This post was written by Christopher Johnson, a student at South Alabama University that participated in the Grassroots Mapping project in Alabama.

Hello! My name is Christopher Johnson, and I was one of the University of South Alabama (USA) students to participate in the Grassroots Mapping project in Professor Dawn McKinney‘s Computer Science class. It was a bit weird to go outside and do a project, since our majors are all computer-related, but I think in the long run the class was better for it.

Basically we were broken into teams of around six, each team having at least two of each major: CS, IT, and IS (not our actual majors; we were assigned a major for each third of the course, which we rotated). We had to work in teams to stitch together parts of Dauphin Island using Cartagen, among a few other things essential to the Freshman course.

Most of the technical problems came with Cartagen being down for a short period and unusable pictures – the nice sea breeze can be a difficult adversary. Another difficulty was overcoming the challenges we created ourselves, such as arguments within the group and people not showing up for class.

Overall it was a very good learning experience; I was one of those who went to Dauphin Island (taking the pictures was optional), and we had a lot of fun. I’d definitely do it again, given the opportunity, and I recommend that everybody go out there and try to make a difference. It’s more fun than you think, and you can really make a difference in your community!

During the first session, Jeff Warren and I gave an overview of the Grassroots Mapping project and Jeff taught the basics of map stitching via Skype from Boston. After this first session, with two volunteers, I accompanied a group of approximately fifteen students and three faculty members to Dauphin Island for a day of service learning where students were to map different portions of the island. Dauphin Island is a particularly difficult location to map as we had experienced over the course of the summer. On the ground there can be hardly a breeze, but upon letting a balloon up only a hundred feet, the wind currents change and you can end up with a balloon floating low to the ground, but half a mile from your standing point. Using the kite was equally difficult, two or three students would act as shadows, making sure that upon catching a rogue air current the kite and camera didn’t dive into the water. Despite the initial difficulties that students experienced, they mapped the island a total of three times, producing enough images to experiment with the stitching process.

From participating in the mapping and learning about Grassroots Mapping techniques, students commented that, “… it gives our communities a chance to fight back,” and, “We were basically able to make our own Google Earth. It made us realize that we don’t always have to rely on companies or what they say. This process gave us the confidence to do things that we might have thought were too complicated or troublesome- you can really do so much with relatively little.”

In the classroom, the students used the mapping process as a way to experiment with project management. In each team, students were required to break into the roles of IS, IT and CS, each with different responsibilities. You’ll be hearing from a student in the class on his experience with this project in the next week, but overwhelmingly when students were asked to reflect on what the most powerful take away from this project was, the response was that they not only learned mapping and computing techniques, but skills for working and communicating with a team.

Student teams tackled difficulties that they encountered along the way and even developed suggestions for the Grassroots Mapping team going forward. An initial difficulty that students learned to work around was that the shoreline of Dauphin Island had been completely altered after Katrina, the beach of Dauphin having expanded close to 200 feet. Although Google imagery documented a central pier as being underwater, students quickly identified from memory their local shoreline, noting that it was the same pier that today stands completely inland, out of the water and offers shade on the hot summer days to beach goers.

When the Cartagen site was down for a few weeks, students experimented with different programs that could help them stitch maps including Gimp, Photoshop and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Students favored alternative methods such as the automatic merge function in Photoshop, but were quick to point out the flaws with the different systems that they tried. Some suggested that ease of stitching did not equate to accurate maps, others cautioned their classmates that working in Photoshop was difficult because of the amount of memory that was used in the process. Others even made suggestions about the mapping process including:

– tie two (or even better, three) strings to the balloon to control the movement rather than letting the wind dictate balloon direction,

– When in auto shoot function, count how long it takes for the camera to snap 100 pictures and take GPS coordinates at each subsequent time interval so that there is a more accurate GPS reading (when logging and tracking devices are unavailable),

– Because it is difficult to geographically pinpoint photos where only beach shows, have someone shadow the balloon to take GPS coordinates while walking underneath.

After a positive experience with this project, which was interpreted into computing management practices, USA is interested in continuing this program next semester. From the teaching perspective, Dawn commented that, “…it was wonderful to get out of the classroom and have an experience with my students, it not only gave them a hands on opportunity away from their computers, but also allowed me, as an instructor, to get to know each of them better.” As this was a “pilot” program for teaching Gulf Coast students about the Grassroots Mapping process- from mapping their local areas, to completing final mapped images- over the next few months, we’ll be working on further developing the teaching process for computing students.

Thanks to everyone who helped with this project- all the students, Leo Denton, Dawn McKinney, Cesar Harada, Hunter Daniels and Mariko Toyoji

With 2 boats we took this route (see google map) :

I traced this route with my mobile phone Google Nexus One and the fantabulous Open GPS tracker for Android – 4 stars rating!
This is what we could see from the boat, kinda boring :

Soon after I launched a balloon and Hunter a kite out there, kinda exciting :

we captured nice pictures, here 6 details :

These 6 pictures were made using 270 stills… that was a 12 hours work on photoshop since hugin (an open-source photo mosaic software) didnt do the trick – yet :/ Still working on it to automate the process and spend more time sipping mango juice

In addition to what we had a bad GPS trace – my bad, I mean, it is good but I did’nt know where we started taking pictures on that route… Also the GPS time-stamp and the camera time-stamp did not match… So, here is the trick I found:

Ok, so now we have this huge empty map :

That’s another 6 hours work adjusting 700 pics layer by layer on photoshop ; hey, 270 images in 12 hours VS 700 images in 6 hours => see, it is much faster with a support map! We got that :

Don’t forget to put a scale and cardinal orientation + legal mentions.
So, under your eyes that’s a 17000 x 17000 pixel map, made of 970 pictures taken at 1000ft altitude, depicting about 5 linear km of damaged coastline. Combining the 6 details views and the general map we could observe that the south side was much more exposed to the spill (more dark brown brrrrr). Using this map we could also establish that on the exposed side, even the inland waterways are strongly affected by the spill : we can use these maps to quantify the surface affected by the oil spill, and the mass of crude attached to the surface coastline. Now even cooler, you can see these maps on google earth, download the KMZ file here (dont worry it is a tiny file – all the content is online). FLY !

Apart from mapping this catastrophe – which is very useful for scientific study and for lawsuits against BP- why am I personally learning aerial photography? Well, because I am currently designing an oil collecting robot called “protei“.

Protei is a sailing semi-autonomous robot with a long oil absorbing tail. Surface oil drifts downwind, so Protei sails upwind, taking and taking, intercepting oil sheens. Imagine many many of these cheap machines out there in the ocean collecting oil

After some research …

I built a steampunk test machine that is pretty promising with a flexible hull front-steering :

We are also testing at sea the behavior of a long tail, and same, going pretty well …

See these little balloons on the surface of the water? And this is when aerial photography comes handy : to evaluate the efficiency and behavior of Protei, seeing everything from above helps a lot, I can see the trajectory, the movement of the tail, the interaction with oil.  Also having a highly visible “flying flag” in the sky is amazing to optimize safety and long range communication (flying antenna)… Exciting no? And the challenge is here, millions of liters of crude oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Niger Delta, in Latin America, the middle east, in Asia… Protei_Oil_Spill has a busy future!

Of course, just like grassroots mapping, Protei is developed open-source and collaboratively, so I hope that sometimes soon, Protei will come back to land with a lot of amazing pictures for LA Bucket Brigade and its amazing oil  spill map, GrassrootMapping, Cartagen and Open_Sailing! I received most electronic parts for the next prototype of Protei_Oil_Spill this morning (YAY!), I am building in New Orleans, so if you are around, or if you want to help the project remotely, do get in touch – cesar@protei.org – thanks!