Uninspired

📑 International Climate Initiative (IKI) Land Use Plan: Green Initiative in the Heart of Borneo (HoB) Report

Tool: ArcGIS Pro 2.9.3 Technique: Overlay analysis, visualization via remote sensing technique

These maps are developed to aid or supplement the Natural Capital Valuation (NatCap) initiative. As cited by WWF:

An essential element of the Natural Capital Project is developing tools that help decision makers protect biodiversity and ecosystem services.

One of the site included in this initiative by WWF-Malaysia is the Heart of Borneo (HoB). Specifically for this exercise, the visualization of policy and land use eventually become the data input utilized in the tool InVest that generates the models and maps for the economic values of ecosystem services within the landscape of interest.

The generation of the data mainly includes superficial remote sensing to assess the status of the land use in the respective concessions using Sentinel-2 satellite image with specific band combination to identify tree cover, particularly mangrove forest.

diy geo app

Esri has been releasing more and more MOOC over the span of 2 years to accommodate its increasingly large expanse of products within the ArcGIS ecosystem. 

But of all the MOOCs that I've participated in, 'Do-It-Yourself Geo App MOOC' must be the most underrated ones produced by Esri Training. The functionalities highlighted within the MOOC took the anthem right off their recent Esri UC 2020 that went virtual. The curriculum includes:

The creation of hosted feature layer (without utilizing any GIS software medium like ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro).

The basics of the ArcGIS Online platform ecosystem:

hosted feature layer >  web map > web app 

Basically, to view a hosted feature layer, you will need to drag it onto a 'Map' and save it as a web map.

Conventionally, web map suffices for the visualization and analytical work for the likes of any geospatialist who are familiar with Web GIS. 

But this time, Esri is highlighting a brand new web map product called 'Map Viewer Beta'. Why beta? Cause it is still in beta version but so sleeky cool that they just had to let every have a shot at using it. Truth be told, Map Viewer Beta did not disappoint.

Even so, Map Viewer Beta still has some functionalities that have yet to be implemented. 

Using web map to visualize data, configure pop-up, execute simple analysis and extending it to Map Viewer Beta interface 

Utilizing Survey123 for crowdsourcing data; the first level of citizen science and creating a webmap out of it.

Creating native apps using AppStudio for ArcGIS; no coding required. 

Some tidbits on accessing the ArcGIS API for JavaScript

I love how cool it is that this MOOC actually shows you step-by-step on how to use the new Map Viewer Beta and explain the hierarchy of formats for the published content in the ArcGIS Online platform

I have established my understanding of ArcGIS Online ecosystem 3 years back but I do find it awkward that such powerful information is not actually summarized in a way that is comprehensible for users that have every intention of delving into Web GIS. And Web GIS is the future with all the parallel servers that could handle the processing/analysis of large amount of data. ArcGIS Online is a simplified platform that provides interfaces for the fresh-eyed new geospatial professionals. 

It is quite well-know for the fact that there has been some criticism as to the domination of Esri within the GIS tools/resources within the geospatial science industry, but I believe it is something we could take as a pinch of salt. Not everything in Esri's massive line of commercial products are superior to other platforms but it is a starting point for any new geospatialists who wants to explore technologies there are not familiar with. 

All in all, this MOOC is heaven-sent. For me, I have been playing with the web apps and web maps for close to 4 years and I can attest to the fact that it covers all the basics. For the developer's bit, maybe not so much as going through it in a distinct step-by-step but it does stoke the curiosity as to how it works. The question is, how do we make it work. Now that's a mystery I am eager to solve. 

I'm going to put this on my ever-expanding to-do list and think JavaScript for another few more months of testing out this ArcGIS API for JavaScript implementation. Tell me if you wanna know how this actually works and I'll share what I find out when I do.

For those who had missed out on this cohort, fear not. This MOOC runs twice a year and the next cohort is going to be from Feb 17 to March 17 2021. The registration is already open, so don’t hold back and click the link below:

Do-It-Yourself Geo Apps

Do register for a public account before signing up or just click 'Register' at the MOOC's page and it's open the open to either sign in or 'Create a public account'. It was a blast and I'm sure, if you've never used any of the feature I've mentioned above, you'll be as wide-eyed as I was 3 years ago. :D

Till then, stay spatially mappy comrades!

P/S: If you complete all the assignments and quizzes, you'll get a certificate of completion from Esri. Which is pretty rad!

📚 Nature in the Heart of Borneo (2020)

Tool: ArcGIS Pro 2.6.1

Technique: Annotation, Labeling and Symbology

A series of maps were created for the book published by WWF-Malaysia and FORMADAT (Forum Masyarakat Adat Dataran Tinggi Borneo) back in 2020 called Nature in the Heart of Borneo.

This book was meant as a guide to some of the natural attractions at Northern parts of Sarawak. If it was clear, Northern Sarawak is where the we have our very own highlanders which consist of primarily the Lundayeh/Lun Bawang, Sa'ban and Kelabit people. Some of the beautiful settlements up in the north that should not be missed are Ba'kelalan and Long Semadoh. They have beautiful homestays and even more beautiful landscapes with trekking activities lined up for tourists. And this is the culmination of ardent passion by my two absolutely wonderful colleagues, Alicia Ng and Cynthia Chin.

Most part of the maps were made using readily available basemap provided by Esri in their Living Atlas. But in entirety, many of the features and details are drawn manually within ArcGIS Pro. Like many other mapmakers out there, the labeling feature is horrendously temperamental and I either end up using annotations instead.

In summary, technically, there are 2 lessons learned here:

1️⃣ Establish concept or pick an idea before you start drawing

A concept of the map and palette should be established at the earliest stage possible. And don't just throw the task of making maps and split them evenly between cartographers. They won't have similar ideas or similar interpretations of the concept. It'll only give you double the pain of creating the maps again from scratch.

2️⃣ Omit borders

If you're making maps for books, don't border trying to make borders and fully utilize the whole layout. In the end, you'll need to export out your maps and they will resize it anyway and it'll compromise the maps you created. As if it wasn't graining enough in the first place, it'll look absolutely microscopic by the time they're done.

Society of Conservation GIS Scholarship Award 2020

33rd National Geoscience Conference 2021 (NGC 2021)

Tool: ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Pro Deep Learning extension, Python, Jupyter Notebook Technique: Deep learning; semantic segmentation, cartography, remote sensing

The presentation of abstract outlining the implementation of deep learning in land cover classification across the Borneo island. It uses the Sentinel-2 image data and the band combination that differentiates the bareland, tree cover as well as waterbodies and croplands whilst training the U-Net model using the referenced data collected.

Please find the abstract published here:

Warta Geologi, Vol. 47, No. 1, April 2021

The presentation slide can be accessed at the following link 👇🏻:

Taskade: Multi-platform planner and task manager

The year 2021 is looming over us and I am dying to have some sort of control over what I could be doing for the next 365 days. While 2020 had been a year of 'character building', I discover alot of things about everything around me and myself. For starters, I am an avid planner; surprisingly. But it does not mean that I follow through with them. See what I did right there? I am admitting the truth behind self-study and lifetime of learning.

With alot of things I have planned to breathe new life to my own progress and time management, I went hunting for some interesting stuff in the internet for inspiration and try-outs. And guess what? I found one and I think most people may have been using this already in full swing because the review is 5 ⭐!

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

Taskade is simply a project/team management tool. Ah ah ah...before you write me off, hear me out. Taskade is aimed to help teams to plan, organize or manage their tasks and prioritize output for decision-making. It is simply an interactive planner sans organizer sans dashboard that sees where you're at with your work, what you've managed to get done and communicate tasks among people in your team; IF you have a whole team working on some sort of project. Hence, the chat capability that is implemented in this tool.

At my job, I work in a team of only 2 people; me and another colleague, and we're the regional programme unit which is apart of the bigger unit of team mates spread elsewhere in other regions. So, just because your unit is small, it doesn't mean that your task load complements your pint-sized manpower. So, I've been looking for platforms that could help me organize our productivity and ensure high-quality output. Just because technology is more advanced, it doesn'e mean there isn't any learning curve, right? So I tried just about anything under the sun for project/team management; Asana, Slack, Discord, the pre-existing Google..., but none of them could nail all shortcomings precisely; due dates, assignment of tasks, progress, sub-tasks, interactive commenting, multiplatform sync, brainstorming etc. Channels in Slack gives me headache -- same with Discord, and Telegram channels is too 'static' and 'one-way street' for me to view everything.

I found Taskade after trying to find a complementary 'Forest: Focus' extension at the Google Chrome extensions marketplace. There are plenty of interesting high-quality extensions as of late and I am pleasantyl surprised because earlier this year, most of them were quite 'beta' in their functionality. I saw a 'Bullet Journal' extension that someone raved about and another individual commented: 'Isn't this Taskade?'. The curious cat I am, I googled it and was not disappointed. What are the main keywords that hooked me?:

FREE

Google-integrated

Remote work environment advocacy

Multi-platform

What features do Taskade actually have? ✨

Given that it is an All-in-One Collaboration tool, it is understandable if the GUI is pleasing on the eyes. I do understand that first-impression is everything; color, packaging, fore-front information and visual, but it was really the functionality that delivers me to salvation. If you're an active member of Dev.to, then you'll catch feels with this theme that Taskade delivers. Key features in Taskade that you should try out:

Task list

Collaborators invitation feature (no organizational handle required)

Chat feature (with a call feature!)

Workspace feature (nothing new but...I'll get back to this later)

5 interchangeable neural-forest task list templates; List, Board, Action, Mindmap and Org Chart -- seamless with no error.

The capability to utilize this very platform as a presentation or exported into PDF task list printout.

Safe to say, Taskade buried me alive with the curation of beautiful images for the background; again...not relevant but needed to be said.

The Live Demosandbo lets you try it out for yourself although, at first glance, you may be wondering what on earth you are looking at. But it won't take long before you discover that it is quite intuitive.

Did I mention you can download and access it from just about ANYWHERE? Laptops, browser extensions and even smartphone apps. I'm not kidding when I said Taskade is multiplatform; they work on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Linux. Currently, I am testing it out using the Chrome extension and installed the app in my Android phone. It works like I expect it to so far.

What is the difference between the FREE and PAID version? 💰💰💰

As I just mentioned, you can sign-up for it for free and use it for life...for free. The priced version is seemingly there to accommodate the file size per upload you require; as of now. For free plan, you can upload 5MB file per upload while the paid version increases the size to 50MB per upload. Both versions offer:

Unlimited storage

Unlimited tasks entry

Unlimited project creation

Unlimited collaborators addition

The development team is currently adding more functionalities such as Project Activity Tracking, Integration to Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive as well as Email Integration -- available for free.

Although it is mentioned that the free version of Taskade includes unlimited tasks, collaborators and all essential features, it was also mentioned that you will need to upgrade if you exceed the workspace limits which doesn't actually have any entailing elaborations which I will try to dig soon enough. But safe to say that if you are a single person using this tool, you are considered a team of 'one' where your shared projects in workspace to your 'editors' are still considered free. Only workspace the addition of workspace members are billed. This may imply that there are certain limits to how many individuals you can add into your workspace before you are required to upgrade. So far, visually, I see that the limit may be 2 people that makes up to 3 people per workspace (including yourself). You can find some details to pricing and FAQs here:

Taskade | Simple Pricing

Personally, I don't think USD5 is a hard bargain if you're self-employed and work with external parties collaboratively. If you're apart of an organization, feel free to ask for demo from them. Discount is possible if you're from a nonprofit or educational institution.

How I use Taskade? ☕

Well, given that it was free to sign-up, I tried it out straight away and I'm happy to report that I successfully managed to use it without having to google nor view any how-tos. That is a good thing! In fact, I am quite elated with just how easy it is to use this tool that I have used my personal email to help centralize and manage my work and personal work side-by-side. If you prefer some satellite view of your progress and all the task you need to complete to clear off certain objective, this is not a bad organization.

So I created 2 workspace: one for work and one for my personal tasks. Then I just collate all my tasks into monthly projects.

My personal tasks involve me updating my study progress and curating stuff I like online into my Tumblr blog.

Create studyblr workspace

Create new project in the studyblr workspace to organize and brainstorm Tumblr contents I plan to create and post: Tumblr: 2021/01.

Utilize the Mindmap template from all the options of templates shared and start creating the and organizing the content I want and tasks I need to execute to develop them.

Et voila! There all there is to it! It is easy peasy and you can start adding due dates as reminders and links as resources as well as hashtags for filtering in future. Check out some drafting I did so far in the screenshots below!

For more updates, check out their Updates page that fully utilizes Taskade to share all the updates straight from December 2017 till present and the chat function is there available for you to ask the Taskade team about the feature updates directly. Now that's awesome cause you know something's good if the one who makes them, actually uses them.😎😎😎

🌱 Google Earth Pro 101

Google Earth Pro is one of the most powerful freely available software one can use for location investigation. If you're a non-tech GIS user who needs to know just enough to get your work going, then let's hit the ground running with this tutorial for starters.

🟢 Beginner-friendly.

🆓 Free with no hidden monetary cost.

🖥️ Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

home is where you are

There is a moment where base maps just couldn't or wouldn't cut it. And DEMs are not helping. The beautiful hillshade raster generated from the hillshade tool can't help it if the DEM isn't as crisp as you would want it to be. And to think that I've been hiding into hermitage to learn how to 'soften' and cook visual 'occlusion' to make maps look seamlessly smooth. Cartographers are the MUAs of the satellite image community. 

I have always loved monochromatic maps where the visual is clean, the colors not harsh and easy for me to read. There was not much gig lately at work where map-making is concerned. The last one was back in April for some of our new strategy plans. So, when my pal wanted me to just 'edit' some maps she wanted to use, I can't stop myself with just changing the base map. 

The result isn't as much as I'd like it to be but then, we are catering the population that actually uses this map. Inspired by the beautiful map produced by John M Nelson that he graciously presented at 2019 NACIS; An Absurdly Tall Hiking Map of the Appalachian Trail. What I found is absurd is how little views this presentation have. The simplicity of the map is personally spot-on for me. Similar to Daniel P. Huffman as he confessed in his NACIS 2018 talk; Mapping in Monochrome, I am in favor of monochromatic color scheme. I absolutely loathe chaotic map that looked like my niece's unicorn just barf the 70s color deco all across the screen. Maybe for practical purposes of differentiating values of an attribute is deemed justifiable but surely...we can do better than clashing orange, purple and green together, no? 

So...a request to change some labels turn into a full-on make over. There are some things that I realized while making this map using ArcGIS Pro that I believe any ArcGIS Pro noob should know:

Sizing your symbols in Symbology should ideally be done in the Layout view. Trust me. It'll save you alot of time. 

When making outlines of anything at all, consider using a tone or two lighter than the darkest of colors and make the line thinner than 1 pt. 

Halo do matter for your labels or any textual elements of your map.

Sometimes, making borders for your map is justifiable goose chase. You don't particularly need it. Especially if the map is something you are going to compact together with articles or to be apart of a book etc. 

Using blue all the way might have been something I preferred but they have the different zonations for the rivers, so that plan went out the window. 

And speaking of window...the window for improvement in this map is as big as US and Europe combined. 

zero to pandas

There are alot of Python courses out there that we can jump into and get started with. But to a certain extent in that attempt to learn the language, the process becomes unbearably long and frustratingly slow. We all know the feeling of wanting to run before we could learn how to walk; we really wanna get started with some subtantial project but we do not know enough to even call the data into the terminal for viewing.

Back in August, freeCodeCamp in collaboration with Jovian.ai, organized a very interesting 6-week MOOC called Data Analysis with Python: Zero to Pandas and as a self-proclaimed Python groupie, I pledged my allegiance!

If there are any expectation that I've managed to whizz myself through the course and obtained a certificate, nothing of that sort happened; I missed the deadline cause I was busy testing out every single code I found and work had my brain on overdrive. I can't...I just...can't. Even with the extension, I was short of 2 Pythonic answers required to earn the certificate. But don't mistake my blunders for the quality of the content this course has to offer; is worth every gratitude of its graduates!

Zero to Pandas MOOC is a course that spans over 6 weeks with one lecture webinar per week that compacts the basics of Python modules that are relevant in executing data analysis. Like the play on its name, this course assumes no prior knowledge in Python language and aims to teach prospective students the basics on Python language structure AND the steps in analyzing real data. The course does not pretend that data analytics is easy and cut-corners to simplify anything. It is a very 'honest' demonstration that effectively gives overly ambitious future data analysts a flick on the forehead about data analysis. Who are we kidding? Data analysis using programming language requires sturdy knowledge in some nifty codes clean, splice and feature engineer the raw data and real critical thinking on figuring out 'Pythonic' ways to answer analytical questions. What does it even mean by Pythonic ways? Please refer to this article by Robert Clark, How to be Pythonic and Why You Should Care. We can discuss it somewhere down the line, when I am more experienced to understand it better. But for now, Packt Hub has the more comprehensive simple answer; it simply is an adjective coined to describe a way/code/structure of a code that utilizes or take advantage of the Python idioms well and displays the natural fluency in the language.

The bottom line is, we want to be able to fully utilize Python in its context and using its idioms to analyze data.

The course is conducted at Jovian.ai platform by its founder; Aakash and it takes advantage of Jupyter-like notebook format; Binder, in addition to making the synchronization available at Kaggle and Google's Colab. Each webinar in this course spans over close to 2 hours and each week, there are assignments on the lecture given. The assignments are due in a week but given the very disproportionate ratio of students and instructors, there were some extensions on the submission dates that I truly was grateful for. Forum for students is available at Jovian to engage students into discussing their ideas and question and the teaching body also conducts office hours where students can actively ask questions.

The instructor's method of teaching is something I believe to be effective for technical learners. In each lectures, he will be teaching the codes and module requires to execute certain tasks in the thorough procedure of the data analysis task itself. From importing the .csv formatted data into Python to establishing navigation to the data repository...from explaining what the hell loops are to touching base with creating functions. All in the controlled context of two most important module for the real objective of this course; Numpy and Pandas.

My gain from this course is immensely vast and that's why I truly think that freeCodeCamp and Jovian.ai really put the word 'tea' to 'teachers'. Taking advantage of the fact that people are involuntarily quarantined in their house, this course is something that should not be placed aside in the 'LATER' basket. I managed to clear my head to understand what 'loop' is! So I do think it can solve the world's problem!

In conclusion, this is the best course I have ever completed (90%!) on data analysis using Python. I look forward to attending it again and really finish up that last coursework.

Oh. Did I not mention why I got stuck? It was the last coursework. We are required to demonstrate all the steps of data analysis on data of our choice, create 5 questions and answer them using what we've learned throughout the course. Easy eh? Well, I've always had the tendency of digging my own grave everytime I get awesome cool assignments. But I'm not saying I did not do it :). Have a look-see at this notebook and consider the possibilities you can grasp after you've completed the course. And that's just my work...I'm a standard C-grade student.

And the exciting latest news from Jovian.ai is that they have upcoming course at Jovian for Deep Learning called Deep Learning with PyTorch: Zero to GANS! That's actually yesterday's news since they organized it earlier this year...so yeah...this is an impending second cohort! Tentatively, the course will start on Nov 14th. Click the link below to sign-up and get ready to attack the nitty-gritty. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

And that's me, reporting live from the confinement of COVID pandemic somewhere in a developing country at Southeast Asia....