Island Imagery Available (August 2009)

Let's get away from the boring "book" for a while and take a look at what imagery we have for the islands as of today. Here is an update.
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· Latest update

o Kosrae (FSM) Pan-sharpened Natural Color QuickBird; August 2008 from Tony Kimmet (NRCS)
o Kosrae (FSM) Pan-sharpened Color-Infrared QuickBird; August 2008 from Tony Kimmet (NRCS)
o Manu’a group (American Samoa) Pan-sharpened Natural Color QuickBird; August 2008 from Land Info (direct purchase).
o Manu’a group (American Samoa) Pan-sharpened Color-Infrared QuickBird; August 2008 from Land Info (direct purchase).


· All Archive Imagery Available

Island Imagery Available
Guam IKONOS; QuickBird
CNMI IKONOS; QuickBird
Palau QuickBird
American Samoa QuickBird
Federated States of Micronesia QuickBird
Republic of the Marshall Islands QuickBird
Hawaii QuickBird


· Data Distribution Status

o All archive image data have been distributed to corresponding islands/sates with the latest transfer provided as part of our workshop materials.

o The new Manu’a group QuickBird has been provided to American Samoa.

a Step-by-Step Guide for SWARS Geospatial Analysis

As promised, I'm starting to put together this step-by-step guide for conducting the spatial analysis for SWARS. This will be a very detailed and technical guide designed for you GIS specialist. Because of that "high requirment", it's not gonna be ready in a day or two. Plus, I will have video clips to accompany some of the steps. So, read along as new writings become available here or on the page desiganated for the document here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dg4763rp_42hf45563n.

I don't think you would need this document to be completedly available to start your work on SWARS, especially after the intense training last week in Honolulu. You should have learned enough to get started.

As I said more than a million times, there is a lot of work needed to be done before you even start to prepare your first layer. Defining the issue(s) alone will take some lengthy discussions sand debates. Then the layer rankings and weights, the class values for your rasters and how to get your original layers, continuous raster or themaic vector, all these questions are to be answered first.

Hoptefuly our repeated practices in the workshop on all that tasks have prepared you for the coming battles. Don't be shy! You need to and should be active in those meetings and discussions. You need to help to initiate, facilitate, and lead some of the discussions. Don't forget, in the end, you are responsible to implement all the anlyses. Without a well defined path and target, you could run into all kinds of problems later on. If that happens, yourself is partially to be blamed.

Getting to know satellite imagery

this is a talk from our previous island workshops on Satellite Imagery.

Quick Demo of Definiens Developer 7.0 (eCognition)

We recently got the latest version of Definiens Developer 7.0, previously known as eCognition. It's the weapon we use to create polygon segements from the island QuickBird imagery. Here is a quick video demo of how the segmentation is done.