Transcript Ragazzo_Gabby_Grossman_Ray _sm

Mapping on a
Local and
Global Scale
Raymond Grossman and Gabby Ragazzo
The Mapping Africa
Project
Dr. Lyndon Estes, CEE department
THE PROBLEM
• The current data for agricultural land use in Africa is
pretty inaccurate
Why do we care?
• Agricultural expansion
• Food security estimations
THE GOAL
• Map Sub-Saharan Africa using Amazon Mechanical
Turk
QUALITY CONTROL
• Set of pre-mapped 609 1km by
1km aerial images of South
Africa randomly dispersed in the
Mapping Africa project on
Mechanical Turk
• Images have fields mapped by
South Africans themselves,
additions made by previous
interns following a strict set of
“Mapping Rules”
MY WORK
• Added, deleted, and adjusted some fields to the
South Africa data set where necessary using the
software QGIS
• Began this process for Zambia
• Assessed the accuracy of the fields that the South
Africans mapped themselves
• Dabbled in making a short tutorial video to put on
the Mechanical Turk website…
QGIS
RULES
• My primary role was to determine whether or not
the mapping rules had been followed by the South
Africans and previous interns
4 Rules
•
•
•
•
Map active fields
Don’t map orchards
Don’t map gardens
Map commercial and subsistence agriculture
A SUMMER WELL SPENT
• Learned how to use QGIS
• Contributed to a worthwhile project
• Got to stay on campus over the summer
UAV’s and High Resolution
Aerial Mapping
The Project
• UAV’s and their applications for Ecology are
just beginning to blossom as a field of study
• This summer, I focused on two projects
related to UAV’s
o Data collection for a lit review
o Data collection of aerial photos for determination of NDVI
Mapping of Cranberry
Bogs
• Kaiyu Guan, a grad
student, had a
octocopter
• Went to nearby
cranberry bogs, to take
aerial photos
• I mainly worked with
processed the photos
o Stitched flies together
• 2 types : Tetracam and
Iphone
Pushing the Project
Forward
• Additionally, I spent a
fair amount of time
over learning to fly a
UAV so the project
could be continued
after Kaiyu left
o Had trainer copter
o Cheap, comparatively
o Easily broken
• Could not carry
tetracam- too small
UAV’s in Ecology as a
Whole
• Additionally, I spent a lot of time over the summer
collecting data for a lit review.
• I looked at recently published Ecology studies, from
high impact journals
o Different types examined, but no water/ animal based studies ( UAV’s
don’t really apply to those)
o Found spatial and temporal resolution and extent
• Area sampled, how often, etc, how detailed
o As I finish the study during the school year, I hope to compare this data to
the possibilities of UAV’s to demonstrate the existence of a “niche” for
these tools in ecology
In Conclusion…
• I really enjoyed working with both Dr. Estes and Mr.
Guan this summer
• It helped me understand what a professional
research environment was like , and gave me some
experience in one
• I feel I also got to dive into a topic that will gather
momentum and importance in the coming years