recent field trip travelling with car through some of the towns on the south-coast I can report a couple of prospectively very nice places for both climbing and hiking.

In this article I will go through some of the places and suggest activities for a stay Timor Leste road trip. The article will be particularly useful if you are into rock climbing, bouldering, hiking or caving.
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Drones in conservation – some thoughts

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Military drones 2005

The term drone is usually associated with unmanned planes used for military surveillance and aggressive activities. The latter is something we as conservationists, scientists, environmental managers and others would rather not be associated with. Surveillance is a term slightly associated with our own trade. We call it monitoring – but much of it is about the same thing. We want to know who is where, how many they are and what they are doing. Our purpose for monitoring the environment is to be able to understand a certain species, their interactions with other species or its immediate environment.

Quality information is necessary to make decisions to protect the environment, or to provide politicians with a basis for policy decisions.  A question which has surfaced is: Will drones make conservation and management of the environment more efficient and accurate?

In this posting I will take a brief look at some of the challenges and opportunities pertaining to the use of drones in conservation.

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Elevation model, climate change and fresh water ecology…

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A Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is a data set containing information about a terrains surface. In its most basic form it is a collection of geographical positions with associated elevation information. With this information it is possible to make visualizations or calculations which again can be used to understand how objects on the surface can interact.

As a geographer it is most of the time my job to facilitate for the use of spatial data. Working with elevation data is as fun as it gets, technically. The data sets lends themselves to nice visualizations and given the right questions the data sets might tell us interesting things about the relations between water, biological entities and masses. The much used watershed analysis results in an understanding of to which rivers water in an area drains. Among other things this is used to understand and manage water basins within the European Union.

For some years now there has been a discussion in Norway about the quality of our current elevation model. Most of us would agree that it could be better. I am one of them. In this posting I will try to give the reader some background to my view on this issue.

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