Latest Contributions by TamaraGrant1

by Robert Waterman Released on  April 18, 2018 This release of Landsat Image Services includes some noteworthy updates… Improvements Revised scaling.   The Top of Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance values (which range from 0 – 1 by default) will now be scaled using a range of 0 – 10,000.   These values were previously scaled to 5,000 – 55,000. Some important user considerations… This change will primarily affect image computation and analytics, where numerical and visual results may vary. This change does not impact the visualization of band combinations and indices provided by Esri and does not impact user-defined raster functions which do not involve image computation. The scale range will now be equivalent to other TOA reflectance products, including those provided by the USGS. This change simplifies the computation of indices such as NDVI. Users should account for the revised scaling accordingly. Daily updates.  The service will now be updated daily. Minimizing the time between data capture and data availability is important for users who rely on the most recent data. New QA band.  The service will now include a QA band as band 9. This layer is provided with the Collection 1 data for assessing general quality conditions within an image.  For more information, please reference  Landsat Collection 1 Level-1 Quality Assessment. New field.  Our Landsat Image Services will continue to provide both Pre-Collection and Collection 1 data.  A new field called Landsat_product_id has been added to distinguish between the two. For more on these collections, see Landsat Collections. WCS and WMS compatibility.  The Landsat Image Services will now include the ability to be consumed as WCS or WMS services.   Affected Apps and Services Due to the change in output range of pixel values, the image services update will affect users who use the services for processing and analytics. The following apps, services, and tools will be affected. Apps Landsat Explorer, Landsat App Minor modifications will be made to the computation of indices. Services Landsat 8 Views, Landsat 8 PanSharpened, Landsat 8 Panchromatic, Multispectral Landsat, Pansharpened Landsat, Panchromatic Landsat, Landsat GLS Multispectral, Landsat GLS Pansharpened, Landsat GLS Panchromatic All the functions will be updated resulting in a change in the raw values. Web map functionality will not change. Tools Landsat 8 Image Service Add-in Tools Minor modifications will be made to the computation of indices. If you are using the Add-in, you will need to update it. ... View more

by Bern Szukalski Some layers in your web map may be dynamic, meaning they are being updated at regular intervals. For example, a GeoRSS feed, earth observations from the Living Atlas, or a feature service being updated by workers performing edits while in the field. When the map containing these layers is redrawn, these data refresh. By setting the refresh interval property on these layers, you can force an automatic refresh at a specific time interval. These refreshes occur even while the map is open and idle, and will synchronize the map anywhere it is accessed – via browsers, desktops, and devices.   Example: USA Weather Warnings and Watches USA Weather Warnings and Watches is one of the curated earth observation layers available in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. To add the layer to your map, click Add then choose Browse Living Atlas Layers. Searching for “weather” we can find the USA Weather Warnings and Watches live feed from the Living Atlas, and add it to our map as a layer. Click (+) to add it to your map. Viewing the item details we learn that the service is checked for updates every 5 minutes. To view the details, click the title (or thumbnail if in List view). Scrolling through the item details, we learn the service is updated every five minutes. To set the layer refresh to match the update interval, open the layer options, choose Refresh Interval, and set it to 5 minutes. The interval must be expressed in minutes, but can be in the range 0.1 (6 seconds) to 1440 (1 day). This ensures that even when the map is not being actively used, the layer will refresh to show the latest updated information. The layer properties are saved with the map, and the layer will automatically refresh at the specified interval when viewed, even if the map is left idle. View a sample web map using refresh intervals. The web map has two layers (USGS earthquakes past hour and past day) that update every 5 minutes. Update intervals can be different from layer to layer.   More information For more information see: Set refresh interval Browse Living Atlas layers   This post was originally published on September 25, 2013, and has been updated. ... View more

by Shane Matthews Community Maps contributors have made it clear, and we’ve noticed. Colleges and universities all over the world want their campus on the map. There has been a rather impressive increase in the number of campuses that want to share their content with Esri’s Living Atlas of the World. Just click on these interactive maps to view a few of the campuses we have helped complete maps for.       Sure, there are many campuses that maintain campus maps already. The Living Atlas team at Esri would like to offer an additional resource. What’s the benefit? Maybe you should ask yourself, how will your campus benefit by not participating and sharing your map content. We’d like to help your campus get on the map. Here’s what you get and how to do it. Make Your Campus Map Widely Accessible Faculty, students, and facility managers will all have access to the same online basemaps, derived from and maintained with the authoritative content provided by the educational institution’s data stewards. The online basemaps can then be used to manage your facilities, highlight student life, activities and events. Like this Building Energy Explorer App. It Calculates and compares the Energy Use Intensity (EUI) for UMass buildings and associates this data with a map to visualize and analyze energy consumption across the campus. Assemble all your campus apps by creating a map gallery on ArcGIS Online, it makes it easy for students, faculty, and staff to find information they need. Ensure featured content about your campus is easily discoverable. Create a Living Atlas of your campus! Why Esri’s Community Maps Program? When you participate in Community Maps, your campus data will be integrated into a suite of ready-to-use online basemaps. You also get… Access to your map 24 hours a day, seven days a week Your content hosted, published, and maintained by Esri, ensuring high performance The ability to combine your campus map service and other operational data in web applications Contributing your campus data, whether it includes building footprints, sidewalks, or vegetation data, provides your internal users and the public with access to a unified, cartographically well-designed campus map. The campus map can be accessed through a standard Internet browser, ArcGIS® for Desktop, ArcGIS® Pro, ArcGIS for Smartphones and Tablets, or custom applications. Getting Started Participation in the program is free, and a wealth of resources is available to you. Just email Shane Matthews (smatthews@esri.com), I can help you out! Or register for Community Maps here, and we’ll contact you with the next steps. This Story Map illustrates the building blocks of large-scale content, features select contributing campuses, and provides examples of applied use. ... View more

The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World has been updated to use new categories for item organization. The categories more closely reflect conventional topics and industries. The categories and subcategories have been consolidated into logical groupings making item discovery more intuitive. Items will be included in only one, and at most two, categories. The new categories will also allow faster Living Atlas contribution. While a few new categories have been added, many remain the same or have become subcategories. A Trending category has been added where content that is new and noteworthy or related to current events will be featured. Content in this category will be updated frequently. The most notable updates to the Basemaps category is the addition of the Creative Maps subcategory and the Vector Tiles subcategory. This means users can more readily take advantage of the benefits these maps offer. The categories have been updated on both the Living Atlas website and in ArcGIS Online. The updated categories can be seen on the Browse page of the website. For the nomination process, this means contributors will no longer have to add Living Atlas specific tags to their items. However, the recommendation is to still include at least three tags when nominating items for the Living Atlas. To learn more about the criteria for Living Atlas item contribution, please read “A Simple Checklist for Nominating Your Maps and Apps into the Living Atlas”. To prepare and nominate items to the Living Atlas sign in to the My Contributions page of the Living Atlas website using your ArcGIS Online credentials. For more information regarding the category updates in ArcGIS Online, please read “What’s New in ArcGIS Online (April 2018)“. ... View more

by Lucy Guerra Demographic content has been updated for 50 countries in the first release of the year. First, the Advanced dataset for Japan, from Esri Japan, has been updated to incorporate the latest Census release from 2015. In addition, many popular data variables have been updated by Esri Japan using a variety of public sources. The data are available for the following geography levels: prefectures, municipalities, and blocks. More information about this release can be found in the methodology. In addition, the Advanced dataset for Germany, from Nexiga, which was updated to 2017 last December, now includes four (4) additional data variables: Total Male Population, Total Female Population, Total Births, and Total Deceased. Read the Release Notes for more information. And lastly, the Standard datasets for 48 countries have been updated to reflect the latest estimates from Michael Bauer Research (MB Research). Not only does the release make available the last group of countries in the 2016 demographic update, but it also makes available the 2017 demographic variables for many European countries. Read about these updates in the Release Notes for each country. *Both Standard and Advanced datasets were updated for these countries.   How will these updates affect me? For the Ready-to-Use Living Atlas Maps User within ArcGIS Online Demographic layers and maps for 50 countries are updated. For the Business Analyst and Community Analyst User Business Analyst and Community Analyst users can access the updated data through reports, infographics, and maps. The complete attribute list for each country is accessible through the data browser contained in the application. For the Data Enrichment user in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Maps for Office The April 2018 update provides access to the datasets shown above. For a detailed explanation of new or deleted attributes in datasets, see the Release Notes for each individual country available on the Esri Demographics documentation pages. For the Developer using REST endpoints for Standard Global Demographics & Lifestyle Map Services The REST endpoints for Standard Global Demographics & Lifestyle Map Services were updated in April 2018. These changes will impact any application consuming these services. Some of the changes to the underlying REST endpoints included in this release are: Changes to the layer IDs. Changes to layer names. Changes to attribute field names, IDs, and aliases including additions and deletions. Because of updates to the underlying data, users of the Demographics & Lifestyle Map Services may need to update these items in the query parameters of REST requests to the service from their apps. To view the updated map service REST endpoints, you will need to access the REST API with a developer or organizational account, using a token request. For the Developer using the REST endpoints of the GeoEnrichment Service The underlying datasets of the REST endpoints of the GeoEnrichment Service were updated in April 2018. Some of the changes to the REST endpoints included in this release are: Changes to the layer IDs of the administrative/statistical boundaries. Changes to the layer names of the administrative/statistical boundaries. Changes to attributes/analysis variables including additions and deletions. Because of updates to the underlying data, users of the GeoEnrichment Service may need to update these items in the query parameters of REST requests to the service from their apps. To view the updated REST endpoints, you will need to access the GeoEnrichment Service with a developer or organizational account, using a token request. ... View more

by Daniel Siegel Just because you can’t see evapotranspiration doesn’t mean you can’t map it. In fact, the Living Atlas of the World has long contained data about average annual evapotranspiration for the United States. Today that map is being deprecated and replaced by two global versions that show evaporative losses everywhere on Earth. Actual Evapotranspiration Potential Evapotranspiration Evapotranpsiration is the measure of evaporative losses from the landscape. It includes both direct evaporation from lakes and soil, and transpiration, which is when plants take water up through their roots and release it from their leaves. Over 61% of rainfall is lost to evapotranspiration, so mapping its variance is an important part of understanding the global water cycle. Actual ET vs Potential ET in Africa Potential evapotranspiration is the amount of evapotranspiration that would occur if water availability were unlimited. It is a meteorological variable that depends only on air temperature and solar radiation. So, for example, Scotland and Norway have a lower rate of evapotranspiration than the Congo, despite receiving just as much rain, because potential evapotranspiration is lower. There is not enough solar energy to vaporize all the water. Conversely, the Sahara Desert has a very high potential evapotranspiration, but receives little rain, so actual evapotranspiration is low and the unused solar energy heats the sand to over 170 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Congo River Basin, there is high potential evapotranspiration and ample precipitation, so less of the potential goes unused. The result is high actual evapotranspiration and a much more humid climate with abundant plant life. These layers were built using the MOD16 Global Evapotranspiration Product, which is derived from satellite imagery by researchers at the University of Montana. Imagery is from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), an instrument with 1-km resolution first launched in 1999 and carried by two NASA satellites. The MOD16 algorithmderives from raw imagery a number of secondary data products like land surface albedo, leaf area index, and net solar radiation. These intermediate data are used to solve the Penman-Monteith equation for total daily evapotranspiration, which is then aggregated into 8-day, monthly, and annual intervals. We calculated the average annual evapotranspiration over the 15 year period of record (2000 – 2014), both in terms of actual and potential ET, in order to build the layers above. If you want to access the monthly data, a toolbox you can use is available here. ET with hillshade What can you do with this data? These layers are image services, so they can be used as input by your geoprocessing tools in Desktop. The “Zonal Statistics as Table” tool is particularly useful for calculating evaporative losses over a watershed, which is the first step towards calculating the water balance. If you subtract annual evapotranspiration from the annual rainfall you have a good estimate of available water, the sustainable supply of a watershed that must be split between human use, freshwater ecosystems, and groundwater recharge. For visualization purposes there is also a cached version of this map that has a hillshade burned in. When combined with the Hydro Reference Overlay it can be used to create a particularly beautiful basemap. ... View more

by Charlie Frye We are pleased to announce the availability of an update to the World Population Estimate layers. World Population Estimate 2016 World Population Estimate Density 2016 World Settlement Score 2016 World Population Estimate Confidence 2016 This update was produced during 2017, using the most current data sources for population and land cover. The significant improvements are highlighted below, and for more detailed information see the 2016 Methodology White Paper: A confidence score (1 = most, to 5 = least) surface is now available. This score accounts for the reliability, age, and method of the population estimates, the impact of raster resampling during the modeling process, and the ratio of the population to the size of reporting units. See World Population Estimate Confidence 2016 Within Europe and North Africa, confidence in population estimate varies tremendously. This is based on age of census or estimate, size of available enumeration units, the quality of the census, etc.   The geoprocessing model used to create the surfaces was restructured to eliminate statistical artifacts which affected the model’s ability to determine an appropriate threshold for human settlement, especially in coastal areas. To improve upon this previous version we switched to a Top of Atmosphere (TOA) corrected Landsat8 panchromatic dataset. TOA effectively normalizes statistics between scenes. We are also pleased to include that Esri participates in the POPGRID Data Collaborative, which is a consortium of those who produce global and national gridded population estimates and redistributions. POPGRID seeks to facilitate collaboration among data producers and inform users about the differences in purpose and utility of existing gridded population datasets. The 2016 World Population Estimate layers are found in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Supporting Content: 2016 Methodology White Paper that provides detailed documentation describing the nature of the WPE, how it is produced, and recommendations for successful use. World Population Estimate 2016 Sources Web Map This example shows the kind of information available for every country.   We are Everywhere story map that introduces the WPE and possibilities for gridded population data. ... View more

by Rajinder Nagi Elevation surface provides foundational layer for your work in 3D. ArcGIS 3D clients such as ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online Web Scene Viewer, and ArcGIS Earth comes with a default elevation layer – Terrain 3D.  Along with this default elevation layer, ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World also provides TopoBathy 3D, which combines topography (land elevation) and bathymetry (water depths) into one seamless layer. Terrain 3D and TopoBathy 3D are tiled elevation services that uses the LERC (Limited Error Raster Compression) tile format and are derived from World Elevation Terrain and TopoBathy respectively. A few weeks ago World Elevation layers (Terrain & TopoBathy) and Tools were enhanced with Airbus WorldDEM4Ortho. These updates are now rolled out to 3D elevation layers (Terrain 3Dand TopoBathy 3D). Airbus WorldDEM4Ortho is a global dataset covering the entire earth’s land surface (excluding the countries of Azerbaijan, DR Congo and Ukraine), which has a resolution of 0.8 arc second (approx. 24 meters). It brings many quality improvements especially over urban areas in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, which were previously using SRTM 30 m dataset. SRTM is a digital surface model (DSM), which represents elevation values of the natural and built features on the earth surface such as buildings, vegetation, etc. Due to its DSM nature and coarser resolution, urban areas especially with dense and high rise buildings appear to have small hills or undulating surface. When you overlay 3D buildings/objects on this undulating surface, it seems to be either sinking or floating on the ground. In Airbus WorldDEM4Ortho, urban areas are flattened to give DTM-like product thus providing much better surface than SRTM 30 m. Let’s see a few examples showing improvements over urban areas in before and after comparisons. Auckland, New Zealand – 3D buildings are now sitting nicely on flat ground surface (WorldDEM4Ortho 24 m) in comparison to previously undulating surface (SRTM 30 m) where buildings seem to be sinking in the ground. Berlin, Germany – 3D buildings are now sitting nicely on flat surface of WorldDEM4Ortho 24 m (after) in comparison to undulating surface of SRTM 30 m (before). Esri will keep improving the World Elevation Layers, Tools and derived information products with high resolution content from open sources and community maps for elevation program. You can look at the current data sources used by checking our Elevation Coverage Map. If your organization has better elevation content that they can contribute, then check our Community Maps for Elevation program to get in touch. If you are interested in learning more about various elevation information products in the ArcGIS Living Atlas, then take a tour with this elevation story map. ... View more

by Caitlin Scopel The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World contains vector and raster layers for lands managed or owned by six agencies of the federal government (US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Defense). Last week, these Esri owned layers were updated, including the addition of two new agencies, more accurate ownership attribution, faster drawing speeds, and access to the latest features in ArcGIS Pro. Vector The USA Federal Lands feature layer provides access to vector data for all six agencies. In ArcGIS Online, the feature layer can be filtered and new feature layer views of the data saved as layers: USA Bureau of Land Management Lands USA Bureau of Reclamation Lands USA Department of Defense Lands USA National Park Service Lands USA Fish and Wildlife Service Lands USA Forest Service Lands The new USA Federal Lands feature layer is best for visualization at larger scales (> 1:2,000,000) and can be combined with an imagery layer or a tile layer in a web map to provide fast rendering across the entire range of scales. In ArcGIS Online you can export the feature layer’s data, perform analysis, change symbology, and work with the layer’s attribute table to select features and edit data. In ArcGIS Pro you can do even more including using the layer as an analytic input to a geoprocessing tool, model, or Python script. Raster The USA Federal Lands imagery layers were also updated with the same data used to create the feature layers. Like the feature layer, raster functions and filters allow us to create views of subsets of the data. We created imagery layers for each of the six federal agencies in the data set: USA Bureau of Land Management Lands USA Bureau of Reclamation USA Department of Defense Lands USA National Park Service Lands USA Fish and Wildlife Service Lands USA Forest Service Lands Imagery layers are useful online to rapidly draw across the entire scale range and can be used in web maps to support the feature service at smaller scales. Imagery layers are particularly useful in ArcGIS Pro where you can use functions to extract, modify, and combine imagery layers on the fly to create landscape models that reveal patterns in the data. These layers are part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, which provides an easy way to explore many other authoritative maps on hundreds of topics like this one. ... View more

by Robert Waterman Community Maps Imagery Updates It is looking to be a very productive year for our Community Maps Program.  Over the last two months we have updated our World Imagery basemap with high-resolution aerial imagery contributions ranging from 4 to 30cm. A few highlights: 21 US Counties 9 Canadian City and/or County-wide contibutions Complete State/Province-wide contributions in Spain, Switzerland, and Germany See What’s New in Community Maps Imagery (2018) to explore a series of bookmarked locations and a full listing of 2018 Community Maps Imagery publications by month. DigitalGlobe Imagery Updates So far, in 2018, we have published more than 35 Million KM² of DigitalGlobe satellite imagery.  Most recently we published 1m coverage of the following: Mexico Argentina Saudi Arabia Oman Yemen Egypt Ethiopia Libya Western Sahara Morocco Mauritania Tunisia Algeria Mali Niger Sudan South Sudan Somalia Tanzania Kazakhstan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan North Korea South Korea Azores Cape Verde Canary Islands ... View more

See the latest enhancements to the # LivingAtlas in the ArcGIS Living Atlas Gems newsletter http://p.ctx.ly/r/7hw6  Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox http://p.ctx.ly/r/7hw7  ... View more

We'll be at the 2018 Esri Federal GIS Conference! Hope to see you there! ... View more