Grassroots Mapping is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras.

Birds and oil visible in most recent citizen map of southern Chandeleur islands

May 16th, 2010 by Jeffrey Warren

OpenLayers TMS map of oil and birds on Chandeleur Island, May 9

Stewart Long finished up a fantastic stitched map from the trip he led on May 9th to the southern Chandeleur Islands. Using a helium balloon, he and a group from Louisiana Bucket Brigade produced this extremely high resolution map of an oil slick surrounding a sandbar.

The boat was offered by Jim Smith of Uptown Angler (we were put in touch with him via Spencer Moss of FishingGuidesWorld.com) — many thanks!

You can view the full map in OpenLayers here: tiled web map
There is also a GeoTiff: chandeleur-balloon.tif (278mB)

What’s truly amazing about this map is that you can see individual birds and streaks of oil on the sandbar at the bottom (see below for full resolution).

Birds and streaks of oil on a sandbar at Chandeleur

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