Branner Blog

Satellite imagery and digital mapping has changed the way we interact with and know about large-scale disasters. A case in point are the Southern California wildfires.

The San Diego Office Of Emergency Services is releasing maps each day of the burn areas, the perimeters of the fires, and the evacuation areas.

NASA has a series of satellite images showing the spread of the fires over the past few days over all of Southern California, one taken from the Space Shuttle Discovery as it rose into orbit on Tuesday.

Google is offering content from KPBS, which can be loaded into Google Earth.

The US Forest Service has released infrared imagery showing the locations and intensity of the fires in San Diego. I have yet to be able to access this imagery. My guess is the traffic has been so heavy that the site is down. Keep trying to get in over the next few days.

On a related task, we were trying to figure out what’s going on with the record for the microfilm version of the Phosphate Rocks of Arkansas (everyone talks about the future of print, but you really don’t hear much about the fate of microfilm…). It turns out that our print copy is now findable on Google Books, and it also turns out that Google Books has a nice new embeddable clip sharing feature. Run your mouse over the icon to the right of the hand and you can “save, send or embed a section of the page.”

The Phosphate Rocks of Arkansas By John Casper Branner, John Flesher Newsom

Clip away.

In August, I visited the lovely and evocative Walden Pond, where I examined a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, strolled along the shore to his original homesite in the woods, saw and heard commuter trains across the water, and watched a kayaker and swimmers brave the early morning chill. On the plane ride east, I had begun re-reading “Walden”, considered by many to be America’s first environmental classic text. Published in 1854, it sold poorly during the author’s lifetime, but since then has appeared in more than 200 editions. Readers today are faced with a dilemma/opportunity: which edition to choose.

Style-wise, my favorite has illustrations by Thomas Nason. Info-wise, there are several annotated editions, and also versions with introductions by such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Edward Abbey, and Bill McKibben. If you want a lightweight edition, there’s a Bantam Classics paperback with an introduction by Joseph Wood Krutch. And there are various digital copies, of which I recommend the editions available to Stanford affiliates through ebrary.

Check out SULAIR’s offerings at ebrary. Use the “advanced search” tab, with title “Walden”, to locate particular phrases in the text, e.g. “lives of quiet desperation,” “castles in the air,” “cats in Zanzibar.” With digital books, you don’t have to flip pages to find these passages. Just enter your search terms, and let the computer hone in.

A couple of things that have passed my way lately that you all might enjoy, in no particular order:

• The USGS goals for the coming decade [Science via geonet]. A nice synopsis if you’re curious about the future directions of research at the USGS.
• From the Electronic Green Journal, an article by Fred Stoss with suggestions for further reading/viewing to understand the science behind An Inconvenient Truth.

Join us at the Stanford University Libraries Open House on October 17th from noon to 4pm. Mike Keller, the University Librarian, will talk about the future of the libraries, there will be tours of the robotic book scanner, and information from 20 libraries across campus. Win prizes including an iPod Nano (courtesy of Apple and the Stanford Bookstore), books by Stanford authors, iTunes and Stanford Bookstore gift certificates, and more.

The Open House will take place in Green and Meyer Libraries this Wednesday from noon to 4pm. We look forward to seeing you there!

The University of Michigan’s Global Land Cover Facility has spent years building up an impressive collection of remotely sensed satellite data including ASTER, MODIS, and Landsat. The collection now tops out at over 15 terabytes of imagery, all of which can be downloaded for free. A list of data and derivative products is also included. Check here first for historical worldwide satellite coverage.

Cloud Stratification, Baikal Lake Shore; PARIS Jean-Daniel, LSCE/IPSL

The image above comes from Imaggeo, the online open access geosciences image repository of the European Geosciences Union. The archive is searchable by topic, geographic region, and keywords. If you’d like to share geo-related imagery with others, go ahead and submit some photos to this repository. The images are distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons license–they can be used by other scientists and the press, but you retain full rights to your images. To learn more, visit Imaggeo, or Creative Commons.

Stanford readers, we now have access to the Lyell Collection from the Geological Society of London. Check it out and let us know what you think.

From the site:

The Lyell Collection , created to mark the Geological Society of London’s 200th anniversary in 2007, represents one of the largest integrated collections of online Earth science literature available. Bringing together Journal of the Geological Society, Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology, Special Publications and key book series on a single electronic platform,the Lyell Collection is a unique resource for researcher and student alike.