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.
At Public Lab, we've grown the Grassroots Mapping community into a broader effort to enable communities to understand and respond to environmental threats with DIY techniques.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working with JumpStart International’s project, OpenMapsCaucasus in Georgia, teaching balloon-mapping workshops. With OMC’s Austin Cowley, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Svaneti in the northwest of Georgia, where we collaborated with local OMC staff and a group of enterprising school kids to map the entire city of Mestia:
The map, 5.5 kilometers from end to end, is the largest area ever mapped using these techniques, and was completed in less than 3 days, with a 6-foot helium balloon flying up to 1.4 kilometers above the ground. Below, you can see the flight paths of our first 3 launches, recorded with a lightweight GPS which we attached to the balloon:
The trip is the first of a series of mapping expeditions and workshops I’ll be teaching with OMC staff across the country, and the imagery will be used to improve the public domain map that OMC is developing.
Since May, volunteers and staff from the LABB have been working with students from MIT’s media lab on an aerial photography mapping project. The Gulf Oil Spill Mapping project is so simple that it baffles people: attach a basic camera to a kite or weather ballon and set it to automatically take a picture every 5, 10 or 20 seconds. Let the rig out 1000 feet and cover as much coastline as you can. The photos are then sent to some smart guys at MIT (including the project’s fearless leader, Jeff Warren) who then stitch the photos together pixel by pixel and georeference them to make a map.
The simplicity of this project is what initially sparked my interest in it. The kits are assembled from relatively inexpensive materials, and almost anyone can perform the basic tasks of attaching the camera and letting out the kite or balloon. Since its inception, the project has successfully accumulated a lot of quality data. However, mapping the gulf coast oil spill is different than mapping, say, the festival grounds at Bonneroo.
The first, most obvious challenge is access. At Grand Isle, for example, the beaches remain open to the public, but only up to the water berm, about 30 feet back from the high tide mark. Even under low-wind conditions, it is almost impossible to get pictures of the coastline from this distance–especially when the Coast Guard and mysterious private security teams involved in the beach clean-up are breathing down your neck. When it is windy, the kite or balloon is carried even farther back from the coastline, and you end up with a bunch of pictures of people’s camp roofs. The old standby for us there has been the pier at Grand Isle State Park, which allows us to position the kite or balloon directly over the coastline. However, it forces us to limit our mapping to a very narrow section of beach, since we are confined to the pier. In contrast, the Mississippi Coast remains open to the public and our brave volunteers have actually waded out into the water to properly position the camera over the coastline–with great results! (But, we don’t know how much longer the MS beaches will remain open.)
Isle Grand Terre, a barrier island off the eastern coast of Grand Isle, hit the mainstream media a few weeks ago when its shores and wildlife were covered with thick, black oil. The day after oil hit, our volunteers were able to hitch a ride on a boat with researcher Adam Griffith from Western Carolina University and photographer Richard Shephard. The amazing results of that trip can be seen here:
However, access to the island has been significantly restricted since oil was found there. On Thursday, LABB volunteer Elizabeth, HandsOn New Orleans volunteer Erin, and I were lucky enough to score a boat ride with Greenpeace to Isle Grand Terre, along with a marine biologist and a filmmaker from California. Technically, Greenpeace warned us, we were not supposed to even go to the island. Getting on the beach there would require us to tow a small skiff boat and use it to ferry our group’s members to the beach. The prospects for toting a heavy helium tank on a boat with 8 people and then transitioning it to an 8-foot skiff boat with a 2-stroke engine seemed dim. I opted for the kite.
The boat ride from the Bridgeside Marina on Grand Isle to the fort at Grand Terre was slow. The entire bay is essentially a no-wake zone. In addition, there are larger oil-soaked fishing and shrimping boats constantly leaving and arriving at the docks of the Sand Dollar Marina at the eastern end of the island. Booms set up around Queen Bess island and large barges transporting tanker trucks present further navigational challenges. When we finally got to the island, we saw that the clean-up operations had been effective on the beach–the four-inch thick pools of oil were gone. But, thick, brown and orange oil remained trapped in the rock jetties and the marsh grasses surrounding them. Standing on the jetty, I looked down through the spaces in the rocks at pools of oil and brown frothy mess.
It is difficult to imagine how, or if, it can ever been cleaned up. When I set up the kite, I was disappointed to find that the wind was not strong enough to lift it up to 1000 feet. The more I let out the reel, the further from the coastline the kite ventured, with little rise in elevation. The results are that we captured plenty of pictures of the island’s interior, but only a few of the coastline (and these were at low elevation). My next option would have been to trail the kite behind the boat, but divergent interests among the boat’s passengers and the fuel level of the boat ruled out this scenario. All in all, the mapping trip was not the most successful one we have had so far. But, it also was not a total failure. Elizabeth obtained some excellent shots of the oil on Grand Terre, dolphins looking for food in shallow water and the clean-up operations, which can be viewed on the LABB flickr site.
We were also grateful to establish a relationship with Greenpeace. Having never worked with Greenpeace before, the organization’s reputation for in-your-face environmental activism made me a little wary of their intentions and tactics in the gulf. Although my personal sentiments toward off-shore drilling and the energy sector are closely aligned with theirs, I recognize the importance of petroleum to the economy and culture of coastal Louisiana; and I politely keep my opinions to myself here. A moratorium on off-shore drilling is not a popular idea in Louisiana–and Grand Isle is no exception. Further, I believe that using any disaster as a backdrop to bolster a political agenda is not only exploitative, it’s disrespectful. If you’re going to bother coming down to the gulf right now, you better have something to offer the people that live and work here–and anti-drilling rhetoric doesn’t count. Save it for Washington.
To Greenpeace’s credit, I was impressed with their staff’s efforts to keep a low profile and not isolate the community along political lines. The organization is funded entirely from private donations and does not endorse political candidates or accept funds from them. Their work in Grand Isle is focused specifically on providing boat transport to independent journalists, scientists and organizations who lack the funds to charter boats. Sure, they are also taking their own pictures as well. I am grateful for their services and appreciative of their respect for the sensitivity of the issue here.
The moral of this story: we can’t depend solely on the generosity of Greenpeace to get us where we need to go! Boats cost money; and mainstream media outlets have a lot more of it than we do–but they don’t have kites! If you are interested in our mapping project and would like to see more images of areas that are only accessible by boat, please visit our Grassroots Mapping page to make a donation!
Update: we’ve reached our funding deadline! Thanks for the support; if you want to continue contributing, please use the PayPal donate button in the right-hand column.
We’re starting a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to support citizen mappers of the Gulf Oil Spill. Check out the above video, and visit the Kickstarter page. The cool part about Kickstarter is that you get ‘rewards’ for pledging given amounts – if you pledge $10 we’ll send you a 5×7 print of one of our images. If you pledge $100, we’ll do better – along with a 16×20 poster, we’ll write your name on one of the kites we use to capture this imagery! But we need your help to get the word out. Unless we reach our funding goal by June 21, nobody pays – it’s all or nothing!
Keep track of the campaign with the badge on the right:
If anyone can help us get a licensed version of Google Earth Pro to get rid of the ‘Trial Version’ watermark, please get in touch!
Update: Thanks to John Crowley of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Jeff Martin from Google, we’ve got some licenses now! Please be patient as the new, un-watermarked version uploads.
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!
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).
Using imagery from Stewart Long’s May 8th overflight of Chandeleur islands, we’ve stitched together a map layer. A sample is above, and you can view the complete map here:
A couple updates: we’re now deep in the stitching process. Above is a preview; we hope to post one or two finished stitches today.
Kris Ansin of Tulane and Louisiana Bucket Brigade is coordinating mapping teams on the ground. (He’s leading a trip today). We’ve had some donations but if you’re able to, please donate to support our efforts. Even $50 will buy us a tank of helium. $100 buys us a new kite.
In the meantime we’ve had some great support from Kristian Hansen of TungstenMonkey, a local production company. Kristian documented our training session last Saturday and has posted an intro video to our project which gets across a lot of information in a very short time. Thanks Kristian!
On Sunday May 9, Stewart Long, Shannon and Mariko from Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and several other volunteers made it to the Chandeleur islands on a boat and in 9mph winds were able to image the slick making its way through the island chain. There appeared to be no booms in place at that location. In the above image you can see their boat and the tether for the balloon.
Stewart and others from LABB are scheduled to be out on a boat today down in Port Fourchon, and we may have more imagery for you then. For now, the full dataset from today is available here, and is in the public domain:
Many birds were congregating on the islands; in coming weeks we’ll be looking out for tarred and/or dead birds and other wildlife. One advantage to the high resolution we’re working at is that we hope to be able to pick out individual animals and plants, and thus better quantify the damage wreaked by the British Petroleum spill.
Are you embroiled in an cartographic dispute? Do you disagree with the official version of your geography? Contact us through the public mailing list.
Grassroots Mapping is part of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, founded by a group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model.
Purchase the Grassroots Mapping Forum, our new community research journal/archive/zine/map, where we hope to share ideas, techniques, and stories from the Grassroots Mapping community. It is printed on a single 22.75x35" newsprint sheet, folded down to just over letter size, and includes a full color reproduction of a grassroots map along with essays, illustrated guides, and interviews on the reverse.
We're helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming yeas.We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery into the public domain.
Techniques and tools for people who want to make maps, on the Public Laboratory wiki. Includes readings and case studies on grassroots mapping projects.
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