For Andromeda, we generated tiles surrounding a given location with information on the percentage of various forms of landcover for that particular area. The process utilized (through ArcGIS’ API) is recorded here.
There were challenges with interactions with the ArcGIS server that made this a very time-consuming process and prevented us from collecting the data in real-time to match the exact location at which people took their images. The OSU ASC ESRI-SUPPORT team suggested we look into using PyQGIS as an alternative to ArcPy. (QGIS is an open source GIS application.)
More notes from them:
Different types of spatial analysis are accomplished in PyQGIS (and QGIS generally) using processing algorithms. The main QGIS documentation has a section dedicated to processing algorithms for different operations. There is one for overlap analysis, which “calculates the area and percentage cover by which features from an input layer are overlapped by features from a selection of overlay layers,” and this is essentially what Tabulate Intersection does in ArcGIS. (Tabulate Intersection was essentially what we were using.)
He did not think Python libraries like Shapely and GeoPandas had anything that mirrored Tabulate Intersection.
The question is if anyone has tried doing something similar, and if so, what have you used? If not, would anyone be interested in trying to piece together a more open-sourced method of doing this that may allow for real-time calculations/access?
The second part of it is access to landcover data at granular levels. We were able to use a layer specific to NJ, but I’d imagine something like it exists for other states as well. The tiles we generated for Andromeda proved useful in the QUEST program’s analysis of pollinators, and it’d be great to see if we could expand it to be available across the country.
For Andromeda, we generated tiles surrounding a given location with information on the percentage of various forms of landcover for that particular area. The process utilized (through ArcGIS’ API) is recorded here. There were challenges with interactions with the ArcGIS server that made this a very time-consuming process and prevented us from collecting the data in real-time to match the exact location at which people took their images. The OSU ASC ESRI-SUPPORT team suggested we look into using PyQGIS as an alternative to ArcPy. (QGIS is an open source GIS application.) More notes from them:
The question is if anyone has tried doing something similar, and if so, what have you used? If not, would anyone be interested in trying to piece together a more open-sourced method of doing this that may allow for real-time calculations/access?
The second part of it is access to landcover data at granular levels. We were able to use a layer specific to NJ, but I’d imagine something like it exists for other states as well. The tiles we generated for Andromeda proved useful in the QUEST program’s analysis of pollinators, and it’d be great to see if we could expand it to be available across the country.