[pcplantdb] Re: openGIS / locales

Richard Morris webmaster at pfaf.org
Tue Mar 29 04:14:55 EST 2005


Bear Kaufmann wrote:

>> Did you guys ever check this out?:
>> http://www.laspilitas.com/comhabit/zipcode.htm
> 
> Yeah, and was basing a bit of my commentary on it, though the references 
> might not have been obvious.
> It's a helpful system....what Sean is suggesting (in the last post, some 
> below) is something with even more fine grained potential...
> 
> Sean writes:
> 
>> Even better is if we can get GPS savvy users.  The GPS not
>> only gives better accuracy to lat/long than postal
>> codes, but also includes altitude.  Throw in some
>> weather gadgets and an accurate micro-climate picture
>> can be developed over time for any given locality.  On
>> the exreme end of sensor automation, we get pretty far
>> out of scope for PIW, which I'm still not sure where
>> the real scope ends anyway.
> 
> Something I mentioned before is that a lot of satellite based 
> weather/climate/etc data is now available (and darned if I can't find 
> the URL's right now... :-P ). It should be possible to grab a lot of 
> info for a specific point if we can access and process that data (I'm 
> wondering if there already isn't something on the web that can do that).
> 
> Sean writes:
> 
>> However, the formula calculating distance is fairly simple.
> 
> Yes, but it would be interesting, and a bit more of a challenge to 
> calculate "climate similarity/ecological relatedness". Though that is 
> quite fine grained....I think getting access to polygons (shape files, 
> from WWF?) and finding which ecosystem type a point is in, is most 
> accurate...though preprocessing it into a DB table of postal codes 
> (noting multi-ecosystem overlap within a postal area) is acceptable, and 
> what the LasPilitas site does..
> 
> Richard Morris writes:
> 
>>     find which regions are inside which other region
>>     find overlapping regions
>>     find which regions contain a particular spot cordinate
> 
> I believe these functions are now a part of newer MySQL releases:
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/gis-introduction.html

Wonderful. Excactly the framework we would need.
All we need nows the data!

> I'd also like to note that there is an open source map server:
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/
> This would be great to incorporate...if there was access to data such as 
> native plant ranges etc in standardized shape files, or ecosystem 
> ranges, that would be great to show...

Rich




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