Jamaica Earmarks $121 Million for Cadastral Mapping and Land Registration Project

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12 April 2013 | By Jamaica Information Service | 172

The Government has allocated some $121 million to boost activities under the Cadastral Mapping and Land Registration project. This is outlined in the 2013/14 Estimates of Expenditure, now before the House of Representatives. The programme seeks to assist persons, particularly rural residents currently occupying lands but not in possession of titles for those properties, to formalise their holdings by providing them with those documents. Read More

Mark Tercek's New Book Discusses the Business Case for Nature

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07 April 2013 | By Marc Gunther | 113

The value of nature is astonishing, when you stop and think about it. Marshes protect coastlands. Urban trees clean the air. Forests provide timber. Oceans give us seafood.  Snow-capped mountains store drinking water. Some might say nature is priceless. Not Mark Tercek, the former investment banker at Goldman Sachs who became CEO of The Nature Conservancy in 2008. His new book, Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature (Basic Books, 2013), argues that nature provides enormous economic benefits to society, business and consumers, and that, if we can figure out how to value and pay for those benefits, we can slow down and even reverse the degradation of nature that threatens our well-being. Read More

Obama Proposes to Launch Satellite Shelved After 2000 Election

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12 April 2013 | By Boston.com | 163

President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took office. It cost about $100 million by then with NASA’s internal auditors faulting its cost increases. Read More

New Camera System Creates High-Resolution 3D IMages from a Kilometer Away

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07 April 2013 | By Phys.org | 115

Map: The Countries Most at Risk for a Coup in 2013

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11 April 2013 | By Washington Post | 270

A number of the world’s governments are still at risk of a coup. A few hours before the inauguration, it looked like one of them could be Eritrea, an East African country whose government is so authoritarian and cruel that it’s often compared to North Korea’s. Dissident soldiers seized the country’s state-run TV station, often a first step in a coup, forcing anchors to call for the release of all political prisoners (there are several thousand) before the broadcast abruptly ended. It turns out that, according to Reuters, the soldiers were likely just “low- to mid-ranking soldiers who sought a change in the constitution rather than a coup.” Read More

Burkholder Earns Lifetime Achievement Award for Promotion of 3D Geospatial Data

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07 April 2013 | By Las Cruces Sun-News | 130

Earl F. Burkholder, a resident of Las Cruces, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the New Mexico Professional Surveyors. He is licensed in New Mexico both as a Professional Surveyor and as a Professional Engineer. He is a Fellow and Life Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Award was based, in part, on Burkholder's efforts to promote the use of 3-D digital geospatial data for surveying, mapping, and engineering projects. He wrote a book, "The 3-D Global Spatial Data Model: Foundation of the Spatial Data Infrastructure," published by CRC Press in April 2008. Read More

Kazakhstan Plans to Launch First Land Remote Sensing Satellite in Fourth Quarter of 2013

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11 April 2013 | By Trend | 147

Kazakhstan plans to launch the first domestic land remote sensing satellite in the fourth quarter of 2013, Kazkosmos National Space Agency said. "The launch of the first Kazakh land remote sensing satellite of medium resolution is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2013 from the Yasny launch site in Russia," National Space Agency said. Read More

Unlocking Precision Ag Data

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07 April 2013 | By Agriculture.com | 117

Mike Zeedyk doesn’t have to be a detective to realize there are valuable facts and statistics cloaked within the data he’s been gathering on his fields since 2003. “Right from the get-go, I knew there was useful information there, because I was seeing differences on my yield monitor,” recalls the Ohio farmer. “For example, I always thought the bigger beans that were leaning a little bit were my best-yielding beans. However, I realized when I was harvesting them that first year, it was the other way around. Those were my lower-yielding beans.” As he looked through the clues, he wrote the variance off as a fluke. That is, until the same thing happened in year two. Read More

Google Technology to Help Prevent Deforestation

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11 April 2013 | By Environmental Leader | 141

Google, in partnership with the University of Maryland and the UN Environment Programme, has developed a tool to help prevent deforestation. Global Forest Watch 2.0, which will launch later this year, is an interactive, real-time, forest monitoring system. It uses satellite technology, data sharing and human networks around the world to provide information to better managing forests. Read More

Belarus and Russia to Jointly Develop New Satellites in Near Future

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06 April 2013 | By Belteleradio Company | 150

The agreements between the Belarusian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Space Agency have been announced in Novosibirsk today. The first joint remote sensing satellite will obviously not be the last. The project on the new satellite with higher resolution and larger coverage has already been agreed on by the Academy of Sciences and the Federal Space Agency. Moreover, the parties see the need in a whole group of such devices. Read More

Iran Plans 'Islamic Google Earth'

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11 April 2013 | By The Guardian | 137

The Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool for western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks on the 3D mapping service one step further – by planning the launch of an "Islamic" competitor. Iran's minister for information and communications technology, Mohammad Hassan Nami, announced this week that his country was developing what he described as an "Islamic Google Earth" to be called Basir (spectator in Farsi) which will be ready for use "within the next four months". Read More

Satellite Image Clues to South Australia's Mass Fish Deaths

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06 April 2013 | By News.com.au | 130

Experts say that US satellite images show that algal blooms and high temperatures caused mass deaths of fish on South Australian beaches over the past month. "The red colouring in both Spencer Gulf and Gulf St Vincent shows high chlorophyll levels, which are the way of measuring algal levels," he explained. Read More

Small Startups Gain Higher Visibility at National Space Symposium

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10 April 2013 | By Denver Post | 149

The National Space Symposium, long dominated by the large government prime contractors, is seeing a groundswell of attendance by space startups that hope to fill the gaps left by a battered federal budget. "I want to do something that spends the money better and that appeals to a lot of people, especially in a budget-constrained environment," said Christian Lenz, chief operating officer of PLANETiQ. Read More

Google and Ubisense Enjoy Maps Into Apps Boom

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06 April 2013 | By Business Weekly | 146

Global sales have doubled of a tracking system that combines geographic information systems technology from Ubisense in Cambridge UK with the power of Google Maps for Business. And the partners are expecting more international growth after Ubisense clinched two further deals for its myWorld solution with major German customers Stadtwerke Kiel and Stadt Heidelberg. Both customers use the technology to manage their spatial assets and networks. Stadtwerke Kiel is a multi-utility that uses GIS to plan and document its networks and manage faults. Read More

Russian Military Orders Five High-Res

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10 April 2013 | By Ria Novosti | 223

Russia’s Lavochkin aerospace company has won a defense ministry tender on the development of a series of five high-resolution optical-electronic surveillance satellites worth almost 70 billion rubles ($2.2 bln), the Izvestia newspaper said. Read More

Disaster Communications: Covering the 'Last Mile'

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05 April 2013 | By The Guardian | 163

For survivors of any disaster, huddled under tarps, among the rubble, on top of rooftops, or hidden in the bush, the concerns are not just for food, water or medicines. It is critically important that affected communities know how, when and where aid services can be accessed, what's going on around them, and how they can connect with aid providers. It's the start of restoring self-sufficiency, dignity and hope. The impact of this knowledge can be life-saving. Read More

Mapping While Driving Ruled Illegal in California

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10 April 2013 | By Web Pro News | 137

Thanks to a recent court ruling by a California appellate court, it doesn’t matter that you were only checking your smartphone to update Google Maps. That’s because the law, as it currently reads, bans any sort of hands-on use of phones while driving. The case comes on an appeal from the Superior Court of Fresno County. Last year, Steven Spriggs was cited for violating section 23123, which bans the use of wireless technologies while driving. Read More

Geography: Mapping the future with Esri

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05 April 2013 | By Los Angeles Times | 135

Jack Dangermond started his working life at his parents' plant nursery in Redlands. Now, Forbes says, he's a billionaire. Dangermond is founder and president of Esri, one of the world's leading geographic information systems companies. In 2010, he won the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the National Geographic Society and the Patron's Medal from England's Royal Geographical Society. Recently we asked him to talk about Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, and his vision for them. Read More

Data Management is the Biggest Challenge in Precision Farming

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10 April 2013 | By Ag Professional | 127

Paul Mask, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System assistant director for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources and an Auburn University professor of agronomy and soils, says the promise of precision farming is using technology to gain a clear and comprehensive picture of one’s farming operations to secure the highest measure of farm efficiency and profitability by reducing input usage, insulating against risk and enhancing sustainable farming practices. Read More

Mountain Pine Beetle Poised to Ravage Eastern Canada

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04 April 2013 | By CBC | 142

Billions of mountain pine beetles from B.C. are expected to devastate forests in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces as they munch their way east over the next two decades, scientists predict in a new documentary. "Most every scientist studying the beetle feels that it's inevitable," said David York, the filmmaker behind The Beetles Are Coming, which airs on CBC TV's The Nature of Things Thursday. Read More

Science 'Javelins' Pierce Antarctic Glaciers to Monitor Movement

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10 April 2013 | By BBC News | 134

UK scientists have developed an air-dropped projectile to put instruments in some of the most inaccessible places in Antarctica. Twenty-five of the "javelins" are currently sticking in Pine Island Glacier (PIG), one of the continent's biggest and fastest-moving ice streams. The British Antarctic Survey's spears have been equipped with GPS to track the PIG's progression towards the sea. Read More

Map: Who’s Living Off the Grid?

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04 April 2013 | By Modern Farmer | 213

Inspired by permaculture ideas and instigated by the reality of peak oil and global warming, two Brits, Rob Hopkins and Ben Brangwyn, established the Transition Network in 2005 to help individuals “transition” away from fossil fuel-dependent systems. Now more than 35 countries have Transition Towns, with tens of thousands of participants. Initiatives range from starting community gardens to stockpiling food, as different regions have different concerns. Read More

Lake Superior is not Sending as Much Water Into Lake Michigan and Lake Huron

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10 April 2013 | By Michigan Live | 140

Lake Superior sends its water into Lake Michigan and Lake Huron via the St. Marys River at Sault Saint Marie. Lake Superior is not sending as much water into Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as it has in the past. Read More

NASA Flies Dragon Eye Unmanned Aircraft Into Volcanic Plume

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04 April 2013 | By Science Blog | 150

NASA Earth science researchers last month traveled to Turrialba Volcano, near San Jose, Costa Rica, to fly a Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — a small electric aircraft equipped with cameras and sensors — into the volcano’s sulfur dioxide plume and over its summit crater, to study Turrialba’s chemical environment. The project is designed to improve the remote-sensing capability of satellites and computer models of volcanic activity. Read More

A Geostatistics Giant Dies

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09 April 2013 | By Mine Web | 401

Danie Krige - an international household name to anyone who studied or practiced the science of evaluating mineral resources for mining purposes, died recently in Johannesburg. And while his name may not be familiar to many people outside the field, so new and revolutionary were his ideas – applying mathematical statistics to the spatial evaluation of ore-bodies – that the processes he developed were named after him, becoming known in the industry as ‘kriging’. This technique has helped improve ore evaluation techniques and reduce the financial risk of investing in mining projects. Read More

Conservation Gets Boost from New Landsat Satellite

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04 April 2013 | By Mongabay | 168

Efforts to monitor the world's forests and other ecosystems got a big boost in February with the launch of Landsat 8, NASA's newest earth observation satellite, which augments the crippled Landsat 7 currently orbiting Earth. "Landsat 8 is a much anticipated and critically needed satellite for Earth resource mapping, monitoring and analysis," Greg Asner, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology, told mongabay.com. "Nearly every country serious about deforestation monitoring uses the Landsat series, which are made available for free by the U.S. government. Read More

Climate Change Could Make Montana the Hot New Wine Region

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09 April 2013 | By Slate | 138

Eyes in Sky Help When Catastrophe Strikes

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04 April 2013 | By AFP | 150

Almost unknown to the public, a constellation of satellite guardians is flying overhead, and all it takes is a phone call for them to intervene when a country is hit by a storm, earthquake, tsunami or flood. Armed with cameras or ground radar, these Earth-observation satellites were sent into orbit for scientific and commercial missions. But under an international agreement, they can also be called on for humanitarian work. Read More

Navy Deploying Laser Weapon Prototype Near Iran

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09 April 2013 | By New York Times | 119

The Navy is going to sea for the first time with a laser attack weapon that has been shown in tests to disable patrol boats and blind or destroy surveillance drones. A prototype shipboard laser will be deployed on a converted amphibious transport and docking ship in the Persian Gulf, where Iranian fast-attack boats have harassed American warships and where the government in Tehran is building remotely piloted aircraft carrying surveillance pods and, someday potentially, rockets. Read More

Robots, Deep-Sea Sensors Help Pentagon Futurists Hunt Subs

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04 April 2013 | By Wired Danger Room | 170

Darpa announced today that it’s successfully tested two bleeding-edge methods of detecting quiet submarines lost under the ocean depths. One relies on distributed sensors at the bottom of the ocean floor to locate the subs. The other sends an aquatic robot to hunt them. They’re both part of an effort called Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting, or DASH, and they’re not even the sum total of Darpa’s anti-submarine warfare programs. Read More

Australia's First Space Policy Touts Satellite Imagery Impact

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09 April 2013 | By Sydney Morning Herald | 104

The space policy is designed to pay economic dividends for Australia. Satellite imagery alone was estimated in a 2010 report to contribute about $3.3 billion per year to GDP. Positioning technologies were estimated in 2008 to have added $1 billion per year to GDP, and this is forecast to grow to between $6 and $12 billion by 2030. Under the new policy, a new Space Coordination Office in the Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education will be in operation from July 1. Read More

Esri Ireland Wins First Round of Connected Health Initiative

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02 April 2013 | By Tech Central | 141

Esri Ireland has been awarded the first funding package under the Connected Health initiative. Connected Health is a joint project by the Digital Hub and Saint James's Hospital that aims to support digital technology companies to develop solutions to for the healthcare sector. The first call for proposals focused on local asset mapping, where digital enterprises were invited to submit applications to develop a web site and mobile application using local data to document all health-related services in the vicinity of Saint James's Hospital. Read More

South Africa and Russia Sign Satellite Agreement

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09 April 2013 | By Communications Africa | 112

The South African National Space Agency (SANSA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) have signed an agreement that will see the countries working together closely on science and space technologies. The RadioAstron space satellite agreement was signed while Russian president, Vladimir Putin was visiting the country for the recent Brics Summit in Durban, South Africa. Read More

European Space Agency Opts for Radar Mission to Measure Biomass

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02 April 2013 | By Nature | 141

A €400-million (US$513 million) radar project that is designed to measure global forest biomass in unprecedented detail will very probably launch around the end of the decade as the next Earth-observation mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA’s Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) says that it found BIOMASS the technically and scientifically most convincing of three candidate missions discussed last month at a user meeting in Graz, Austria. Read More

African Move Against REDD Initiatives

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09 April 2013 | By Premium Times | 117

African participants at the World Social Forum in Tunisia have taken a historic decision to launch a No REDD in Africa Network and join the global movement against REDD. REDD, an acronym for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation; as well as REDD+ are carbon offset mechanisms whereby industrialized Northern countries use forests, agriculture, soils and even water as sponges for their pollution instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at source. Read More

New Images of the 2013 Arctic Sea Ice Mega-Fracture

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01 April 2013 | By Wunderground | 179

New images of 2013's Arctic sea ice mega-fracture have been posted on NASA's website. Sea ice fractures are not uncommon, though, according to NASA, the extent of this one is. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this view of extensive sea-ice fracturing off the northern coast of Alaska. The event began in late-January and spread west toward Banks Island throughout February and March 2013. Read More

NASA To Use Google And MIT Backed Satellite For Finding New Planets

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08 April 2013 | By Ubergizmo | 131

NASA has announced that it is launching a mission to hunt for new planets. Under NASA’s Astrophysics Explorer program, the planet hunting mission is expected to be launched in 2017. The agency will be making use of TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to conduct an all sky transit survey. The satellite allows them to cover 400 times as much sky as any previous mission. It is capable of identifying thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood and will have a special focus on planets are comparable in size to Earth. TESS is backed by MIT and Google. A small grant fund for the development of wide-field digital cameras that TESS uses was provided by Google. Read More

From Tuna to Tech, Hexagon Breaks Swedish Mould

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01 April 2013 | By Reuters | 155

In the shadow of well-known brands like Volvo and Ericsson, an acquisition-packed decade has made technology firm Hexagon one of Sweden's most valuable companies and a rare newcomer among its top blue chips. The company, market leader in precision measurement technology used in fields from microchip making to surveying dam construction, is now worth more than Swedish world number two white goods maker Electrolux after taking its business so far from its roots as to be unrecognizable. Read More

Drones Will Soon Monitor Endangered Animals in Africa

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08 April 2013 | By U.S. News | 137

Scientists recently completed one of the first unmanned aerial surveys of wildlife in Africa, which could one day lead to endangered animal protection and poacher prevention. The survey was completed in Burkina Faso's Nazinga Game Ranch, one of the few areas of Africa where the African elephant population is growing, says Cedric Vermeulen, a researcher at Belgium's Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech. Read More

Thailand, China to Cooperate on Space Survey, Remote Sensing

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01 April 2013 | By Pattaya Mail | 146

Thailand and China have signed an agreement on space technology development, aimed at trade and investment cooperation on remote sensing and survey. The deal was signed between the Thai Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) and the Chinese Wuhan Information Technology Outsourcing Service and Research Centre (WITOSRC). Read More

The OGC Requests Comment on Coordinate Reference System Extension to Web Coverage Service Interface Standard

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08 April 2013 | By OGC | 137

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced a call for public comment on the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Coordinate Reference System (CRS) Extension Standard.

Pecision Ag's Data Management Challenge

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01 April 2013 | By Ag Web | 139

Precision agriculture has officially left its infancy. Companies have layered a full suite of products and services on top in recent years, including remote alerts, geo-tagging functionality, fleet management services and more. Now, data management is the next challenge to conquer. Read More

Geography is Covering New Ground for Travelers

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08 April 2013 | By LA Times | 141

Planet Earth lovers should prepare to be amazed by the way new geography has set about solving some of the world's most pressing and mystifying problems, along the way making travelers safer, keeping them fully informed and throwing open the doors to new horizons. Read More

Galileo Satellite Puts app developers in pole position

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31 March 2013 | By The Telegraph | 182

Drones: Colleges' Next Research Project

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08 April 2013 | By Huffington Post | 126

The idea of drones flying around domestic airspace is terrifying to many Americans, so the fact that Virginia Tech has half a dozen drones, controlled by students, might be disturbing. The university’s Unmanned Systems Laboratory is one of just “63 registered domestic drone operators in the country receiving funds from the U.S. Defense [Department],” according to Virtual Town Square. Program director Kevin Kochersberger doesn’t want this initiative to fall prey to stereotypes about drones. “When people refer to drones, they immediately think of weaponized unmanned vehicles. That couldn’t be farther from what we do at the lab.” Read More

Scotland’s Croft Lands to be Mapped for Posterity

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31 March 2013 | By Scotsman | 189

Crofters’ leaders are to map Scotland’s croft lands for the first time to stop them falling victim to land grabs. The massive project to chart over three quarter of a million hectares of land in the highlands and islands is aimed at protecting the crofting way of life and stopping landowners, offshore trusts, prospective buyers and councils from laying claim to “ransom strips” whose ownership is not legally registered. Read More

ScoutDoc Field Monitoring App Adds GPS Mapping Tools

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07 April 2013 | By Farm & Ranch Guide | 128

If you ask farmers where they want to spend their time — in the field or in the office — their response would be obvious. Farmers want to do what they do best, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take the office with them. And smart phones, iPads and other technology advancements are enabling them to do just that. Read More

Governments to Publish Long-awaited Environmental Data on Oil Sands

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30 March 2013 | By Globe and Mail | 200

The federal and Alberta governments are finally ready to make research and data from their oil sands monitoring program public. Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent and his Alberta counterpart, Diana McQueen, are expected to launch a new data portal next Wednesday at an event at Carleton University in Ottawa. Read More

Google-sponsored Planetary Search Satellite Slated to be Launched in 2017

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07 April 2013 | By News.com.au | 126

Internet giant Google its taking its search function to new heights: Finding new planets, no less. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be launched in 2017 and will see Google join NASA to send a set of specialist cameras in to space to scan the skies for planets orbiting bright nearby stars. NASA has said the satellite will focus upon stars likely to have Earth-like planets. Read More

Tanzania Unveils Mobile Environmental Monitoring Laboratory

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30 March 2013 | By The Citizen | 167

The minister of State, Vice Presidents’ Office (Environment), Dr Terezya Huvisa, on Wednesday launched a mobile environmental monitoring laboratory unit worth Euro 133,000 (Sh279.3 million). The laboratory which is the property of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), placed under the management of Cleaner Production Centre of Tanzania ( CPCT), its operations will be jointly handled by the three parties including the Vice President’s office, During the inauguration speech, Dr Huvisa said the coming of the new tool in the country would help the struggle to alleviate environmental pollution by industries. Read More