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Environment

EDF Map of "Dirty" Heating Oil Usage in NYC

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, heating systems cause 50% more pollution in New York City than cars and trucks.  EDF obtained data from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection in early 2009 showing which buildings in the city use the "dirty" No. 4 or No. 6 heating oil, as opposed to the relatively cleaner-burning No. 2 oil or natural gas.  This Flash-based map, created from that data, shows a building-by-building status of heating oil in use, as well as pending applications for fuel changes.  In addition, this map features an address search widget so that you can look for a specific building directly.

URL: 
http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=49624

Crowd-sourced water quality map

Submitted by jim on Thu, 2009-09-10 10:00

WaterGoodness is a new site allowing users to share and find water quality reports across the United States.  The site combines water quality and pollution data from a variety of government sources with visitor reports of their local water quality.

GreenSpaceMap displays nearby environmental features

By searching the US Environmental Protection Agency's database, GreenSpaceMap offers visitors the ability to locate environmental threats in their neighborhood or region.  Locations like Superfund sites and brownfields are visible once you type in a starting address.  This is also an entry in the Sunlight Labs Apps for America contest.

URL: 
http://www.greenspacemap.com/

California Fires on Google Earth and Maps

Submitted by jim on Mon, 2009-08-31 15:18

The Google Earth blog today included several links to near-real-time maps of the California wildfires, visible in Google Maps and Google Earth:

For those of you without access to Google Maps or Google Earth, CALFIRE (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) has plenty of up-to-date information on the fires, including frequently-updated incident maps covering the entire state.

iGMT: Interactive Mapping of Geoscientific Datasets

"This program is intended to make working with the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) easier. iGMT provides a graphical user interface for GMT and is written in the Tcl/Tk computer language. Besides supplying a user friendly way of handling GMT, iGMT comes with built-in support for many different geoscientific data sets, such as topography, gravity, seafloor age, hypocenter catalogs, plate boundary files, hotspot lists, CMT solutions etc."

An interactive mapping tool with a built in datasets.

URL: 
http://www.seismology.harvard.edu/~becker/igmt/

CRAN Taskview GIS Spatial Analysis Tool

A good website to read up on it is MapCruzer! and CRAN's site. This tool can use geostatistics and spatial regression as well and read and write geodata. It also has special tools for disease analysis and ecological analysis.

URL: 
http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html