Canada’s New Drone Can Better Surveil Its Challenging Arctic Environment

                                             

After years of experimentation and analysis, the government of Canada has procured a new Hermes 900 StarLiner from Israeli UAV manufacturer Elbit Systems that can withstand and patrol its massive, inhospitable Arctic territory. Read more...

Orthophoto Survey Drones Help Predict Flash Flooding

Climate researchers in Alaska are using drones to help track ice and water levels in the Suicide Basin glacial lake. The team, led by Gabriel Wolken, research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Climate Adaptation Science Center, is working to visualize and predict seasonal flux at the glacial lake. It looks at how water interacts with the Mendenhall Glacier, which was once connected to Suicide Glacier before rising temperatures separated them. When basin waters rise to a point, Mendenhall Glacier can no longer hold them and the entire basin drains, causing flash floods. The team is using orthophoto and digital elevation models from a WingtraOne drone to assess changes to water and ice levels at Suicide Basin. Read more...

Apple's New iPad Pro with Lidar Scanner

Apple has announced its most advanced iPad Pro ever, which even includes a Lidar scanner. Equipped with the A12Z Bionic chip, the new iPad Pro is faster and more powerful than many PC laptops. The breakthrough Lidar scanner delivers depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more specialized workflows and supporting professional photo and video apps in combination with the ultrawide camera and studio-quality microphones. Read more...

Canada’s National Elevation Data Strategy Updates from NRCan

 

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is proud to announce a new release of the product High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM). This new and highly accurate data covers approximately 50,000 km2 of new territory and includes areas in Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Read more...

Reality Series Features Real Surveyors!

Reality TV-like series “Down to Earth” features surveyors of Rogers-based engineering company Crafton Tull in the first three episodes, titled “The Ozarks.” Read more...

Lidar Technology for Game of Thrones

Led by Vektra of Croatia, a visual effects team used Teledyne’s lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create a detailed 3D representation of the old city of Dubrovnik; the model for the fictional city of King’s Landing. They generated 3D point clouds in the set using various lidar technologies, including Teledyne Optech’s Maverick mobile lidar system and Polaris fixed terrestrial scanner. The lidar point clouds were then colourised with digital camera imagery and image fusion software.Read more....

Fake News: Mars Edition, Circa 1877

When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered at Mars through a powerful telescope in the late 1800s, he observed dark channels raked across its surface. These features became the key characteristics in his detailed maps of the planet, which fueled more than a decade of wild speculation regarding alien-built canals. Read more...

Automatically Extracted Buildings Data

Natural Resources Canada recently added a new data layer to the Federal Government Open Data portal to help with emergency management (particularly for flood and earthquake risk analysis).

The data layer consists of delineated building footprints with height and elevations automatically extracted from airborne LiDAR data, high-resolution optical imagery or other sources.Automatically Extracted Building Footprints Open Data for Eastern Canada

The data set available in vector format contains close to 1 million building footprints in several different geographies across the county.
https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/7a5cda52-c7df-427f-9ced-26f19a8a64d6

Mapping The Hidden Geography Of Language Through The News

Geography gives us an incredible lens through which to see the world. While we often think of maps in terms of information that already exists in the spatial domain, such as building addresses or GPS coordinates, the written word contains a tremendous volume of locative insights. What happens when we combine fulltext geocoding with the power of the cloud to analyze hundreds of billions of words of global news coverage to map the hidden geography of the language of news? Read more...

The Drone that Submerges, Floats and Flies

After two years of designing and prototyping, the team at SwellProUSA and Urban Drones, a drone technology company, have introduced The Spry - the first ever waterproof drone that can briefly submerge like a submarine, float like a boat, and fly in the air at over 43mph. The Spry has a self-contained 4K camera that can capture video at 30fps, images at 12 megapixels, and wirelessly transmit the video signal to a monitor embedded in its waterproof remote control. Read more...

MIT Researchers Develop Virtual-Reality Testing Ground for Drones

Training drones to fly fast, around even the simplest obstacles, is a crash-prone exercise that can have engineers repairing or replacing vehicles with frustrating regularity. Now MIT engineers have developed a new virtual-reality training system for drones that enables a vehicle to "see" a rich, virtual environment while flying in an empty physical space. Read more...

Perhaps Nobody Knows it Yet, But Geomatics is Cool

The geospatial industry faces a major challenge: how to attract a new generation of mapping and surveying professionals. The sector is crying out for talented young individuals who are willing and able to enter the profession. But, as a quick glance at the labour market reveals, they are currently in short supply, so other measures are needed. A good starting point is to increase the industry’s interaction with children in primary and secondary schools to help them see the relevance of geomatics. Read more...

FAA Releases Study on Potential Mid-air Drone Collisions

On November 28th the FAA announced the release of a report by the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research, aka ASSURE. This report was commissioned in 2015 to test the potential damage to manned aircraft due to mid-air collisions with drones and how that compared to the more traditional airborne hazard: bird strike. The report concludes that drones which collide with manned aircraft can cause more structural damage than birds of the same weight for a given impact speed. Click HERE for more...

Mapping Noise Pollution with Smartphones

Novel applications include the use of smart phones, such as the NoiseTube application, that measure the location and strength of given noise pollution. By having these sensors deployed via mobile phones, mapping noise pollution can be at a higher density and, consequently, be more accurate over a wider spatial extent. Read more...

National Energy Board's Oil Spill Interactive Map

Canada's pipeline regulator took a "big step forward" on a promise to be more transparent with the release of a map of spills and other incidents. But gaps in the data still exist.Click here for more...

Pipelines and Jobs

Do pipelines create thousands of new jobs as claimed by energy companies and governments? Here's some interesting statistics on how many jobs might really be created - both short and long term: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/jan/09/3-key-keystone-xl-questions-answered/

Mapping the Impacts of Climate Change

Check out this link which displays and ranks how climate change impacts countries in order of urgency. David Wheeler complied data in various categories including sea level rise, extreme weather, agricultural land, etc and performed and ordinal ranking of 233 countries based on vulnerability from the various categories. Click Here to see the interactive map!

Seeing Through Wildfire Smoke in Fort McMurray, Alberta with Infrared Imaging

Images of the massive wildfire that engulfed Fort McMurray, Alberta earlier this year have been seared into our collective consciousness. Record-setting heat, low humidity, dry conditions and high winds combined to create a destructive “perfect storm” of fire weather the likes of which have been rarely seen anywhere in Canada – much less in an Alberta springtime.Read more...

Drone Fair comes to Calgary

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are taking over the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) on Father's Day as Drone Fair Calgary flies onto campus. Read more...

How Canada is Regulating the Rise of Drones

Drones have launched into recreational and commercial popularity over the last few years, but they’ve also flown into some legal grey areas with regards to safety and privacy. In Canada, safety guidelines for drones were updated in October 2014 for both hobbyists and businesses. Here’s a look at some recent drones stories in the news and how Canadian regulations are currently addressing these kinds of issues today. Click here for more...

5 Signs You Have an OSM Addiction

As those of you who have tried their hand at OpenStreetMapping know, OSM can quickly turn from a hobby into a full-blown obsession! OpenStreetMap is a free, editable, open access map created by volunteers all over the world. It’s collaborative, hands-on, and just plain fun. 
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Building a UAV from Scratch

The DŠGS FlyEye is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) built from scratch as a data-capturing tool and learning exercise by members of the Slovenian Students of Geodesy Association (DŠGS) at the University of Ljubljana. Having started as just an idea over a year ago, today the FlyEye has exceeded all goals and expectations. The process of learning to build and operate a UAV, and collecting and processing the data, has opened the authors' eyes to new possibilities in the world of UAVs and 3D representations. Hopefully, it will continue to inspire future generations of geodesy students Read more...

Syria: Mapping the Conflict

Territorial control in Syria has changed many times since the country's uprising began more than three years ago and the current conflict is characterized by fluctuating frontlines.
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Seeking a Town on the Border of Fiction and Reality

SOMEWHERE NEAR AGLOE, N.Y. — It is one thing to lose your keys or your iPhone, even the love of your life, but to lose an entire town? Yet that is what just happened in upstate New York. Last week, Google did something it almost never does — it wiped a town off its maps. Read more...

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