Latest Contributions by BernSzukalski

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko could have been just another unknown hunk of galactic stuff traveling through the enormity of space. According to Wikipedia it was discovered in 1969 by Klim Ivanovych Churyumov who identified it by working off of photographs taken by Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko, who was shooting for a different comet. Even so, were it not for the fact that the 2.5-mile diameter comet became the target for the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, it would still have remained in obscurity. The historic mission, launched in 2004 and making its rendezvous with the comment earlier this year, became the first to ever land a space probe on a comet, subsequently creating a fascinated global audience. I ran into a blog post about how the comet is being compared to cities worldwide using digital wizardry. But even more interesting is this Esri CityEngine Web Scene authored by Zorko Sostaric of Eagle Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. The Web Scene takes a few moments to load, but once it does it offers an intriguing interactive perspective of the comet above Auckland. You can also view the ArcGIS Online item details. ... View more

A couple of new Story Maps released today are previews of what's to come. Geography Bee: A Global Gallery of Pollinators uses the context of geography to present a spectacular collection of bee photos by USGS scientist Sam Droege. You'll also find his Flickr site USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab where more of his truly awesome photos can be found. This particular Story Map is also a prototype of a new layout option for Story Map Tour, currently the most popular story map template. This option will be included in the near future. Also released today, Exploring the Chesapeake in John Smith's Wake, is another story using the same prototype template. Another new Story Map enables you to Share Your View—take a photo of what you see out your window or anywhere else, and add it to the map. This Story Map will eventually be available as a configurable Story Map crowdsourcing template, that will let anyone create their own crowdsourced map. Stay tuned for more great Story Maps, and browse other great examples at the Story Maps Gallery. ... View more

Tags are a required field for all ArcGIS Online items. When adding a new item, you must include a tag. Recently I blogged about how to use tags effectively- they can be a powerful way to find things you want quickly and easily. There's a number of changes and new capabilities coming up on the horizon that will make tags even more powerful to use. One of the things I have often wanted to do is to be able to globally search for and replace tags that I've used, for example look for misspellings, or just change or add tags in batch mode. And as an organization Administrator I've often wanted to do the same across my entire organization. While these capabilities aren't yet implemented in ArcGIS Online, there's a tool authored and maintained by one of my colleagues - John Grayson of the Applications Prototype Lab - that provides additional tag management capabilities that I find useful, and perhaps you will too. John shares his work on GitHub and that's where you will find his ItemInfo repo, which provides some really useful tag management capabilities. It's just been updated to enable an Administrator to find all tags in the organization and replace or delete any of them. The app is published and maintained from Esri servers where you can launch ItemInfo directly. Here's a quick rundown of one example of how I use it to search for and replace tags. (1) Spark up the app by launching it from it's hosted location. (2) Login (3) Click Tags to view all your tags. If logged in as an org Administrator, you will see all tags used in your organization. (4) Locate the tag you want to change in the list and select it. In this case I found the misspelled "resilient commuitites" in the list of tags that I have used. (5) Items that use the selected tag will be displayed. Click the tag you want to change, and choose replace tag. (6) Enter the new tag, and choose Replace. The replacement or deletion happens on all selected items that you own, or if an Administrator, on all selected items owned by members of your organization. Some Caveats A few things to keep in mind if you choose to use ItemInfo: The code is not supported, so use at your own risk. You may find curious things... The app is hosted on a single demo server, which may go up, down, or sideways unexpectedly at any moment. For organizations with very large numbers of users, when searching for tags as an Admin the app maybe slow, or may time-out. The app is subject to change at any moment, and the tag management part may soon be pulled out separately. I'll try to keep you posted... ... View more

September has been an especially tough month in California. Already impacted by severe drought, vast portions of the state neared or broke record temperatures as a heat wave spread across Southern California. Fueled by hot and dry conditions, just a day ago there were a dozen fires, adding to the total of more than 4,000 wildfires that California has endured so far this year. The King Fire, centered 60 miles east of Sacramento and visible over a hundred miles away, tripled in size in roughly 24 hours, yesterday threatening more than 12,000 homes. Near Yosemite National Park another fire has damaged or destroyed over 70 structures, including 37 homes. Just north of the popular resort destination of Mammoth Lakes, along California's Eastern Sierra, a fire threatened the town of June Lake, driving evacuations and highway closures. And the list goes on... At the state's northern edge, a fire destroyed 150 structures in the town of Weed, including two churches, a community center, and the town library. The Boles Fire, as it is known, has also damaged a mill, one of the cornerstones of the town's economy. At its peak, nearly the entire town of 3,000 was evacuated. I walked into the office of Paul Doherty, Esri's Disaster Response Program technical lead, yesterday. He toured me through what is today's map of the day. It's a map compiled and used by CalFire, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), and the Siskiyou County Office of Emergency Services to collect and display information used in damage assessment and briefings concerning the Boles Fire. The continually updating map uses Dashboard for ArcGIS, and the data behind it is collected using Collector for ArcGIS and the new ArcGIS Online GeoForm app template. The big picture can be seen using the US Wildfire Activity Public Information Map, found on the Esri Disaster Response Program mapping and GIS portal. ... View more

Story Maps are an amazingly popular addition to the ArcGIS portfolio. Their appeal? They make it easy for anyone to combine interactive maps and multimedia to tell great stories. Story Maps have been rapidly evolving, and continue to evolve quickly. There are many interesting and inspirational examples that you can find at the Story Maps Gallery. What was the first Story Map, and when was it published? The early concepts date well back in history, and can be credited to Story Maps visionary and current team manager Allen Carroll, who joined Esri in an encore career after completing his first career at the National Geographic Society. Though early story map incarnations predate this event, the first public Esri Story Map was a Flash application built by Lee Bock, who today remains a key member and a lead developer on the team. Lee's Story Map first appeared on April 8, 2011, and was subsequently migrated to Javascript to use the Story Map Swipe template. It's a story about Fort Sumter in 1861, detailing its role in the opening salvos of the Civil War, and leveraging the Swipe template to provide a comparison using a historic map from the David Rumsey Collection with present day imagery delivered by the Esri World Imagery basemap. Though simple by today's story map standards, it's still a great example. ... View more

When most people think of earthquakes in the United States, California usually comes to mind. There are thousands of significant faults in the state, but it's the San Andreas fault, forming the tectonic boundary between the Pacific and North American Plates, that is the most familiar. It's also along its southern reaches in the greater Los Angeles area where the San Andreas will be the likely source of the now overdue Big One—a quake exceeding magnitude 7. When I first moved to California from tectonically tame Pennsylvania a friend joked that among other interesting benefits the state offers, I'd also enjoy a ringside seat to plate tectonics in action. I think of that every time I feel an earthquake. And as I look out from my patio, and view the mountain landscape created by the San Andreas and related faults, I sometimes fear the Big One. A most recent, and destructive, example of California's earthquake activity was the South Napa earthquake, which struck California's Bay Area earlier this week on Sunday morning, August 24. The 6.0 magnitude temblor caused widespread damage, fires, hundreds of injuries, and knocked out power for tens of thousands of residents. Many buildings are currently uninhabitable. The damage costs are as yet unknown, but could potentially exceed a billion dollars. Prior to the South Napa quake it had been 25 years since the last large temblor hit the area. In 1989 the Loma Prieta quake, weighing in at a magnitude 6.9, caused billions of dollars in damage, and killed dozens. The largest quake on record for the Bay Area was the 7.8 earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906. According to Wikipedia the quake and associated fires are considered one of the worst natural disasters in the United States. The quake and ensuing fires, that burned for several days, destroyed nearly 80% of the city and claimed roughly 3,000 lives. Our Mostly Mapping Map of the Day is a Story Map authored by Chris Ingram, of the Santa Clara County Fire Department, based in Los Gatos in California's Bay Area. The map tells the story of the disaster through the words of Henry Mitchell, a Captain in the San Francisco Fire Department at the time. The Story Map uses an historic map of San Francisco that was georeferenced and published as a hosted tile service, along with photos and other historic maps to bring Mitchell's words in context. I think it's a great example of how words, photos, and old maps can tell a compelling story about past events, whose messages extend forward to today. ... View more

Earlier this week the World Health Organization announced that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has claimed more than 1,200 lives. The outbreak began last December, originating in Guinea and subsequently spreading to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. Threats that the spread could escalate increased as a holding facility in the West Point slum of Monrovia, Liberia, was ransacked, with patients fleeing and looters removing items stained with blood, vomit, and excrement—potentially spreading the disease further. This of course is not the first outbreak of the disease, though it has the highest number of human cases by far. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website the previously recorded high was 425 cases, reported during the 2000-2001 outbreak in Uganda. Chronicling the outbreaks since 1976 is this Story Map from Esri UK. It uses a combination of maps, reports, and photos to add context to the timeline, and was authored using the Story Map Journal. This timely, informative, and sobering story makes it our Mostly Mapping map of the day. ... View more

First introduced in November, 2006, ArcGIS Explorer Desktop was a pioneering product in many ways, breaking GIS ground with configurations, popups (as they were spelled back then), swipe tools, map notes, tasking, the ability to "skin" the application, and also introducing one of its most popular features—presentations. ArcGIS Explorer Desktop was first introduced as Build 340 (build numbers were used instead of versions) in November of 2006. The ability to author presentations—a collection of interactive map slides that could capture the map state and include a title and eventually overlays and other capabilities—came along a bit later with Build 900 in 2009. ArcGIS Explorer Online arrived in May of 2010, the result of a development effort that was focused on building an innovative, lightweight, browser-based app for exploration and query. It also iterated on many of the ArcGIS Explorer Desktop innovations, including it's own version of online presentations, and added some unique innovations of its own, most notably dashboards, gadgets, and queries. It was officially deprecated in December, 2013, though had not been actively developed for months before its official retirement. As the sun began to set on ArcGIS Explorer Online, the need to move support for presentations to the javascript-based ArcGIS Online map viewer became increasingly important. The map viewer began supporting viewing Explorer Online presentations in 2011. But other opportunities and alternatives also appeared and became popular for creating presentations—or more accurately—communicating using maps. These included the evolving landscape of app templates and Story Maps, the first of which was published as a custom app in April, 2011. Earlier this year Explorer for ArcGIS was released on iOS with support for viewing presentations. Another recently introduced native MacOS version of Explorer for ArcGIS also offers the same capabilities. With the July, 2014, release of ArcGIS Online presentations have now come full circle. You can now author as well as view presentations using the ArcGIS Online map viewer. See Create a presentation with your map and Embed a presentation in your website. So what's old is new once again. Presentations, as time and product development initiatives have shown, remain a popular and effective way to communicate with maps. ... View more

The Map of the Day today shows a near miss, actually two of them. Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell said "We dodged a bullet" earlier today.  It looks like he'll be able to say that once more. Hurricane Iselle, which passed directly over the island, weakened to a tropical storm just hours before landfall. As it passed across the Big Island it caused only limited damage. The threat of a second storm—Hurricane Julio—also seems to be fading as it's forecast path will take it approximately 200 miles northeast from the nearest coastline. The map below was captured from the Esri Disaster Response portal using the Hurricane and Cyclone Public Information Map. The application combines real-time weather data and forecasts from NOAA along with other layers (including social media), and shows hurricane paths across and around Hawaii. The Hurricane and Cyclone Map uses the Public Information app template—a hosted application template you can find and use from the Make A Web Application gallery. ... View more

As GIS practitioners we face many different challenges, and those brought on by climate change are among them. Though some aspects of climate change are still controversial, the facts are that climate change is real, it's happening, and it's something that we have to deal with—now. We're seeing the effects of climate change manifested in many ways, and these present significant challenges for being prepared, responding, and mitigating these effects. But using a GIS-based approach, and leveraging new tools and capabilities, we're in a better position than ever before to understand, predict, and deal with these changes. At the Esri 2014 User Conference climate change framed the afternoon plenary session, and this recent Esri Insider blog post summarizes the essential GIS building blocks for resilience. ... View more

The ArcGIS Online map viewer is a great app for authoring web maps and more. But for a variety of reasons it's just not the best option when you want to make your web maps available to a broad audience, for example decision makers in your organization, or the public. Yet often I'll see the map viewer used on public organization home pages, public galleries, and other public places. There are lots of other alternatives, and most are better for a more public audience. And they're easy to use and configure to boot. Check out this post covering simple view-only app templates that you should consider instead of using the map viewer. Here's the bunch covered in the post: Basic Viewer, Legend, Panels, Simple Map Viewer, Storytelling Basic, and Storytelling Text & Legend. ... View more

Announced first at the Esri 2014 User Conference a couple of weeks ago, and the topic of a recent Esri email campaign, it's worth getting the word out on. It's the Global Disaster Resilience App Challenge, a partnership of Esri and the United Nations, specifically the UNISDR - the part of the organization that focuses on disaster reduction. There's a $10,000 reward for the best professional/scientfic app, and also best consumer/public-facing app. And remember you don't need to be a programming ninja - there are lots of app templates that can lift your idea. For more details visit the Esri Global Disaster Resilience App Challenge website. The submission deadline is August 27, 5:00 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time). Pass it on to your colleagues, your professional network, universities, etc. ... View more

At the recent 2014 Esri User Conference I showed on-demand satellite tasking from Airbus Defense & Space using a couple of examples with imagery obtained on-demand the week before the conference. Since then I've gotten several questions about the tasking, and the applications that were shown. Here's an outline of the presentation. The demonstration began by showing the Airbus Defense and Space - Satellite Tasking & Archive application. I had used a beta version of the application to obtain the imagery shown, and the application was released just prior to the User Conference and is now available via the ArcGIS Marketplace. The application enables you to search for a location (I used San Diego), then click to locate a 10 km x 10 km area of interest. Click Search to find imagery. The app returns a list of options to choose from, which include the following: Instant Tasking You can task to capture an image from the next available satellite pass of either Pleiades (50cm resolution) or SPOT (1.5m resolution) satellites, guaranteeing image capture on an exact date. This is best for when you absolutely must have the imagery as soon as possible. The image will be "as captured," so there are no guarantees to cloud cover percentage, so consider the weather and atmospheric conditions before using this option. These options are indicated by the red 1 Shot Tasking symbol. Click Info to get more details. Automatic Tasking Request imagery within the next 30 or 60 days. If you don't need the imagery as soon as possible, you benefit from getting a guarantee of the cloud cover. Search the archive Browse the archive of imagery that overlaps your area of interest. Hover over the selection to display the yellow shaded coverage of the image against your area of interest, or click Preview to see more details. Not shown or mentioned during the User Conference demonstration, the application also offers sorting and custom date range and percent cloud cover filters. Examples: A Partnership in Preservation: Coogan Farm in Connecticut, a project of The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is an example where the imagery could potentially be used for monitoring and stewardship. Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq: Imagery that shows camps that have sprung up as Iraqis have fled their homes for safer areas during recent turmoil. A Tornado's Swath of Destruction in Pilger, Nebraska: This third example was not shown during the Plenary, but is added here. It shows the devastating impact of an EF4 tornado on the town of Pilger, Nebraska. All of these examples were authored using the Story Map Swipe template. Note: The above is just a recap of what was demonstrated at the Esri UC. For more on this application, and other services offered by Airbus Defense & Space, search the ArcGIS Marketplace using the keyword Airbus. Note that this is a new Marketplace offering, and pricing and licensing is subject to change. ... View more