I just launched a broader project of geojournalism at O Eco (http://www.oeco.com.br/geonoticias). It is called Geonotícia (Geonews, translanding from Portuguese). It is much more complete than the previous experience (http://www.oeco.com.br/monitor) because finaly I managed to use the Earth directly on the website. The idea is to produce a story over the Google Earth.
But also I will be exploring the satellite images in a simple way. Basicaly the idea is to bring ground information to what the pictures are showing from the sky.
The trends of geojournalism and citizen journalism are quite similar. Both are increasing and starting to involve more people. Here I give two examples.
First, it was really interesting the post by Andrew Revkin at his Dot Earth Blog about the launch of the Ocean`s layer on the Google Earth. Some of you might have seen that now it is possible to travel around the world’s marine environment. What Revkin is discussing its is whether or not this effort of bulding a virtual world is going to lead to more conservation.
The other thing that has impressed me a lot is the Ushahidi software. It is a kind of automatic mapping of facts reported by citizen. They have amazing experiences already completed on the Congo and the Gaza conflicts. It is worth having a look on it. Here
Due to the incredible amount of data available in the internet, anyone can monitor protected areas around the globe. For journalists, looking closer to what is happening in parks and other kind of reserves can just give a lot of material for good stories. If you read the previous post, on “Tracking Forest Fires”, you saw how simple is to download updated fire pixels into Google Earth.
Now once you just have the firepixels on your computer, you can cross this information with the limits of national park for example. The best way of doing it is to go the World Database on Protected Areas. Overthere you go to the Advance Search Area and then just look for you country. After is just to search in one of the countries protected areas categories and finally they will open a page with the parks names. Once you click in one of their names you get a lot of good information. But the main thing is to download the Google Earth -KML file with the shape of the area. And well, one click is everything done. I used this resource a lot to illustred our O Eco Monitor on Fires at the Protected Areas (in Brazil).
I get pictures like this one, from the Bom Futuro National Forest. This is how it look like on last august.
Producing stories and graphics with forest fire information is one of the most interesting applications that journalists can do using the satellites information. The slideshow you see above was very simple to do. I just colect all the fire alerts that Fire Information Resources Management System (FIRMS) send everyday on my email. Once you get in the website you can sign for a newsletter with your area of interested and they send you all the fire spots registered.
The FIRMS is done by the University of Maryland, a well known center of geo-technologies which work with NASA and a lot other institutions. One thing that helps me a lot on their website is Web Fire Mapper. It is pretty good deal for finding stories if you just ask to see the latest fire spots with the Protected Areas Layer. Go to the right hand side, click on ‘Layers’ and choose ‘Protected Areas’. You might see, if you live in tropical country like Brazil that, protected areas has been very much affected by fire.
And finally, do not forget testing the data on Google Earth. Just go the Web Mapping Services and choose ‘KML/Google Earth`. Once again you can choose the fire spots by region. Download the KML file (suitable for opening in Google Earth) and once it is open in you computer, try to cross the information. See which cities are close to the fire. Or even more interesting just import some protected area limits and see how they burned lately. Next post I will show where to get parks and reserves on KML format very easily.
