Day: March 9, 2011

Forest Business Strengthens Asset Management Capability with GIS

/ Matt Artz

Rayonier Inc. signed an enterprise license agreement (ELA) with Esri that enables the international forest products company to improve land management of its 2.4 million acres of sustainably managed forests. By securing unlimited access to geographic information system (GIS) software, Rayonier managers can make more informed and timely decisions about their timberlands while preserving the environment through sustainable forestry. Rayonier is the first timber real estate investment trust (REIT) in the nation to shift to this easy GIS software acquisition method.

The ELA software program simplifies procurement of essential GIS technology that can improve Rayonier’s business decisions. With the benefit of unlimited software deployment, Rayonier now has the flexibility to apply the exact geospatial solution needed to support key business processes. Rayonier planners and land managers can apply the technology to a wide range of forest management activities, including applications for site preparation, planting, stand maintenance, timber sales, harvest compliance, and land administration.

“In the face of changing markets, we need flexibility in our approach to land use and land management,” explained Eric Fanelli, Rayonier’s director of Land Support Services. “The ELA with Esri will help us bring together our forest management systems for a complete picture of our timber and nontimber assets. It will also help us quickly take advantage of business opportunities as they arise.”

“This ELA emphasizes our commitment to our relationship with Rayonier,” noted Peter Eredics, Esri’s forestry manager. “We see Rayonier’s innovative approach as a new standard for using geospatial technology to redefine and advance positioning on the forest products value chain. It supplies a fully integrated system that lets you easily author and analyze data, maps, and models for desktop, browser, or field mobile device applications.”

About Rayonier
Rayonier is a leading international forest products company with three core businesses: Timber, Real Estate and Performance Fibers. The company owns, leases or manages 2.4 million acres of timber and land in the United States and New Zealand. The company’s holdings include approximately 200,000 acres with residential and commercial development potential along the Interstate 95 corridor between Savannah, Ga., and Daytona Beach, Fla. Its Performance Fibers business is one of the world’s leading producers of high-value specialty cellulose fibers. Approximately 45 percent of the company’s sales are outside the U.S. to customers in approximately 40 countries. Rayonier is structured as a real estate investment trust. More information is available at www.rayonier.com.

[Source: Esri press release]

Situation Detection and Control using Spatio-temporal Analysis of Microblogs

/ Matt Artz

WWW 2010, April 26-30, Raleigh, NC

Vivek K. Singh, Mingyan Gao, and Ramesh Jain

“Large volumes of spatio-temporal-thematic data being created using sites like Twitter and Jaiku, can potentially be combined to detect events, and understand various ‘situations’ as they are evolving at different spatio-temporal granularity across the world. Taking inspiration from traditional image pixels which represent aggregation of photon energies at a location, we consider aggregation of user interest levels at different geo-locations as social pixels. Combining such pixels spatio-temporally allows for creation of social images and video. Here, we describe how the use of relevant (media processing inspired) situation detection operators upon such ‘images’, and domain based rules can be used to decide relevant control actions. The ideas are showcased using a Swine flu monitoring application which uses Twitter data.”

Visualizing Migration Dynamics Using Weighted Radial Variation

/ Matt Artz

GeoViz: Linking Geovisualization with Spatial Analysis and Modeling, 10-11 March 2011, Hamburg, Germany

Clio Andris and Frank Hardisty

“Directional flows created from an origin/destination matrix have been traditionally difficult to visualize because of the number of flows to be rendered in a small cartographic space. Because visualizing geographic flow dynamics are useful for understanding the complex dynamics of human and information flow that connect non-adjacent space, techniques that allow for visual data mining or static representations of system dynamics are a growing field of research. Here, we use a Weighted Radial Variation (WRV) technique to classify places based on their group’s radially-emanating vector flows. Each entity’s vector are syncopated in terms of cardinality, direction, length, and flow magnitude. The WRV process unravels each star-like entity’s individual flow vectors on a 0-360° spectrum, to form a unique signal whose distribution depends on the flow presence at each step around the entity, and is further characterized by flow distance and magnitude. The signals are processed with a supervised classification method that clusters entities with similar signatures or trajectories in order to learn about types and geographic distribution of flow dynamics. We use U.S. county-to-county human incoming and outgoing migration data to test our method.”