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These students make maps for the Philippines and Belize. They never leave campus to do it.

mapathon-1

“With Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ humming in the background, about two dozen students at George Washington University traced skinny lines and square-shaped landmarks on a satellite image of a rural chunk of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines. They are in the early stages of piecing together a map of the region where half of the country’s food is grown but where most people live in poverty.

The students carefully scanned the photos to scope out buildings and roads tucked between thick trees. The task is painstaking but necessary to create an up-to-date map. This corner of the Philippines — like large swaths of the planet — does not have any recent digital maps.” SOURCE: Washington Post

Crowd-sourced mapping is increasingly an important resource during an emergency and one of the best ways to put geographic knowledge and geospatial skills in action.  Many high school and college students around the country are learning mapping skills by creating maps for places that aren’t well-mapped and in great need.  Poorer places are often not as well mapped out by the commercial cartographic organizations and these are oftentimes the places that are most vulnerable to natural disasters.  Relief agencies depend on mapping platforms to handle the logistics of administering aid and assessing the extent of the damage and rely on these crowd-sourced data sets.  My students and I are working on this over the weekend; can you join in and help?  The projects that are marked urgent by the Red Cross are all in Haiti right now.  Here are is a video playlist that explains the project and how you can help if you are new to OpenStreetMap (OSM).  The embedded TEDx talk below discusses the advantages of using OSM in geography teaching.

GeoEd Tags: cartography, disasters, mapping, STEM.

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Damaged and defiant: Hurricane Harvey

Houston holds strong in the wake of devastation left by Hurricane Harvey.

Source: www.houstonchronicle.com

I am sharing these three interactive webmaps of Houston with my mapping courses to demonstrate what is technologically possible.  Texts, charts, pictures, videos, and maps can be seamlessly integrated to present spatial information in an incredibly engaging and accessible manner.  

Houston’s Hurricane Harvey was incredibly impactful but the factors leading to this were also very complex.  These three Story maps lay out:

  1. Houston’s urban ecological context
  2. The geographic origins of Hurricane Harvey
  3. The human stories from Hurricane Harvey

 

Scoop.it Tags:  physical, water, coastal, urban,  urban ecology, disasters, mapping, ESRI, StoryMap.

WordPress TAGS: physical, water, coastal, urban, urban ecology, disasters, mapping, esri, storymap.

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Houston’s stories of Hurricane Harvey

“Blue and her team selected 45 stories, each plotted with ESRI’s ArcGIS software on a map of Greater Houston and tied to the exact location where it was first told. The resulting story map of Hurricane Harvey, ‘Damaged and Defiant: Houston Stories,’ was published in the Houston Chronicle in December. The map shows short narratives gathered by Chronicle staffers from people across the area — from Crosby to Kingwood to Katy — each a unique perspective on the storm; told together, they’re the collective account of a city that experienced one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.”

Source: news.rice.edu

These interlinked Houston story maps show some of the key elements of a good story map: 1) strong spatial analytical components, 2) a powerful narrative, 3) rich visuals, 4) solid cartography, and 5) well-sourced information.

 

Tags: fluvial, water, coastal, urban, disasters, physical, mapping, ESRI, StoryMap.

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Burn Scars on California’s Wine Country

“Devastating wildfires burned through California’s wine country in October 2017, taking several lives and leaving thousands of people homeless. On October 21, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on the Terra satellite acquired this false-color image of the burn scars left by the Tubbs (upper left), Nuns (center), and Atlas (lower right) fires. Unburned vegetation appears red; burned vegetation appears brown. Buildings, roads, and other developed areas appear light gray and white.”

 

Tags: remote sensing, disasters, California, physical.

Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov

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Washington Journal Tim Frazier Discusses Hurricane Irma Disaster

https://www.c-span.org/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=433726-4
//www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?433726-4

“Georgetown University’s Tim Frazier talks about the federal government’s management of disaster relief related to Hurricanes Irma and Harvey.”

Tim Frazier is not only a fantastic geographer with an expertise in disaster management, he was also my volleyball partner on the “Bad Latitudes” team at Penn State.  Good job Tim; great geographic insight and context to understand the response efforts.

Tags: disasters.

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Disaster Mapping: Hurricane Irma, Mexico Earthquake and Bangladesh Floods

This week has seen disasters and destruction on an unprecedented scale, and the HOT Community has activated to respond. Hurricane Irma is the largest Hurricane ever recorded, and has torn death and destruction through the Caribbean. Destruction on some islands is estimated at 95%, affecting the lives of 1.2 million so far, and on track to cause severe destruction across the entire Florida State, where mass evacuation is currently underway. Barbuda’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, described the damage as absolutely heart-wrenching. ‘The island is literally under water and barely habitable,’ Browne said. ‘About 95% of properties are damaged, there is a serious threat of disease. Additionally, those already affected by Irma fear a second brutal battering by Hurricane Jose.'”

Source: www.hotosm.org

Want to see geographic knowledge and geospatial skills in action?  Crowd-sourced mapping is increasingly an important resource during an emergency.  Poorer places are often not as well mapped out by the commercial cartographic organizations and these are oftentimes the places that are most vulnerable to natural disasters.  Relief agencies depend on mapping platforms to handle the logistics of administering aid and assessing the extent of the damage and rely on these crowd-sourced data sets.  My students and I join OpenStreetMap (OSM) projects, especially when there is a major humanitarian need…it’s a great way to make service learning and geospatial technologies come together. The projects that are marked urgent by the Red Cross are all in Haiti right now.  Here are is a video playlist that explains the project and how you can help if you are new to OpenStreetMap (OSM).

 

Tags: disasters, mapping, edtech, STEM, weather and climate.

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The Geography Teacher’s Introduction to OpenStreetMap

“Wed, Mar 15, 2017 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT, the NCGE will be offering a free webinar for educators on the OpenStreetMap project and how you can incorporate it into your class.”

Source: attendee.gotowebinar.com

My students and I join OpenStreetMap (OSM) projects, especially when there is a major humanitarian need…it’s a great way to make service learning and geospatial technologies come together. If you are interested learning more about OSM projects for the classroom, sign up for this NCGE webinar seminar as soon as possible, since this event is right around the corner (the webinar program is one of the many great reasons to become a member of NCGE). 

 

Tags: NCGE, mapping, edtech, cartography, geospatial, disasters, STEM.

 

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Tsunami Stones: Ancient Japanese Markers Warn Builders of High Water

“Residents of Aneyoshi, Japan, heeded the warnings of their ancestors. They obeyed directions and wisdom found on a local stone monument: ‘Do not build any homes below this point,’ it reads. ‘High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.’ When the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, this village.”

Source: 99percentinvisible.org

Beachfront property is beautiful real estate with enormous economic potential, but when it is in an area with a history of tsunamis, the impending threat of an earthquake looms over the coastal lowlands and limits the land use plans for the region. 

 

Tags: physical, tsunami, water, tectonics, disasters.

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Factory farming practices are under scrutiny again in N.C. after disastrous hurricane floods

As fecal waste and bacteria flow from hog lagoons into the water supply, North Carolina is revisiting a contentious battle between the pork industry, health experts and environmentalists.

 

In regions where hog farm density is high, there is an overall poor sanitary quality of surface waters. The presence of mass-scale swine and poultry lots and processing plants in a sandy floodplain – a region once dotted by small tobacco farms – has long posed a difficult dilemma for a state where swine and poultry represent billions of dollars a year for the economy. [Past] hurricane’s environmental impact in North Carolina were so severe in part because of the large number of hog lagoon breaches. Following Hurricane Matthew, the department has counted 10 to 12 lagoons that were inundated, with floodwaters topping the berms and spreading diluted waste.

 

Tags: food, agriculture, agribusiness, unit 5 agriculture, agricultural environment, environment, environment modify, pollution. 

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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