Blue Raster Blog

Partnering with the World Resources Institute, Blue Raster has developed an innovative tool to map the health of the southern forests of the United States.  More than 200 million acres of forests, stretching from Texas to Virginia, are under threat from suburban sprawl, coal mining and resource extraction.  Integrating YouTube, Flickr, WMS services, and KML, this Adobe Flex-based ArcGIS Server mapping application will support WRI’s initiatives of 1) increasing public awareness about these threats and providing useful information about the value of intact forest ecosystems, 2) identifying and developing options that direct economic incentive toward maintaining the health of these forests, and 3) tracking the execution of these initiatives and analyzing their progress.  For more information regarding the World Resources Institute Southern Forests for the Future Project please visit http://www.wri.org/project/southern-forests.

Visit seesouthernforests.org to learn more.

Blue Raster has created a new application for the Forest Carbon Index (FCI) which compiles and displays trends relating to biological, economic, governance, investment, and market readiness conditions for every forest and country in the world, and helps provide a reference for the best places and countries to make investments in forest conservation.  Designed by Blue Raster for Resources for the Future, and created using ArcGIS Desktop and the Flex API, this new application incorporates four different maps into a single tool that assesses the most  effective places to invest in forest conservation.  Resources for the Future hopes that this powerful tool will help policy makers and investors better identify where to invest their limited resources. For more information regarding the Forest Carbon Index please visit http://www.forestcarbonindex.org.

Blue Raster is pleased to annouce a partnership with Resources for the Future, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that conducts research on environmental, energy, natural resource and public health issues, to create an interactive mapping tool that will track and present the effects of climate change on populations around the world.  The application, created using ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 and Flex API, allows users to track historical environmental patterns around the world, as well as to predict the consequences on regions of various hypothetical scenarios, which could include factors of pollution control, energy and transportation policy, land and water use, hazardous waste disposal, climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem management, public health, and environmental challenges in developing countries.  We hope that this user-friendly tool will help generate support for Resources for the Future’s goals of improving environmental and natural resource policymaking worldwide. For more information regarding Adaption Atlas please visit http://www.adaptationatlas.org/.

Blue Raster has contributed an ArcGIS Server Flex API application for the World Wildlife Fund to support the Climate Change LEADS: Linking Environmental Analysis to Decision Support project.   The tool allows users to explore water quality patterns throughout the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. These results are based on quantitative landscape ecology and GIS techniques using existing and emerging data to perform an analysis of the spatial and temporal relationships between environmental factors and coral bleaching response to suggest patterns of resilience within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.  This is very specific to the Keys, but the scientific concepts if applied world-wide would provide one of the few “global” (near-shore environments) data sets and analytical capabilities. For more information regarding the World Wildlife Fund Coral Resilience Mapping Application please visit http://www.worldwildlife.org/.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has selected the Macro team, including Blue Raster as a substantial subcontractor, to implement the MEASURE Phase III Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) contract. Blue Raster has created tools, using ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 and Flex API, to allow widespread access to this data, which will dramatically improve usability and information accessibility.  The mapping application allows users to customize data sets for factors of region, years and household indicator, and then to view the results graphically. This $142 million, five-year contract will serve as the Bureau for Global Health’s primary demographic and health data collection effort. For more information on Measure DHS please visit http://www.measuredhs.com/start.cfm.

World Wildlife Fund officially released the new and dramatically improved WildFinder II.  This new version showcases ArcGIS Server 9.3.1, Adobe Flex, and Google Maps Flash API, which when combined, deliver a superior user experience. Blue Raster is proud to work with WWF to bring Web 2.0 technologies to the forefront of wildlife conservation.

 The Wildfinder application was designed by Blue Raster LLC lets users explore what species live where and select and print quick-maps of global diversity patterns.  The application incorporates WWF’s searchable species distribution database and information on these species into a user-friendly tool that will help conservationists target their efforts worldwide, scientists study global patterns of species diversity, teachers build curricula, students learn more about ecosystems and species, and nature enthusiasts plan excursions.  You can access the WildFinder at http://gis.wwfus.org/wildfinder/. Since science is constantly revealing new information about the world around us, new data will constantly be loaded into Wildfinder to provide the most comprehensive database of species diversity on the internet.