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Geospatial data and analysis is critical for conservation, from planning to implementation and measuring success. The Geospatial group focuses on all aspects of this field, from field surveys to remote sensing and data development/analysis to GIS systems.

Group curators

Vance Russell
3point.xyz
Over 35 years of experience in biodiversity conservation worldwide, largely focused on forests, rewilding and conservation technology. I run my own business assisting nonprofits and agencies in the conservation community
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Collaring Elephants and Post Release Monitoring

Kasi Amor Kalande

28 January 2025 3:16pm

This leads to an exciting blog we did recently, it also includes a spatial map indicating elephant movement tracks of an orphaned elephant who self released himself into the wild (Kafue National Park). Cartography was done using ArcGIS Pro. If you're interested in animal...

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discussion

Help Shape the Future of the WILDLABS Geospatial Group!

Elsa Carla De Grandi

7 December 2024 2:43pm

Hello Geospatial community!First of all, a big thank you for being part of this amazing community.As you may know, @VAR1 , @ahmedjunaid  and I are the new WILDLABS Geospatial...

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Elsa Carla De Grandi

7 January 2025 5:49pm

Happy New Year Geospatial community! Don't forget to fill in the survey. Closing date is 19th January.

We'd love to hear from you! 

Elsa Carla De Grandi

27 January 2025 8:24pm

We're extending the survey deadline! Please don't forget to let us know if you would like to speak about your work at one of the future Geospatial community events. 

Many thanks!

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Wildfires offset the increasing but spatially heterogeneous Arctic–boreal CO2 uptake

Ahmed Junaid

26 January 2025 2:41pm

Nature Climate Change (2025).

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Read "Wildfires offset the increasing but spatially heterogeneous Arctic–boreal CO2 uptake | Nature Climate Change" on Nature

Wildfires offset the increasing but spatially heterogeneous Arctic–boreal CO2 uptake | Nature Climate Change

The Arctic&#8211;Boreal Zone is rapidly warming, impacting its large soil carbon stocks. Here we use a new compilation of terrestrial ecosystem CO2 fluxes, geospatial datasets and random forest models to show that although the Arctic&#8211;Boreal Zone was overall an increasing terrestrial CO2 sink from 2001 to 2020 (mean&#8201;&#177;&#8201;standard deviation in net ecosystem exchange, &#8722;548&#8201;&#177;&#8201;140&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1; trend, &#8722;14&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1; P&#8201;<&#8201;0.001), more than 30% of the region was a net CO2 source. Tundra regions may have already started to function on average as CO2 sources, demonstrating a shift in carbon dynamics. When fire emissions are factored in, the increasing Arctic&#8211;Boreal Zone sink is no longer statistically significant (budget, &#8722;319&#8201;&#177;&#8201;140&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1; trend, &#8722;9&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1), and the permafrost region becomes CO2 neutral (budget, &#8722;24&#8201;&#177;&#8201;123&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1; trend, &#8722;3&#8201;Tg&#8201;C&#8201;yr&#8722;1), underscoring the importance of fire in this region. How the carbon stocks of the Arctic&#8211;Boreal Zone change with warming is not well understood. Here the authors show that wildfires and large regional differences in net carbon fluxes offset the overall increasing CO2 uptake.

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Updated Planted Trees Map Reaches Near-Global Coverage

Carly Batist

25 January 2025 4:41pm

Updated version of the Spatial Database of Planted Trees (SDPT), which differentiates planted forests and tree crops from primary and secondary natural forests. Update has double the number of countries covered

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New Data Provides First Global Annual Picture of Cultivated and Natural Grasslands

Elsa Carla De Grandi

25 January 2025 2:22pm

The Land & Carbon Lab developed a new dataset that provides global maps of grassland extent annually from 2000 - 2022 at a 30 m resolution. These maps are critical for tracking changes in grassland ecosystems, informing land-use management and guiding conservation efforts.

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discussion

Recommended Hardware to stitch together Drone Imagery into Orthomosaics

William Rippon

25 November 2024 6:25am

Recently I've been trying to generate orthomosaic overlays from drone imagery using WebODM. Whilst my computer is fine stitching together RGB imagery of up to 140 photos at a time...

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David Hill

21 December 2024 5:21am

This site may be of use for WebODM and photogrammetry using UAVs, as it focuses purely on processing that type of data and the hardware required.   It also covers Conservation and Agriculture analysis and training using open source GIS and 3D point cloud software. Follow the links below:

https://www.geowingacademy.com

Hope this helps.

Lance Legel

3 January 2025 3:41am

Hi @willrippon, I've worked with 3D reconstruction systems (software and hardware) for over 10 years now, and lately I've been really pleasantly surprised by Pix4D.

Here is a demo for a landscape survey my company just did.
Here is a 300 MB orthomosaic we just got as well.
Here is the hardware workflow described in detail.

On top of the drone imagery, we did "post-processing kinematics" (PPK) of the drone images (a very important thing to do, otherwise photogrammetry quality really suffers).  I'm happy to discuss workflow further, and plan to release open source code and services.

If nothing else, go with Pix4D.

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Photogrammetry of Coral Reef Breakwaters

Matthew Duggan

20 December 2024 1:11am

Hello WildLabs community!I was curious if anyone had any experience or helpful insight into the following project I am working on with coral reef/land mapping interfaces in the...

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Sean Hill

22 December 2024 8:35am

Hi Matthew

 

Wow, what an amazing project! It is incredible how you have managed to figure out some of the complexities of combining underwater imagery with UAV imagery. I am sure that was a fascinating learning experience. 

I cannot help you with Points 1 and 3 but can suggest using Orfeo Toolbox for your segmentation process in Point 2. It integrates with QGIS and is open source. It will work with your UAV ortho maps if there is enough visible detail of the corals. You will be able to build and train your own model in order to accurately segment you reef. It takes a bit of know how to us the Machine Learning algorithms but once you get the hang of it it becomes immensely powerful. I will be building an online course on how to build your own machine learning processing algorithms in 2025 using this brilliant package. Once segmented you can save out the shapefiles and use them to segment and define your 3D point clouds in Agisoft.

Alternatively, look into using Picterra Geospatial AI. It is cloud based and much simpler to use but you may need to compress your imagery or point clouds in order to upload them given the file size you mentioned above.  (Although they probable do allow for large uploads these days, I used Picterra in the past and it was brilliant!). Also i am not sure if it works with point clouds directly but have a look

I hope this helps. Great project!

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discussion

Query Regarding ArcMap

Muzna Kashaf

15 November 2024 2:21pm

I am not able to use tools in arcmap 10.8. I mean tools are not running in my arcmap 10.8. What would be the reason and how to solve it?

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