Mark Mulligan, Reader in Geography at King’s College London, has been gathering an incredible collection of KML geography layers, but until recently did not have the server resources to make them public. That’s changed, so here they are, below.

I’ve only had a limited time to play with them, but what’s obvious is that these layers are highly detailed, thorough and labyrinthine. Check out the Amazon layer, for example: There is visualized information available both at the regional level and at specific hyperlocal places (with some highly detailed aerial photography).

Geographers and university geography departments should take a close look at this collection, as there is sure to be plenty of material here that is useful for their own projects. Perhaps other geography departments could follow Mark Mulligan’s lead and publish their own geographic resources — to help inform the public on the current climate change debate, but also to enthuse future generations of geographers…

Here is Mark’s outline of the available layers

These are public domain environmental data aimed at improving the information (raw and visualised) available to the scientific and conservation communities. The data are freely accessible to all for non-commercial use. Some of the data have been on a slow server for more than 18 months but I have been unable to publicise them until I improved the server capacity, which I have now done. Many of the datasets are works in progress and comments or contributions are welcome. The data are visualised in Google Earth and, in many cases, links to the actual downloadable GIS files also provided. Region based network links are used so zoom in to see the information. I list the main ones here with the ones most relevant to the user community listed first. Another couple of very large ones will become available within the month. All can be accessed through this list (where future databases will also be added) but each also has a shortcut URL as indicated below:

The data are held at King’s College London, Department of Geography:

www.ambiotek.com/places [online] – 5 million geographic features (places etc from the GNS, editable with ‘geowiki’)

www.ambiotek.com/landandwater [online] – 30m resolution outlines of coasts and water bodies from the shuttle radar topography mission

www.ambiotek.com/sealevel [online] – 90m resolution near global analysis of coastal indundation (sea-level rise) scenarios under different levels of sea level change, based on the SRTM data

www.ambiotek.com/seasons – [online] animation from the MODIS blue marble new generation at full resolution (500m pixels) – showing the impact on vegetation and snow of the passage of seasons over the earth and more or less cloudless colour consistent imagery

www.ambiotek.com/topoview (collaborative with the CGIAR) [online] – 90 m hole filled shuttle radar topography data and visual overlays

www.ambiotek.com/paa (collaborative with NASA JPL) [online] – the protected area archive – historic (1972-2007) false colour satel;lite imagery for global protected areas (natural colour version online by end of july)

www.ambiotek.com/amazon (collaborative with INPA) [online, growing] – a pan amazon database including annually updated landsat imagery for looking at land use change and other environemental issues affecting the Amazon

www.ambiotek.com/1kmrainfall [online] – a 1km rainfall climatology including monthly and annual totals, intensities and derivatives Based on data from the tropical rainfall monitoring mission

www.ambiotek.com/rainfalltimeseries [online] – near global 3 hourly rainfall data since 1998 at 0.25 degree spatial resolution including trend analysis (drying, wetting) and seasonality analysis, based on TRMM/GOES data

www.ambiotek.com/cloudforests [online] – tropical montane cloud forests distribution and threats

www.ambiotek.com/fiesta [online] – hydrology and climate of central america

www.ambiotek.com/tbs [online] – very high resolution (sub centimeter) aerial photography and other data for a unique lowland amazon rainforest research site

www.ambiotek.com/oriente [online] – oil related activity in the (western) Amazon

www.ambiotek.com/trees [online] – near global tree cover and tree cover change 2000-2005 based on MODIS VCF product

You can reach Mark Mulligan via this page.

I’m in London for the weekend to see the niece. This morning we went to the Tate Modern’s Global Cities exhibit — a social geographer’s dream and a wonderful place for toddlers to explore. It’s a bit like Google Earth unplugged: population density maps you can climb, and big glorious imagery of cityscapes on the walls. Worth a visit if you are in town (until August 27). Some pics below, but here’s the whole set on Flickr.

In Bahrain, the government of Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa for a time blocked Google Earth back in 2006 so you couldn’t see how big his and his cronies’ palaces were in a country with a chronic housing shortage. He has now just received a Scroll of Honour award from the UN’s Human Settlements Programme. What does that award recognize?

Its aim is to acknowledge initiatives which have made outstanding contributions in various fields such as shelter provision, highlighting the plight of the homeless, leadership in post conflict reconstruction, and developing and improving the human settlements and the quality of urban life.

You can’t make this stuff up. (Via …Or Does it Explode?)

Maps.google.ru goes live. The Moscow Times (a wonderful paper where I once had the pleasure of interning) has the backstory:

When Google Earth was launched in 2005, Russia was just one of many countries to warn that making so many geographical details available to the public represented a real security risk.

A Federal Security Service general said that this would mean terrorists would no longer need to reconnoiter their targets. “Now a U.S. company will do the work for them,” Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin said.

In what analysts say is a sign of the times, however, the government issued a directive in May that effectively lifted all of the old restrictions on access to “precise geographical data.”

Great to see Russia coming round to the enlightened view. I hope India’s government takes the cue and goes next in lifting these outdated restrictions.

Isn’t it annoying when everyone and their Drudge links to an article by the Federation of American Scientists noting the discovery of a new class of Chinese nuclear submarine on Google Earth, without actually linking to the submarine in Google Earth? It’d be like mentioning the existence of a cool new website but forgetting the URL. Ogle Earth will have none of it:-) Here it is.

And as it turns out, “Panther37” on Google Earth Community identified the very same submarine as a Jin-class way back in July 2006, a year before the “experts”.

Perhaps even more interesting is that the placemarks that started that paricular GEC thread were subsequently removed, with the thread initiator commenting “I won’t go into the reasons here why”. Gotta love the Google Earth Community base layer and the wisdom of its crowds, even despite occasional (self?-)censorship.

Seven months after it was “unannounced”, Leica Titan is now available for download as a public beta (Windows only), reports GCN. So what is Leica Titan?

“Leica Titan is positioned as a social network for sharing geospatial data, whether it’s imagery, terrain, features [or] 3-D models,” said Mladen Stojic, director of enterprise products at Leica. “We assume that individuals and organizations around the world have geospatial data that they want to share. Leica Titan is similar to some of the other media-sharing applications that we have for sharing music, pictures and other media files.”

Aha, so it’s a peer-to-peer geospatial filesharing application similar to Napster of old or Gnutella? It’s a bit more than that. Yes, you can share individual files with others that are online, but the coolest thing about Leica Titan is that it lets you load up various geospatial files to your own globe, called your “MyWorld”, and then share that globe with others that are logged into the network. You’re not quite sharing the live state of your virtual globe, as you have to publish a version, but it is getting there.

But why use P2P for sharing states and geospatial files? In the case of most music and movie files, people use P2P because these files are being shared illegally, and owners of central file servers would get sued by copyright owners. In other cases, P2P makes it more difficult for authoritarian governments to control the free flow of information. Is that Leica’s justification for it’s geo-P2P solution? No:

“We’re bypassing the need for a heavyweight server application and facilitating users within the social network to immediately share data for emergency response, where they really need that data turned around rapidly as opposed to having to wait for some IT manager to upload it onto a server, publish it and then tell everyone it’s available,” said Stojic.

Couldn’t that problem be solved more robustly by putting an automated centralized file server online? Google Earth Community and 3D Warehouse serve as models, minus the permissioning. P2P scales horribly. In case of a large-scale disaster involving many respondents, is P2P really the best solution, instead of, say, relaying to a server and then multicasting? And is requiring a Windows machine such a good idea in a disaster scenario, instead of, say, focusing on a cross-platform or web-browser accessible solution?

Regardless of the merits of P2P publishing for this kind of content, I think the concept behind sharing the state of your virtual globe certainly carries a big appeal and can be very useful, not just in disaster response scenarios but when making presentations remotely, whether for business or to grandparents. Indeed, Unype 0.2 for Windows lets you share individual KML and 3D Warehouse files in Google Earth.

Down the line, however, what I would really like is a robust solution where I can reveal the contents of “My Places” in Google Earth, perhaps by having it be linked to my Google account and mirrored on Google servers (just like my Gmail, where space does not appear to be a problem), and also update live the current object of my attention, as GE Sharing does.

Run, don’t walk, to one of the best articles yet written about how Google Earth does its magic:

How Google Earth [Really] Works

It is written by Avi Bar-Ze’ev, who was one of the developers on early versions of Google Earth, when it was still Keyhole Viewer. He starts off his series by looking at how Google Earth renders a 3D virtual globe, and he does this by explaining the various concepts underlying Google’s patent applications, some of which have been made public only recently.

(BTW, Avi also got a long response from NY State Assemblyman Michael Gianaris regarding his desire to censor imagery of infrastructure in Google Earth.

I think he still doesn’t get it — his argument is just wish-thinking: Google isn’t obligated to buy from (potentially censored) US imagery providers; the company could just as well buy it from foreign providers. And if Google and other US companies were compelled to censor their imagery or prohibited from using foreign providers, then there are plenty of map and globe competitors abroad that will and can provide the imagery.

Removing such imagery from Google Earth means that only those who are the most motivated get access (e.g. terrorists, who can use a number of alternate sources and who often have rogue government support) while concerned citizen loses a resource. Want to check if the local power plant is obeying zoning laws? Not if Google Earth has blurred it. Google Earth and other mapping services like it provide checks and balances for the public on their government. If that is taken away, then the terrorists have already won, to overuse that phrase.)