Slashgeo

The Ogle Earth blog and All Points Blog links to a SFGate article dicussing how desktop satellite tools are changing the way environmentalists work. From the article: "But for environmentalists, Google Earth has turned out to be much more than another gee-whiz software development. Instead, it's starting to look like a killer app that could change the power balance between grassroots environmentalists and their adversaries."

dct writes "Cartography has an entry about an animated gif map of the greening of the planet between 1999 and 2002 from its Globcarbon project. From the entry: "This is part of ESA’s attempt to chart ten years of the Earth's vegetation. ... In processing terms we had about 45 terabytes of input data and 18 terabytes of output data...""

Geography Matters describe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency EnviroMapper webmapping tool. Here's EnviroMapper. From the blog: "EnviroMapper is a powerful tool used to map various types of environmental information, including air releases, drinking water, toxic releases, hazardous wastes, water discharge permits, and Superfund sites. Select a geographic area within EnviroMapper and view the different facilities that are present within that area. Create maps at the national, state, and county levels, and link them to environmental text reports. You can even insert dynamically created maps in your own Web pages."

A couple of posts at Google Earth Blog talk about the use of Google Earth for sharing and visualing scientific environmental data. The Ocean Drilling Database in Google Earth shows colour-coded placemarks representing boreholes of different drilling programs, with links to attribute information and reports. A second post talks about a special issue of Popular Science on the Future of the Environment in Google Earth. Both of these examples demostrate possibilities for using GE to integrate scientific research. If scientific journals required a subission of a KML file with research manuscripts, a global view of research activities would quickly emerge, enabling collaborations and greater synthesis of research results.

Google's Lat Long blog informs us the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's is using Google Earth's KML format to publish air quality data. From the EPA Air Quality page: " State and county summaries grouped by major source sectors are available for each of these pollutants: * Carbon Monoxide * Lead * Nitrogen Oxides * Volatile Organic Compounds * Particulate Matter * Sulfur Dioxide [...] It contains facility-level information for the seven major point-source sectors listed below. [...] * Cement Facilities * Chemical Manufacturing * Electric Generating Units * Natural Gas Pipelines * Oil and Gas Production * Petroleum Refineries * Pulp & Paper Industries" Some related previous stories below. Update: 11/30 15:05 GMT by S : It seems Canada also offers that kind of data for the public, see comment below.

Some not-so-closely related geoblog entries. First is Spatial Sustain linking to an article showing correlation between the spatial distribution of fast food restaurants and obesity in Canada. Very Spatial discuss MapEcos a site mapping U.S. industrial pollution. And finally if you have some time during the holidays, APB links to an article about the Traveler IQ Challenge online game, I admit I tried the game some time ago and its simplicity and educative components charmed me. From the MapEcos article: "It offers information on the environmental performance of more 20,000 industrial facilities across the country. Visitors use an interactive map to reveal government data on toxic pollution as well as information from the facilities themselves on what they are going to protect the environment, being gathered by the site's developers." Several related stories below.