2016 - A year in review

Not a bad year overall and thanks to the readers of the blog.

A new team member, 3 peer reviewed journal papers accepted, awarded over €200k in funding, one project finished, one project approaching successful conclusion, a new project kicking off in Mar 2017, an ERC application submitted, multiple conference and workshop presentations, an MSc class graduated, 3 trade journal articles, an RPAS consumer guide and some big Copernicus news to be announced in the new year from Tim.

Roll on 2017 and lets see if we can get even more done.

Christmas Tree Revetment

What a great use of old Christmas trees. These are placed along coastal or river regions experiencing erosion and help the native grass (maram or otherwise) to take hold again and keep the bank together. The example in the link is for the River Dee and fisheries board - I have not come across many examples of this applied in coastal regions in Ireland although plenty online for the US. I wonder is their any harmful side introducing that many Christmas trees to a river area - like changing the pH of the soil. Possible that only happens with live Pine.

The Fall of Hyperion

Bad news on the Hyperion front. 

I posted in a burst of enthusiasm earlier in the year about free satellite hyperspectral datasets that I had found for Ireland. The Hyperion sensor on the EO-1 satellite was recording long strips over agricultural areas in Munster and Connaught. NASA had even agreed to let users request it to capture new sites of interest - which i did almost immediately for a number of our coastal projects around the country. Unfortunately due to a GPS malfunction on the satellite and also I am presuming problems with cloud cover, none of my coastal test sites were ever successfully mapped. Really disappointing as this would have been an invaluable source of hyperspectral imagery for Ireland. To make matters worse - we won't have a chance for a repeat request as the satellite is being decommissioned this month. 

No more free hyperspectral satellite tasking for geospatial researchers.

Propaganda Maps from the 20th Century

Some excellent WW1 and WW2 propaganda maps here compiled by the National Geographic - you really need a monitor to appreciate them - it won't load properly on a phone. I could look at these for hours, there is just so much going on. Would be nice prints for a wall.

What is in the hands of "Ireland" in this WW1 one? A bottle for sure - but what are the tweezers? 

Portugal looks quite content in this one - only country in Europe that is.

And is this rifle supposed to be a scale bar?

Drone Prosecutions

At any of the UAV/UAS/RPAS/SUA/Drone events one of the major talking points has been regulation and prosecution of unlicensed operators. This is a major concern, whether it was at the kick off meet of the UAAI, or the SCSi Working Group on RPAS, or at Survey Ireland, or Drone X. Each week videos pop up on youtube which have been captured in clearly unsafe conditions, by unlicensed operators. This understandably annoys the operators who are playing by the rules and the example is regularly given of Director A who needs 30 seconds of aerial footage for the next episode of their show but needs it this week. They ask Operator A who has a license but cannot get the required permissions in time. He regrettably turns it down,. Operator B who has no insurance, no regard for safety or proper operating procedure gets the 30 seconds of footage and so the business. The word on the street was that a prosecution was coming - but the news broke in the last few weeks that the DPP thought a drone prosecution was too heavy handed. This makes me concerned that we will not get on top of regulation any time soon and the people who play by the rules will be the losers. We have had a drone crash - total IMU failure - and others will too so these safety procedures are essential. As a colleague of mine regularly says - "if you have never crashed your drone you're not flying enough".

I remember coming up to Christmas last year the rush to get the new regs in place as the IAA were expecting a flurry of drone purchases over the holidays (I even saw one for sale in the pound shop). It seems over 6,000 drones have been registered in 2016 alone! 

Hydro International article online

Our article on 'Improving satellite derived bathymetry' is now online. This covers some of the work with GSI and TechWorks Marine but also the more recent INFOMAR shortcall 2015 results.

Kildare FM

Of course it wouldn't be Christmas without my annual call with Kildare FM about our role in 'mapping for santa'. Tune in tomorrow at 14:20 to hear all about it.