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  • From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Re: GIS
  • Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:38:38 -0800

A GIS expert helping us would be a very valuable resource, usually hard to find
for small projects and expensive (because of the high demand for GIS services,
prices are very high). I wonder if there is a family of opensource GIS software
products being developed?
I've looked into it to some degree, and it seems there is...
I can't pull all the links together right now...

Thanks.

This might get you started:
http://opensourcegis.org/
Or the Virtual Terrian Project:
http://www.vterrain.org/

Just looked at this URL. To quote them:

"The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form."
and:
"This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms."

If VTP can "easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form" with GIS coordinates for contour mapping, etc.
and present this data in 3D format, could it or some software derived from it take "3 D" data, i.e. fauna/flora-habitat-environment information and present it in some three dimensional way similar to the way Touchgraph-like tools do? Say, if you (the user) could change something represented in one of the three dimensions represented in the image on your screen (like, for example change Johnson grass
to pennyroyal) the data/image in the other two dimensions would change correspondingly (and maybe sprout branches of data to indicate
other possibilities for displaying relationships 3 dimensionally - maybe a data fractal would emerge to entrance the user.
Well, it's a tough row to hoe, so to speak. It looks like there are tools on VTerrain that can model forests. There are some garden design applications that can model a garden layout in 3d (often using cutout 2d images of plants, shaded, scaled, and placed based on their 3d positions) so not all 3d.
Anyway, it might be possible, but it's a major venture, in a rather different domain from a plant/design element database system. They definitely are keeping up with the technologies, but me thinks we're a few years off before systems like that are full fledged.

Also to note, Touchgraph isn't really 3d, but mimics some physics to make connections springy, which happens to be a reasonably efficient way to arrange connected nodes of a graph. I really like the tactile feel of these systems. Now I'm just trying to grok how we expand upon single property linkages to visualize more complex connections and networks.

Related to my notion of using PIW DB and GIS for market farmers, permaculturists and homesteaders is my notion of exploring plant culture methods on farmland (gardening) where data on existing land contours, land features, microclimates, drainage, exposure, land features and slopes, existing plantings, edge zones and native vegetation are cataloged and processed for graphical presentation of possibilities for planting locations and cultural methods (raised beds, row, orchard). I thought that with knowledge of this sort one could try out
exotic planting schemes such as permanent notill raised beds in mandala and/or keyhole gardens laid out in a fractal pattern.
It does seem like it may be possible to take a Lat/Long point, and derive from it slope, aspect, average precip., temperature, photosynthesis, etc and perhaps pare down the suggested plants to match within their ranges, soil needs, etc. You'd probably want to use a ranking system on this, so the results were somewhat fuzzy. Don't want to completely exclude a potential plant based on roughly recorded range, etc. If we could connect to the USDA Plants DB, we could check a plant was ruled invasive in a state or county, so designers were aware of what to be cautious of. Found a few databases of GIS linked vegetation cover info today. Seems like there definitely are interesting projects out there, but how easy it is to meld and play with the data is another question.

I have an array of exotic tractor tillage equipment that I can use to create the beginnings of gardening systems of this sort. I am about 2 acres of intensively prepared, very weedy soil into it so far.

On another note, the OneVillage Foundation seems quite interesting. Creating eco-villages in Africa and elsewhere, bridging the digital divide, selling fairtrade products to boost the local economies, and I see mention of permaculture in one of the documents.

Something that I thought of when I was developing OpenPermaculture was that it would be really cool to link up with actual sites in "developing" countries, have a digital camera over there. Get photos of the site, have people back here study and research, and generally help in the design process via the net. It seems like this would be an interesting thing to play with. Not necessarily as part of our project, lets keep the scope reasonable :-) ...you'd develop an archive of the transformation of the site, get documented case studies, get research done, etc. There's actually a website doing something like this called Nabuur, see nabuur.com.

Also found http://www.thinkcycle.org/ out of MIT. Interesting projects and ideas if you feel like surfing for a bit. Might be interesting to post this project and goals, see what advice we get from there.

OK, tangental discussions.

Cheers,
Bear





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