If you’re part of an organization looking to plant hundreds or thousands of trees, however, the planting process becomes a lot more complicated. With limited resources, many local governments and horticultural organizations may want to focus on planting trees in key locations in order to achieve a specific impact. One group, for example, may want to target areas with the greatest population density so that the planted trees impact the most people. Another organization may want to look at areas with the lowest air quality in the hopes that more trees will improve conditions. While the hoped for impacts might be clear, how do you figure out where exactly to plant in order to achieve those impacts?

Heat maps provide guidance on where to plant trees in order to achieve the desired impact.

For the last six months, the urban forestry team at Azavea has been exploring how geographic software can assist with prioritizing tree planting locations. With funding from a USDA Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant, we’ve developed the Urban Forest Modeling and Prioritization Toolkit, a prototype web-based tool that enables users to select and weight various parameters such as population density, urban heat island temperatures, health data, and biodiversity statistics that could potentially affect where trees were planted. Using GeoTrellis, our open source geographic data processing engine for high performance applications, the prototype generates a heat map that identifies key planting areas based on the selected criteria. The result, we hope, is an application that could provide groups with guidance in exploring the best locations to plant trees based on their organizational goals.

In the future scenario feature, users can explore the possible impacts of trees over a 30 year period.

In addition to determining planting locations, we also explored the concept of modeling the long-term effects of planting trees.  In a future scenario feature available in the prototype, users identify a location and then select the species, size, and number of trees they would plant in that location as well as an overall tree mortality rate. Using researched  tree growth and mortality rates, we can then calculate how the trees are likely to grow and die over a 30 year time period and how much of an ecosystem impact they will have on air quality, greenhouse gas reduction,  and water and energy conservation. Each scenario generates statistics, charts, and info that can be very useful in demonstrating the many benefits of planting more trees.

The prototype focuses on the City of Philadelphia, which enabled us to work with a great advisory team that included individuals from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.  We think that this type of modeling work could be useful in cities across the country so we’re hoping to apply for additional funding to research new features.

While we won’t be publicly releasing this prototype, we’re happy to demo the software. Sign up for a free demo or contact Deb Boyer at dboyer@azavea.com or 215-701-7506.

The development of the Urban Forestry Modeling and Prioritization Toolkit was funded by a Small Business Innovation Research grant (2011-33610-30511) from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. 

LRC Approved Preliminary House Reapportionment Plan:

LRC Approved Preliminary Senate Reapportionment Plan:

In addition, we have compiled a compactness analysis of the new districts using the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg ratios. You can read more about how those are calculated in our Redistricting white paper. The higher the number, the more compact the district is. Compared with the previous LRC plan, the new House and Senate districts are slightly more compact. However, they are still drastically less compact than the plan devised by Amanda Holt. Considering Holt's plan was the basis for the Supreme Court's remand, it will be interesting to see if this new plan will hold constitutional muster.

Thank you Google Fusion Tables. Democratic and GOP performance numbers calculated with data from the Harvard Election Data Archive. Why are we doing this? As part of our Cicero API database, we maintain the latest redistricting plans approved at the national, state and local level.

In some ways, GeoTrellis is the successor to our DecisionTree product, though it is significantly more than just a new version — GeoTrellis has been completely re-written from the ground up to support a broad array of geoprocessing tasks. The business model will also be different:  GeoTrellis will join Azavea’s other open source products, OpenTreeMap and DistrictBuilder.  We are releasing the source code under an open source license (GPLv3).  While it’s possible that this will reduce our ability to make this a commercial success, we believe that the success of GeoTrellis will depend on the ease with which people will be able to use it.  By releasing the project under an open source license, we hope to reduce the barriers for use by researchers, non-profit organizations, educators and other projects.  For organizations and projects that cannot use the GPL license, we will also offer a commercial license as well as support packages and implementation services.  The source code for GeoTrellis is available right now on GitHub.

I’m very excited about GeoTrellis. I think it is a simply amazing software framework. It encapsulates several years of research and development work around performing very fast processing of geographic data.

Why is this important? Geographic data is crucial to a better understanding our communities, our society and our planet. The data we are gathering about our world is growing at an unprecedented rate. At the same time, our need to visualize and interact with that data in order to make better decisions has never been greater. GeoTrellis is aimed at this intersection: fast processing of big geographic data sets to support better decisions.

GeoTrellis has several important attributes:

• Very, very fast performance – we have continued to refine what we learned in the original DecisionTree product and have re-written the whole framework using new technology and a new language, Scala (the language isn’t really new, but this is a new application of it)
• Runs on standalone servers, arrays of servers or in a distributed cloud infrastructure
• Supports large data sets
• Provides an open and extensible architecture
• Supports integration with both Esri and open source GIS map servers
• Enables composition of multiple operations into larger, more complex spatial models
• Supports custom user interfaces and workflows

• CommonSpace
• City of Asheville Priority Places
• Sustainable Business Siting
• Visualizing Emancipation - a project of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond
• OMB Watch Equity Gap
• Model-My-Watershed – real-time stormwater modeling for educators and students – stay tuned for the release later this year
• US Army Corps of Engineers Water Infrastructure System Data Manager (WISDM) – a national-scale, interactive tool for water project prioritization and budgeting

and other projects we’ll be sharing over the next few months.

How can you learn more about GeoTrellis?

• Learn more on the GeoTrellis web site
• Read about some of our Scala research on the Azavea Labs blog
• Join the GeoTrellis user mailing list
• Hang out in the IRC channel, #geotrellis, on freenode
• Check out the Getting Started Guide
• Fork it on GitHub
• Tell us what you think

They are off to a truly excellent start with tree inventories contributed by the cities of Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Coronado, El Cajon, Encinitas, Imperial Beach, La Mesa, Oceanside, Poway, San Diego, Santee, Solana Beach and Vista as well as Point Loma Nazarene University. Public contributors can expand on the initial map by adding trees, editing tree info, and uploading tree images. The project’s goal is “to provide a one-stop repository for tree data, welcoming information from any agency or group and enabling and celebrating citizen participation.”

The San Diego County Tree Map provides another example of how the OpenTreeMap software can assist organizations and governments in working together and with the public to collaboratively map and inventory the urban forest. For more info about the project, visit the Tree Map or check out this article in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

San Diego is just one of several cities that are experimenting with OpenTreeMap. At a recent Code Across America event hosted in New Orleans, one team worked on creating an OpenTreeMap implementation for New Orleans. We’ve heard of several other groups working on the software, and OpenTreeMap continues to grow as an open source project.

We’ve had several questions from users about what will happen to DistrictBuilder - our open source software for collaborative redistricting – over the next several years, prior to the next round of redistricting. Our answer is A LOT!  DistrictBuilder provides users with tools to draw, edit, and analyze plans for other district types that are built on census or municipal geographic units.

Essentially, this means that DistrictBuilder can be used to redraw any administrative or political boundaries – as long as they can be drawn using a base geography like Census blocks, voting precincts, etc.  Some examples of these boundaries might include:

• Legislative redistricting in other countries
• Police Precincts
• School district and catchment boundaries
• Municipal Service Areas
• Voting precincts

The DistrictBuilder software was developed by the Public Mapping Project with software engineering and implementation services provided by Azavea.   With generous funding by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Amazon Web Services, and Christopher Newport University, Azavea and The Public Mapping Project have been able to continue adding new, powerful features to the DistrictBuilder software. As funding allows, we will continue adding new features to the software over the next several years.  We encourage others in the open source community to contribute features and code to the project as well.

A quick rundown of the features we’ve recently added or are in the process of developing:

Additional Help Documentation and Tools for Users (coming soon):

• Tooltips on all major components of the editing and reporting features
• Video tutorial demoing use of the software
• Updated written tutorial including all the most recently released features

Print Plan to PDF: Users are now able to print their plans to a PDF format for inclusion in reports and presentations or to submit to the media or other organizations for publication.

Export to shapefile: Users can now export a district plan (district polygons or blocks) as a shapefile that includes district id’s, population, and geounit id (block id’s or community id’s).

Add/delete/modify data: We have added ability for administrators to add, delete or edit demographic and election data to an implementation of DistrictBuilder. This new or edited data can be added to the database at any point after implementation.  This is useful if, for example, the census issues a correction to data they’ve already released or if an adjusted set of population data is issued mid-redistricting cycle (as in the recent case of New York State’s release of prison adjusted data – http://www.latfor.state.ny.us/data/)

Re-aggregation tools: When new data is added to an existing implementation of DistrictBuilder, the statistics calculated for each existing user-generated plan must be re-calculated.  This feature will support easy re-aggregation of the data for user plans.

Internationalization: Administrators of each implementation are now able to set a default locale for an implementation and choose to make other locales available for selection by the end user. What might change depending on the locale selected? Language, symbolization, number formatting, time zones,  and locale-aware sorting.

Regionalization: Within an implementation, a country or state can be decomposed into regions, each with its own set of redistricting criteria, targets and default statistics.

• Each region can be assigned a different district target population and other scores as well as a different number of districts.
• When a user picks a region for editing, the target scores and statistics assigned to that region will be displayed in the user interface and used as criteria to measure the success of each plan.

If you have any questions about the new DistrictBuilder features or how DistrictBuilder can be used for creating other types of district plans, please contact me at afretz@azavea.com.

Listen for it, listen for it….sweet, sweet music for the ears of all you developers out there… This week the Cicero team launched a new, REST version of the Cicero API (our district matching and elected official lookup tool). Since its inception in 2005, we have offered Cicero as a web API, but it’s been limited to the SOAP protocol. While SOAP has remained popular for enterprise applications, in recent years, many web developers has moved toward REST.  A REST-ful API is easier to integrate into web browser clients.  REST, while less strict, is also more flexible and makes it easier for us to roll out new functionality.

So we are doing both.  With our REST API, we are also adding new functionality, updated documentation and more data.  For those of you on SOAP, we are not abandoning you – we will continue supporting the current SOAP API for at least a year, though we will not be adding new functionality, and we will be encouraging our SOAP customers to make the transition to REST as you are able.  We’ll be sending you some nudges and reminders over the next year, in preparation for the eventual sunsetting of the SOAP services.

With the new REST API, we are keeping all of the existing capabilities as well as extending it in several new ways:

• Redistricted boundary lookup service – state, local and Congressional districts in the U.S. are in a state of transition over the course of this year as elections take place but new representatives have not yet taken office.  We are supporting this by providing a “redistricted boundary” service along-side the “current” district services.
• A growing collection of global election event data (now almost 7,000 events)
• New district boundary datasets – we’ve added U.S. census geographies, including: census block groups, tracts, MCD places, Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas
• More contact information fields for elected officials, including email webforms and social media
• New styling and projection options for district maps (WOOT!)

Getting Started with the REST API

By the way, we’ve  also increased the Free Developer Trial account to 90 days and 1,000 free credits! (we’re developers too; we know how it goes…)

Feedback! As you develop applications using the new REST API, please send us any questions or feedback you may have to cicero@azavea.com.

We’re pleased that we’ll have the opportunity to share our research as part of a panel discussion this coming Tuesday evening, March 27th. We’ve included the text of the invitation below, but you can find out more and RSVP on the NAF site. There are only 50 spots, so be sure to reserve your place by Monday, March 26th. We hope to have you there to participate in this conversation.

OpenTreeMap enables organizations to work together with the public to map and inventory the urban forest. The software is currently being used in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Sacramento to display, map, and update tree inventories – effectively and cost-efficiently. With OpenTreeMap, tree information, including photos, can be added and updated using a simple web-based system. Users can view the ecosystem benefits of the trees in their area and search for trees by species, location, or other filters.

As part of this webinar, we discussed how OpenTreeMap can:

• Enable collaborative urban tree inventory projects
• Calculate and display the ecosystem benefits of the urban forest
• Engage the community in the care and maintenance of neighborhood trees

For a recording of the webinar, please see the below video. You can also view the recording on YouTube or access the slides on Slideshare. If you have any questions about OpenTreeMap, please feel free to contact me at dboyer@azavea.com.

I am pleased to announce the first Azavea Summer of Maps.  Inspired by the Google Summer of Code, Summer of Maps is a program that offers stipends to student GIS analysts to perform geospatial data analysis for non-profit organizations.  We are going to match up non-profit organizations that have spatial analysis needs with talented students of GIS analysis to implement projects over a three-month period during the summer.  Here’s how it will work:

1. Feb 28 – Mar 16 – Non-profit organizations can submit brief proposals for spatial analysis projects to Azavea
2. Mar 17 – 20, – Azavea program administrators review organizations
3. Mar 21 – April 2 – Students submit proposals and applications
4. April 2 – 13 – Top candidates are interviewed in Philadelphia
5. April 16 – Azavea announces successful Summer of Maps fellows
6. May 14 – August 31 – Summer of Maps fellows work on spatial analysis projects

This is our first time doing this, so we may have to adjust this schedule, but we’ll try to keep the main web page updated on the progress.

What’s in it for the non-profit orgs?

• Receive pro bono services from a talented student GIS analyst to geographically analyze and visualize your data
• Visualize your data in new ways
• Combine your data with other demographic and geographic data to draw new observations
• Receive high quality maps that can be used to make a case to funders or support new initiatives

What’s in it for the students?

• Work on a spatial analysis project that supports the social mission of a non-profit organization
• Work with Azavea mentors to improve your GIS skills
• Receive a monthly stipend
• Gain work experience implementing a GIS project

If you are a non-profit organization and have a project you would like to see implemented, please submit an application.  Deadline is March 16.

Learn more about Azavea Summer of Maps at www.azavea.com/summer-of-maps/

Azavea’s social mission is:

Apply geospatial technology to create more sustainable, vital and livable communities, while advancing the state of the art through research.

As part of our policy of financial transparency with our staff, Azavea prepares an annual report.  Beginning this year, we have also prepared an annual report to all of you, our community, on the various ways in which we are fulfilling our social enterprise commitment.

Some highlights of our 2011 B Corp Annual Report include:

• Increased investment in open source geospatial projects and support for local civic hackathons, including significant contributions to supporting raster data and analysis in the PostGIS database project
• Launch of OpenDataPhilly.org, an open data catalog for the Philadelphia region
• Launch of a partnership with TechSoup to donate our Cicero API to non-profit organizations
• Support for a local City Council redistricting contest, FixPhillyDistricts using the DistrictBuilder software we’ve been developing over the past two years
• Pro Bono services to several non-profit organizations
• Continued to innovate around open source civic software, including:
• OpenTreeMap – collaborative data management tools for managing the urban forest
• DistrictBuilder – open, online legislative redistricting tools
• Open-Data-Catalog – a more generic, open source version of our OpenDataPhilly project.
• Time To Give Back program whereby at least 2% of our profits are donated to non-profit organizations in each of six categories:
• Ecosystems
• Local Arts and Culture
• Open Government and Rule of Law
• Internet and Open Data
• Bicycle Coalition
• Growing Underdeveloped Markets

And we will be rolling out some exciting new initiatives later this year.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, you can read the full report.