GIIF-CAMFER GeoLunch
Spring 2008

Fridays, 1-2pm
111 Mulford Hall

GeoLunch is a weekly seminar series offering interesting talks, group discussion, and show-and-tells - all having to do with geospatial theory, research, and application! The GIIF and the Center for the Assessment and Monitoring of Forest and Environmental Resources (CAMFER) are teaming up to present GeoLunches. If you have a suggestion for a speaker or want to present yourself, please contact either Jeremy Freund or Ashley Holt.

GeoLunch occurs every Friday, 1:00 - 2:00pm in 111 Mulford Hall Conference Room, unless otherwise noted.

Date Speaker Location
Jan. 25 No Geolunch scheduled. 111 Mulford conf. room

Feb. 1

Bernt Wahl, UC Berkeley Industry Fellow. Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.
BerkeleyNeighborhoods"Who is in my neighborhood? Defining neighborhood boundaries & identifying localized context"
Bernt will talk about how he used multiple criteria to develop a new dataset which identifies neighborhood boundaries for 11,000 neighborhoods for the 150 largest cities in the U.S. Many data users might want to target neighborhoods based on socioeconomic and other neighborhood characteristics, rather than on zip code.
Image: Tiger level image of Berkeley neighborhoods
111 Mulford conf. room

Feb. 8

David P. Anderson, Space Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley
"Citizen Cyber-Science"
The Internet lets the general public participate in scientific research by donating computing resources and by performing tasks that require human skills. I'll describe some projects of this sort and will discuss how to set up new ones.
PDF of presentation

111 Mulford conf. room


Feb. 15

NEW TIME FOR THIS WEEK ONLY!

2:00-3:00 PM

James Scarborough, Berkeley Environmental Technology
"BerkeleyImgseg - Creating a new image segmentation software product"
What does image segmentation algorithm research, environmental
consulting, and improving the environment have in common? Nothing.
This talk will describe how a group of Berkeley people decided to
create experimental software as a call to action. Berkeley
Environmental Technology's first product is image segmentation and
classification emphasizing large scale automation. But powerful
methods are no excuse for difficulty of use. As we eat pizza and
discuss the functionality of this application, the group's ideas and
consensus will become the next release. Download the current version
at imageseg.com.
Sponsored by ASPRS, Northern California Region Student Chapter (pizza provided!)
111 Mulford conf. room
Feb. 22 TBA 111 Mulford conf. room

Feb. 29 		John Rogan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Geography, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University
"Tropical Fire: Data and Dynamics from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico"
John is a geographer specializing in lanscape ecology, fire ecology, optical remote sensing and GISience. Recent research projects have involved monitoring land cover change in California using remote sensing date, mapping wildfire burn severity in southern California and southeastern Arizona, and mapping forest types in Massachusetts using multi-season Landsat data.
111 Mulford conf. room
March 7 Edmund Seto, PhD
Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
"An environmental scorecard for infectious disease surveillance in China"
Environmental scorecards are common instruments used to provide qualitative/quantitative rankings on a multitude of factors that affect environmental quality.  Given the wide recognition that infectious disease transmission and emergence are associated with many environmental factors, including the spatial distribution of sociodemographic factors, sanitation, land use, climate, and vector habitats, the scorecard approach may be a useful tool for disease surveillance.  Using the parasitic disease, schistosomiasis in China as an example, Dr. Seto will discuss how a mathematical model of disease transmission may be evaluated in terms of key factors that can used in an environmental scorecard.  These factors are being mapped and provided as a tool via Google Earth for disease surveillance and control in China.		 111 Mulford conf. room

March 14

NEW TIME FOR THIS WEEK ONLY!

12:00-1:00 PM

 Peter Tittman, Geography Graduate Group, UC Davis
"Building a spatially explicit supply curve for biofuel production in the
Western United States using GIS and Network Analysis"
To analyze the potential supply of biofuels we constructed a hybrid geographic information systems (GIS) and mixed integer linear program. The model optimizes the location, type, and size of biorefineries based upon feedstock, transportation, and conversion costs.
111 Mulford conf. room
March 21 Justin Kitzes, Senior Manager, National Accounts Program, Global Footprint Network
"Sustainability Accounting with the Ecological Footprint"
 111 Mulford conf. room
March 28 No Geolunch - Spring Break 111 Mulford conf. room
April 4 Cancelled
April 11 Student presentations (prep. for AAG 2008 Annual Conference)
Sponsored by ASPRS, Northern California Region Student Chapter (pizza provided!)

Fernando Sedano, Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley.
Fernando will give a slide show and talk about his volunteer work with GISCorps.

Ashley Holt , Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley.
"Plague in the United States, 1900 - 1950: Re-interpreting the spatial history of a disease"
Recent studies of plague ecology in North America often begin with the statement that the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, was first imported to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, when infected rats were inadvertently transported from Asia by ships docking in San Francisco. While the current distribution and epizootic activity of sylvatic plague in the United States is documented by ongoing surveillance efforts at the state and federal levels, less is known about the historical pathways and mechanisms by which plague spread from the western coast of the United States to mid-western states and its current distribution. In this study, we re-examine the accepted history of the west-to-east, overland spread of plague in California and the United States, through a combination of literature review, historical map review, and spatial analysis.

 111 Mulford conf. room
April 18 No Geolunch - AAG 2008 Annual Conference 111 Mulford conf. room
April 25 Junhak Lee, Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley.
"Estimating individual tree level leaf area using airborne LiDAR-driven surface model and canopy point clouds"		 111 Mulford conf. room
May 2 Robin Grossinger, San Francisco Estuary Institute Historical Ecology Program
"Groves, Glades, and Scattered Trees: Reconstructing the historical landscape ecology of valley oak savannas and woodlands in the San Francisco Bay Area"
Recent research using a wide array of 19th-century and contemporary data sources is documenting the spatial characteristics of the Bay Area's celebrated valley oak lands as they existed prior to significant Euro-American modification, with implications for conservation planning of these now-rare habitats.		 111 Mulford conf. room

May 9 		Ian Read, Department of History, UC Berkeley
"Merging Lived Space with Relational Space: Forging a Common Methodology in GIS and Networks"
GIS and social network theory share three important characteristics. First, social scientists and historians use the two methodologies to reveal patterns of human behavior and provide ways of explaining or predicting change over time. Second, both stress the importance of representational space, either the lived, physical space or an abstract, social space. And finally, the two methodologies have profited enormously from advances in computation. Despite parallel development and conceptual overlap, the primary tools that we use for these methods are largely disconnected. Ian will use examples from his own historical research to explore the possibilities of a workable "Network Analytic GIS."		 111 Mulford conf. room

Past GeoLunch schedules:
Spring 2007
Fall 2008