Branner Blog

The Everglades are in the news again, with Congress for the first time (11/9/07) over-riding one of President Bush’s rare vetoes. At issue was a $23.2 billion water projects bill, which includes funds for restoring the damaged southern Florida ecosystem. For a vivid picture of the Everglades landscape and ecology before decades of development changed it, read Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s “Everglades, River of Grass.” The first edition came out in 1947, a revised edition in 1978, a 50th anniversary edition in 1997, and the 60th anniversary edition this year. Douglas was a lifelong champion of the ‘glades, and a long life indeed she lived: 108 years. Even in old age, she was a riveting speaker. Before she was an environmentalist, Douglas was a journalist (for her father’s Miami Herald newspaper), and her book contains lively stories of early Florida history and flamboyant personalities. Although untrained in science, she had taken a course at Wellesley in environmental geography, so she saw and wrote about the Everglades as a complex system, whose fragile aquatic balance was greatly impacted by agriculture (sugar-growing in the south and dairy-farming in the north), drainage, channelling, and “improvement.” She grasped the intricate interplay between environment and public policy, and strove to influence policy in the direction of preserving the unique and precious region she cherished.

Are you going to be in or around Chicago between now and March 2008? If you love cartography, you will not want to miss the Festival of Maps. Over 30 organizations are joining in this city-wide celebration by hosting exhibits, talks, and meetings devoted to cartography. The Field Museum has mounted an exhibit entitled “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” featuring a stone Inca map, a landscape vessel from Peru, a eucalyptus bark map from Australia, as well as more conventional maps from the 1200s to the present. The University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit featuring the spectacular Roman “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae dating from the mid-1570’s. The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted an exhibit of historical maps of Paris. Other events can be found at the Festival of Maps Web site.

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Branner has many e-books for you to peruse.
Visit this page to see what we have and what’s on the way.

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.