CENS Technical Seminar Series

Spatializing Your Data: A Lesson in the Open-Source GeoStack and GeoDjango for What's Invasive

Invited Speaker: Patrick Crutcher
Date: October 2, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: BH 4760

Abstract

This discussion will outline the design of an open-source web-based mapping system that is highly flexible to meet the data demands of citizen-science campaigns. Our test case for the system is the What's Invasive campaign, where users participate by using cell phones, cameras, and web forms to help locate invasive species of plants in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area. By leveraging the recent developments in open-source software for geospatial data, we have developed a system that is expandable and enables users to access GIS data layers, interact with submitted data, and utilize social-networking features. We will highlight common issues in the development of web-based GIS and how these issues are overcome using the open-source GeoStack and GeoDjango. This project was supervised under Eric Graham and Mark Hansen in collaboration with the National Park Service.

Biography

Patrick Crutcher is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. His research interests include spectral analysis of time series, spatial statistics, and computational statistics.