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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] Re: openGIS / locales

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Re: openGIS / locales
  • Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 10:14:55 +0100

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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