USA

The U.S. government lifted certain restrictions on commercial remote sensing satellite companies on Monday. The changes came from NOAA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office, which is a division of the Office of Space Commerce. CRSA said restrictions in place kept companies from offering their full capabilities to the public. In 2020, CRSA changed ...

The solution combines NextNav’s reliable TerraPoiNT system with existing LTE and 5G network signals. The tests, conducted in and around San Jose, California, US, showcased the integration of TerraPoiNT signals with cellular infrastructure to deliver highly accurate 3D positioning and timing information without depending solely on traditional satellite-based GPS and GNSS signals. NextNav’s system utilises ...

Telhados verdes têm sido apontados como uma das possíveis soluções para o combate às mudanças climáticas nas cidades. Isso porque, além de permitirem a captação de água da chuva e a produção de hortaliças no alto dos edifícios, eles também são capazes de gerar microclima, reduzindo a temperatura local e o gasto energético com refrigeração, ...

Technology is furthering innovation in wildland firefighting across the west, including the Tahoe Basin — and not just in the process of extinguishing flames but in prevention of these catastrophic burns. Last fall, researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno, kicked off a series of projects that seek to map out the vegetation in the ...

Capella Space’s synthetic aperture radar satellites are falling back to Earth much sooner than the three years they were anticipated to operate, according to publicly available satellite data. The startup has launched a total of ten small satellites to low Earth orbit since 2018, including eight in its family of “Whitney”-class spacecraft. Five of these ...

This summer, a group of students are embarking on a groundbreaking project: mapping tree canopy cover in California. Tree canopies, which provide shade, can offset the heat island effect in cities. The effect is caused by buildings, roads and other human-made infrastructure absorbing and then re-emitting heat. In a warming climate, the heat island effect ...

Learn how to use the City’s Emergency Map to quickly see how neighborhoods, including your own, may be directed to evacuate, shelter in place, or take other protective action during a major emergency. When possible, the City would use the map to also identify evacuation routes, road closures, shelters, or other critical information to guide ...

A Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) Team is being established to begin a burned area assessment of the Grapevine wildfire on the Verde Ranger District. Preliminary evaluation has found no immediate or downstream values at risk, including the community of Whitehorse. BAER teams consist of scientists and specialists including hydrologists, geologists, soil scientists, engineers, botanists, ...

IBM and open-source AI platform Hugging Face today announced that IBM’s watsonx.ai geospatial foundation model – built from NASA’s satellite data – will now be openly available on Hugging Face. It will be the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA. The model ...

Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) are teaming up with a local organization to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the lives of autistic and neurodiverse individuals in North Alabama. The project is being funded by Little Orange Fish (LOF), a Huntsville, Ala., non-profit, to improve access to mental ...

Terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for 3D imaging has matured tremendously in the last decade, thanks to consumer (mobile phones and computers) and automotive safety and autonomy applications. Over 70 companies are vying for a portion of this $billion market. In the meantime, the technology has progressed for drone and higher altitude aerial 3D ...

As the Arctic warms at nearly four times the global rate, permafrost – frozen ground that has remained below 0 degrees Celsius for at least two consecutive years – is thawing rapidly, causing widespread ground collapse and infrastructure damage, threatening Arctic communities and releasing carbon into the atmosphere. To date, while vast amounts of high ...

A new trip-planning app has shown encouraging results in improving navigation inside subway stations, according to a study published in IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, promising the possibility of easier commutes for people who are blind and low-vision. Designed by researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and NYU Grossman School ...

In the paper, “Extended SLIC superpixels algorithm for applications to non-imagery geospatial rasters,” published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and University of Cincinnati proposed an improved version of the popular SLIC algorithm for image segmentation, known as extended SLIC, to be applicable on multidimensional spatial ...

This summer, as wildfire smoke blankets large swaths of North America and heat-stoked summer haze reaches its seasonal peak, NASA and its partners are deploying several new tools to observe air quality and pollution from the street to the stratosphere. Launched into orbit earlier this spring, TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is ...

Driverless cars can struggle to distinguish between a pedestrian and a cardboard cutout of a person when it is dark or particularly rainy. A system that uses AI to identify objects based on their heat emission patterns could help autonomous vehicles to operate more safely in all outdoor conditions. Zubin Jacob at Purdue University in ...

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Monday hosted NASA administrator Bill Nelson and U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley at the presidential palace. According to a statement from the Brazilian government, Mr. Nelson spoke of the possibility of supporting Brazil’s fight against deforestation with the help of new aircraft capable of capturing precise photographs of fires, ...

A group formed by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and mapping company TomTom is releasing data that could enable developers to build their own maps to take on Google Map and Apple Maps. The group, called the Overture Maps Foundation, was formed last year. Today, the group has released it first open map dataset. With this dataset, ...

University of Texas at Dallas researchers are using geospatial mapping techniques to identify social and environmental obstacles in communities that might impede burn injury survivors’ reentry into society. The project is designed to help patients with burn injuries better adapt to their lives after medical discharge, including improving patient access to transportation, employment, food and ...

Researchers have proposed a novel method for counting and tracking vehicles on public roads, a development that could enhance current traffic systems and help travelers get to their destinations faster. Using the cameras already installed on campus buses at The Ohio State University, researchers demonstrated that they could automatically and accurately measure counts of vehicles ...

Woolpert has been contracted to collect high-density Lidar data for more than 17,500 square kilometres of rural Texas to map electrical distribution poles and wires along with surrounding natural and man-made infrastructure. The data will be collected via fixed-wing manned aircraft. The high-density point cloud will be classified and used to construct survey grade 3D ...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a geospatial product called Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) that offers public access to national-scale visual crop rotation data for the first time. The new tool was developed by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and Economic Research Service (ERS), two of the department’s statistical scientific research agencies. CSB is ...

Through an intelligent combination of geotagged social media, global location and natural language data, ORNL’s Junchuan Fan and Gautam Thakur developed MapSpace, a publicly available, scalable land-use modeling framework. By providing data characteristics broader and deeper than satellite imagery alone, MapSpace can generate population analytics invaluable for urban planning and disaster response. The researchers’ findings ...

The Wyoming Natural Diversity Database (WYNDD) at the University of Wyoming will replace two of its most popular online data access tools with a new online tool. The WYNDD Data Explorer will combine and streamline the functionality of the two former tools. “This new web application allows users to view and download spatial data related ...

The CEO of the Rwanda Space Agency (RSA), Colonel Francis Ngabo, and the President of Esri, Jack Dangermond, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a collaborative partnership, setting the foundation for promoting geospatial services to drive social-economic development in Rwanda. The momentous event occurred on the sidelines of the 2023 Esri User Conference ...

ArtsFairfax wants you to help it keep track of all the public art popping up around Fairfax County. The county’s designated, nonprofit local arts agency recently launched an online Public Arts Locator to identify and map out murals, sculptures and other installations placed in the community, either permanently or on a temporary basis. The app ...

Recent bipartisan legislation aims to make satellite communication and PNT services more available to farmers. Legislation that nudges the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to do more to make satellite communication and PNT services available to rural America, particularly farmers, has sailed through the House and is awaiting committee action in the Senate. The bipartisan legislation—something ...

Poaching wild animals poses global environmental risks, from threatening the survival of keystones species to potentially spreading animal-borne diseases to humans. Technology like unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, can help combat poachers, but finding the best way to use the large amounts of geospatial data generated by these tools remains a challenge, according to Penn ...

VeriDaaS Corporation, a leading provider of high-quality geospatial data, and Tarin Resource Services, a prominent name in the Canadian geospatial industry, are thrilled to announce their strategic partnership. Under this new agreement, Tarin Resource Services has become an official reseller of VeriDaaS data, opening doors to unparalleled geospatial solutions for clients across various industries. The ...

Central to the mission of Calvin University is restorative justice; and for years, it has helped inmates get a degree through the Calvin Prison Initiative. Calvin also developed valuable resources, like the “Returning Citizens Map,” an interactive web page that helps people chart a new path forward after they serve their time. In 2018, a ...