Grassroots Mapping

Blog post written by Jaroslav Valuch (@jvaluch or j.valuch@gmail.com)

It was a pretty hot summer. In July, the calmness and silence in the heart of Sumava, the biggest and strictly protected natural park in the Czech Republic, was replaced by the sound of chainsaws and massive police action.

It is usually bark beetle calamity that repeatedly raises controversy around the issue of “to cut or not to cut”. In a strong simplification, the bark beetle attacks the trees and kills them. The traditional forest management approach pushes for cutting infected trees to prevent the beetle from spreading. The modern environment-friendly approach suggests to leave nature to deal with itself – some of the temporary generations of trees will die, but in turn will provide cover for a new generation of trees, that will grow stronger and more resilient to any future bark beetle infestations. However, in clear-cut areas which are unprotected from further destruction by storms and wind, new generations of human-planted trees grow to be too weak for resisting future beetle attacks.

Sumava National Park has had to repeatedly face attacks on its strict level of ecosystem preservation. Local business lobbyists backed by political pressures would prefer to see Sumava open to the construction of ski resorts and infrastructure for mass tourism. Therefore, a wild, difficult to access forest obviously does not correspond with such a vision.

The Czech law is clear – any intervention in the protected areas of natural parks that can significantly impact the local ecosystem is prohibited. In extreme cases, exceptions can be granted. This summer, there was a large logging intervention, but no accompanying legal permission.

This act triggered activist protests which insisted that companies follow the law. In order to prevent illegal cutting, activists started blocking the cutting themselves. Blockades triggered a massive police intervention that attempted to push activists out of the forest. It took four weeks of chaining, tubing, and arrests. The forest was not saved, but one of the goals– to draw the public attention and raise discussion around this issue– was successful.

Once the chainsaws went silent, and the police left the forest, the time for proper documentation of the damage had come. Experts observed the cut trees, many of which actually were not attacked by the bark beetle at all. Simultaneously, visual and geographic documentation took place from a ground perspective.

Cut Area Map

Sumava Cut Area

Inspired by the Grassroots Mapping of the BP oil spill, we decided to try to get our own “satellite” imagery in order to document the devastation in its full scale, have something to present it to public, and to use for any legal action that should follow. We reached out to Shannon and Stewart from Public Laboratory and quickly received some initial thoughts, guidance and support. Soon we were on our way back to the forest with balloons, a camera, a bottle of helium and enthusiasm. It is a piece of cake, we thought, planning to cover all areas in one day. The disillusion came quickly: not enough balloons, too much wind and trees all around. Finally, when our awkward tangle of balloons took off, full of excitement and drunk by the success, we refused to pull the balloons back in time. The wind and trees did their job. As a result, we lost balloons and the camera.

View: Ballon Mapping Fail #1

Having zero images and no more helium, we left the forest, but did not give up. Next week we were back: with a new camera, bigger balloons and a friend who is a climber and managed to get the old camera from the treetop. The imagery was there, however, we didn’t fly high and long enough to get proper imagery.

Our second attempt went smoothly. At 5pm the wind stopped, and the balloons went straight up. In 60 minutes, we had one of the areas covered, hoping we had enough good quality images to merge the pictures into a single layer. And we did. Photoshop CS5 did its job perfectly. As we didn’t have too many images, we didn’t need to use the PLOTS MapKnitter. However, one problem did occur. We had nice single layer imagery, but not enough geo specific data to place it correctly onto a map by using MapKnitter. Simply, there were not enough objects that we could use to scale the image to the right location in the right size. For next time, we plan to geolocate the area more properly. We are thinking about placing three white flipchart papers onto the area, geolocating each of them and than placing the merged image with three visible white papers onto the correct coordinates.

As it stands today, after almost 6,000 trees were cut, the inspection by the Ministry of Environment finally took place, investigating whether the cutting intervention did significantly impact the local ecosystem or not. We now have our own evidence that will be used for three purposes: First, to document the scale of damage. Second, to observe during time how much of the wood will remain in place (despite the fact that the majority of the wood mass should remain on spot, every single tree was cut into logs of precisely 4.1 meters in size, a standard size for trucks. It wouldn’t be the first time when such high-quality wood “disappeared” suddenly). It is the third purpose that is most important – this sends a clear message that we are watching, and that no further logging operation will remain covered-up.

We are also currently launching a Ushahidi based platform (note that this is still a site concept) as a space for gathering all available imagery and testimonies in order to provide a repository for any future reference and planning. Next time, we need to act faster and deploy during the operation, not only after it.

Our key lesson learned while mapping:

While mapping in difficult to access environments, you need to be ready and well prepared: two cameras and enough balloons (note – dogs hate inflating of the balloons) are essential. We plan to try to use kites next time as well. But the bottom line is: Don’t give up!

A list of equipment used for this project:

– Camera Canon Powershot A495 – cheap, but little bit too heavy. Need to crack the firmware in order to enable unlimited continuous shooting.
– SD card – max 2GB SD card enabled the crack for continuous shooting to work, set up 1 image per 3 seconds (the capacity of 2 GB SD card was just enough for some 20-30 minutes of ballooning). Some one third of pictures was sharp enough which was sufficient.
– 5l helium bottle (just enough for one ballooning session)
– 2 party balloons 160cm size, one 90 cm size (at least another three as a backup).
– Light string 150 meters (wish we had more)
– Plastic bottle as a cover
– Laptop
– Tons of AA back-up batteries

I’ve heard Shannon Dosemagen cite “a football field of wetlands loss every 30 minutes” along the Louisiana gulf coast, due to lower freshwater inflow/silt deposition, contamination, wake, and other issues. I was working on a map of balloon images of Bayou St. Denis recently and compared our imagery to that of Bing, which is a few years old. I believe these are pretty well lined up, based on the stream intersections, and you can clearly see the amount of land missing in the more recent images.

http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/warren/9-21-2011/wetlands-erosion-bayou-st-denis-louisiana

http://mapknitter.org/tms/bayou-st–denis/openlayers.html

I wonder how old the Bing imagery is. Google has stuff from a few weeks after the oil spill. Though it’s difficult to align these datasets given that the land itself is changing shape, the high resolution of the images that grassroots mappers captured makes it an interesting way to quantify wetlands loss. Hopefully our ongoing collaboration with Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) will yield even more data for this area.

Compared to the Google Maps vector coastlines, there’s been even more loss; presumably these aren’t updated every time new satellite data is available:

Written by Elizabeth Wolf, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente

The recent months of 2011 have marked the manifestation of student frustration with the Chilean education system. Hundreds of thousands of university and secondary students have flooded the streets of Santiago and other cities across Chile, in a series of protests demanding: lower tuition, more opportunities to access public universities, better quality education, and increased government spending on education, including more scholarships for lower class students.

The Chilean government spends less on education than most developed countries: 4.4% of its GDP, compared to the average 7%, which means a good portion of Chilean students pay for their own university education. With the combination of being one of the most socially stratified countries in the world, (40% of the country’s wealth is concentrated in 10% of the population), and the high costs of education, many students do not have the ability to attend a quality university. The Piñera administration and the leading group of Chilean students, along with their supporters have been at odds with each other for the last few months, struggling on the debate of education policy reform. Unable to agree upon a solution, the result has been the eruption of student protests across the country.

These protests have been covered by media outlets worldwide, often featuring negative images of the few individuals who cause trouble. Most media attention focuses on people fighting with each other, and with the police, showing the resulting arrests and damage to public property. While this is one characteristic of the protests, there is another side of the story that isn’t always covered by the media. That side is of the great majority of the participants in the protest; the individual citizen, who is marching peacefully to show their concern for the issue at hand.  As an organization, we do not take sides on political issues of this nature, however, we support a citizen’s right to express their content or discontent with their government. In this context, and for the purpose of encouraging civic engagement through information technology, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, (Smart Citizen Foundation, http://www.votainteligente.cl/) along with Public Laboratory, adapted the idea of balloon mapping to our own needs. We wanted to demonstrate and strengthen the perspective of viewing protests from the citizen’s point of view, in order to broadcast to the world the majority, rather than the minority of the behavior of the attendees these events. We wanted to show a grassroots movement from a truly grassroots perspective.

The objective was to cover the student protests in a way that was inexpensive, and easily replicable by almost anyone. The materials were simple: an iPhone 3G connected to the internet, string, helium, and balloons. We used a string to connect the camera phone and balloons, which were elevated to approximately 20 feet in the air, and controlled by a member of our team. The phone was connected to the internet, which allowed us to live stream the protest on our website. In only two hours, we had an incredible following; over 10,000 people viewed the protest live from our site, and Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente’s twitter account had thousands of hits and comments. This far exceeded the number of daily visits that we have on our website and showed the impact that this project could really have.

Approximately one week later, in preparation for the next round student protests, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente translated the Public Laboratory’s Guide to Balloon Mapping into Spanish. We uploaded it onto our website, (http://www.ciudadanointeligente.cl/marcha/armatuglobo.html) as well as handed it out to demonstrators at the protest. We wanted to encourage Chilean citizens to construct their own balloon map, allowing them to show their own point of view of the protests. The reception to this idea was very positive and people were excited to realize that they could broadcast their own aerial view of the protest, with any webcam, or camera connected to the internet.

This new idea also captured the attention of the media. Within the two weeks of live streaming the event, Ciudadano Inteligente was featured on Teletrece and TVN, both Chilean news stations that broadcast nationwide. We also had several radio station interviews on the topic. Much to the credit of the incredible citizen and media reception of this project, this site is now an extension of Fundación Cuidadano Inteligente, (http://www.ciudadanointeligente.cl/marcha/) that we hope to use to live stream future protests.

We live in a world where connectivity is immediate and the potential for video virility is one tweet, or one post away. In the instance of balloon mapping protests, the fact that any handheld webcam, or phone with internet connection can be used to capture protests live, allows for the potential of thousands of views, and thus increasing the power of individual self expression and citizen engagement. Now ordinary people don’t necessarily have to rely solely on media broadcasting for coverage of a protest. This enables them not only to see the peaceful activity of the majority of the demonstration participants, but to show their own version of it to the world. This use of global mapping can truly put the power of the dispersion of visual information in the hands of everyday people, the majority of people, to show the positive and peaceful side of grassroots movements as they are happening.

We hope that because of the nature of the feasibility of construction of the Balloon Mapping, for these purposes, more people will construct their own in the future. All of this can be done with easily accessible materials that almost anyone, almost anywhere, can find, allowing for the transformation of the perception of protests; from a literal top down, to bottom up, approach.

In future demonstrations, we hope to look up and see a rainbow of balloons dotting the sky!

Links:

http://www.ciudadanointeligente.cl/marcha/

http://www.ciudadanointeligente.cl/marcha/armatuglobo.html

http://www.votainteligente.cl/

Recorded Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/ciudadanointeligente#p/u/7/VfPPLPoKlzU

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15715893

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15990823

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15714706

Grassroots Mapping בשיתוף עם חגית קיסר ושי אפרתי, הטיסו מספר פעמים מצלמה מותקנת על בלון הליום מעל ראשיהם של למעלה מ-3000 משתתפי צעדת “צועדים לעצמאות” בירושלים. הצעדה עברה ממערב העיר למזרחה, ביום שישי, ה-15 ליולי 2011. הצילומים נעשו בהשראת Vota Inteligente שלאחרונה שידרו שידור חי מעל להפגנת מחאה בסנטיאגו, צ’ילה, ו BIT Balloon documentation שנעשה על ידי נטלי ג’רמיג’נקו במהלך גלי מחאות סביב הכנס הרפובליקאי הלאומי בארה”ב, 2004.

Grassroots Mapping together with Shai Efrati and Hagit Keysar launched a balloon several times over the heads of more than 3000 people in the march for Palestinian Independence, in Jerusalem. The march went from west to east Jerusalem, Friday July, 15 2011. Taking inspiration from Vota Inteligente’s recent balloon live-streaming of protests in Santiago Chile, and Natalie Jeremijenko’s BIT Balloon documentation of the RNC protests in New York City in 2004.

You can read more about the protest here: http://www.en.justjlm.org/557

http://publiclaboratory.org/place/santiago-chile

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/08/64720, Bit Balloon, 2004

The completed stitched map is here:

Hello mappers etc!

We’ve just launched the first issue of 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. (For those of you who don’t know, we are a community of activist cartographers who use DIY tools for civic science — we take aerial photos using kites and balloons of things like the BP oil spill.)

The front of every issue, which is essentially a giant printed map, will depict a Grassroots Mapping site — the first one is of an island in Wilkinson Bay, Louisiana, with oil residue along a wetlands coastline. It is printed on a single 22.75×35″ 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.

You can find out more, and purchase the first issue here for $17 shipped:
http://publiclaboratory.org/forum

If you’re interested in supporting Public Laboratory’s work, consider buying 3 or 4 and giving them to your friends.

The first issue of the Grassoots Mapping Forum was sponsored by DevelopmentSeed, creators of MapBox, and we are looking for sponsors for future maps. If you’re interested, please get in touch.

Jeff & the Public Laboratory team

Dear Grassroots Mappers / Public Laboratory community:

We have some great news to share: the Public Laboratory for Open Technology & Science has just been awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to support citizen-based, grassroots data gathering and research.

We are grateful to be working with all of you and want to let you know that we will be focused on further developing our hardware and software tools, and supporting on-the-ground initiatives.

We will be setting up spaces in several cities – please get in touch, especially if you’ve been reading this list but haven’t spoken up there will be even more varied ways to participate in the community.

The full press release is below. (PDF)

See you outside!
Jeff, Shannon, Adam, Sara, Mathew, Stewart, Liz

(Above photo, left to right: Adam, Jeff, Shannon, Sara, Leif, and Liz)

NEWS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 22, 2011

BOSTON, MA– The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science announced today that it will use a $500,000, three-year Knight News Challenge grant to create a toolkit and online community for citizen-based, grassroots data gathering and research. The News Challenge, a project of the John S.and James L. Knight Foundation, is an international contest to fund digital news experiments using technology to inform and engage communities. 

The Public Lab is an expansion of Grassroots Mapping – one of the most successful projects developed through the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. During the project, residents used helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high-resolution D.I.Y “satellite” maps gauging the extent of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill – at a time when there was little public information on the subject. Expanding the toolkit beyond aerial mapping, Public Laboratory will work with communities, both online and offline, to produce information about our surroundings.

“Knight Foundation’s support underscores the increasing importance of civic technologies and the need for local-level involvement in collecting and interpreting environmental information,” said Jeffrey Warren, Research Director at Public Lab. “This generous grant will help us to develop and launch new projects with our local partners as well as expand upon our existing programs.”

“At Knight Foundation, we’re interested in supporting efforts to connect on-line activity with off-line action,” said John S. Bracken, Director of Digital Media at Knight Foundation. “In Public Lab, we found a skilled partner that is experimenting with tools and behaviors that inform and engage local communities in fascinating ways. We look forward to seeing what this investment yields.”

With the BP oil spill Grassroots Mapping project as a pilot, Public Laboratory has already begun a series of new collaborations focused on locally produced environmental and civic data. Over the next three years, seven local chapters of Public Laboratory will be created around the United States to support community action with new low-cost, accessible tools and technologies. Ranging from infrared vegetation monitoring to thermal photography for home insulation, these projects will be developed in collaboration with local community and advocacy groups to address specific local issues. Drawing from the participatory and Do-It-Yourself techniques which have generated hundreds of gigabytes of citizen-produced environmental map data in the Gulf of Mexico, the Public Lab plans to tackle new problems in new places, while developing a long-term approach to jump-starting and sustaining such efforts on a broader scale.

About the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible “Do-It-Yourself” techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.

The core PLOTS program is focused on “civic science” in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding. For more information, please visit publiclaboratory.org.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.

Contacts

Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science: Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Research Director; phone: 504.358.0647; email: jeff@publiclaboratory.org

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: Marc Fest, Vice President for Communications; phone: 305.908.2677; email: Fest@knightfoundation.org

Grassroots Mapping from James Warden on Vimeo.

Jen Hudon posted last week about mapping in Humboldt Park in Chicago. Sounds like they had a blast! She writes:

We had quite a few technical difficulties on Saturday for the Chicago Grassroots Mapping Workshop, including a broken kite string reel, not enough helium, and a malfunctioning camera. However, the team remained optimistic and had a great time learning more about the Public Laboratory and the many grassroots mapping projects, all while experimenting with cameras, mylar balloons and kites. The group was very interested and impressed with all of the collaborations and developments with the software and hardware – so kudos to everyone involved.

The Grassroots Mapping project was recently awarded an Honorary Mention at the 2011 Prix Ars Electronica:

http://new.aec.at/prix/en/gewinner/#digital-communities

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!

Since 1987, the Prix Ars Electronica has served as an interdisciplinary platform for everyone who uses the computer as a universal medium for implementing and designing their creative projects at the interface of art, technology and society.

The “Digital Communities” category focuses on the wide-ranging social and artistic impact of the Internet technology as well as on the latest developments in social software, user generated content, mobile communications, mash-ups and location based services. Digital Communities” focuses on innovation in relation to human coexistence. Its main goals lie in first, bridging the geographical as well as the genderbased digital divide and second, bridging across cultural conflicts and third, supporting cultural diversity and freedom of artistic expression.

On Thursday May 12th, PLOTS team members Jeff Warren, Shannon Dosemagen and I spent the afternoon mapping Grand Isle State Park using a pair of kites and our trusty Canon camera.  The areas we mapped near the fishing pier in the park have been mapped on several other occasions by various means, most recently on the late February overflight by Shannon and me.  (Stewart Long has done a great map using that data.)  Our goal was to map the same area again to look for any changes to the shoreline and beach that may be associated with impact from the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in April, 2010.

We used our traditional method of suspending a lightweight, point and shoot Canon camera set to shoot continuously with the shutter fully depressed using a rubber band.  This resulted in some quality shots of the pier and the beach, but the onshore winds made photography of the entire beach impossible due to the 45 degree flying angle of our Sutton Flowform kite.  Onshore winds are a problem for capturing images of the beach using KAP and we are continually looking for solution to this specific problem as it represents the greater challenge of KAP when the goal is capturing a specific geographic area for study.  In this particular case, the water wasn’t too deep for wading and I took the kite line a few hundred feet off shore to guide the camera directly over a flock of shore birds.  This approach yielded some impressive, high resolution shots of at least 5 species of birds including Laughing Gulls, Caspian Terns, and an American Oystercatcher.  This mapping mission demonstrated proof-of-concept for estimating bird densities using a method that minimizes disturbance in order to maximize data quality.

In late February, Adam Griffith and I were fortunate to participate in an overflight of the Barataria region on a flight donated by LightHawk. Other flight participants included Dr. Alex Kolker and Alex Ameen of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. We were interested in similar sights as Alex and Alex from LUMCON including Bay Jimmy and Isle Grand Terre which Grassroots Mappers had mapped during the previous summer (2010). Public Laboratory community member, Cesar Harada, had also worked with Adam just a week earlier to begin figuring out a process for quantifying wetlands and thus with these tie-ins, we decided to keep in touch with Alex and Alex and see what kind of cross-over we might have in future work.

In early April, Cesar and I met with Alex and Alex at Tulane University and arranged fieldwork dates for May that fellow PLOTS staff members, Jeff Warren and Adam Griffith could participate in as Jeff has been developing and testing infrared cameras and Adam is a coastal environments specialist. On May 10th and 11th we spent two days in Barataria mapping, testing out infrared and UV cameras and trying out a new aerial mapping rig with dual Infrared and visible light cameras next to each other. We also worked with Alex and Alex to measure shoreline distances and to duplicate the images that they were taking with regular cameras with both UV and Infrared cameras (stitched images coming soon!) that PLOTS has been developing. On the 12th we spent a day in Grand Isle State Park, testing out new kite rigs and determining if, with a combined aerial and ground image approach, we could get accurate counts on bird species on a jetty of land.

Experimenting and collaborating with researchers- is part of the PLOTS outcomes that we have been working towards. In this instance of partnering with LUMCON, we were particularly interested to see how aerial data collected and generated by residents of the Gulf Coast could be useful to Gulf Coast researchers. During the last year, we have continuously worked with media outlets to spread the images collected of the Gulf Coast as many images showed the impact of oil on areas as the spill period progressed- not always evident from ground imagery. Going forward, a year after the spill, we are interested in looking at the ways that baseline aerial-data collected of areas where researchers are still working can be useful in when looking at shoreline impacts from oil, as well as the continued problem of wetland loss. We will continue collaborating with LUMCON in the future, testing out infrared and UV cameras, refining processes of wetland quantification, and aerial mapping over impacted sites such as Bay Jimmy that both PLOTS and LUMCON have used as sites in our work. We’ll also be starting with the development of a time lapse camera that we envision testing over the course of a year in several different wetland areas of Louisiana, including the LUMCON headquarters in Cocodrie, LA.

As always…If you are a Gulf Coast resident and interested in getting involved in working with PLOTS, please contact Shannon@publiclaboratory.org.