[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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