In the interest of dissemination of data products to fisheries management agencies, the fishing community, and the general public the Multispecies Research Group of The Virginia Marine Institute of Marine Science is now providing online access to catch data via an interactive mapping application, Fishery Analyst Online (FAO).  

The web GIS application allows querying the catch data based on species, date, individual length, sex, maturity stage, disease and displaying information about the number of individual caught or the total biomass. Point data can be aggregated in grids of a user defined size. Charts displaying catch by state, research cruise, month and length-frequency histograms are also generated.  

Currently available data are being collected under the Chesapeake Bay Multispecies Monitoring and Assessment Program, ChesMMAP started in 2002 and the NorthEast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program,  NEAMAP started in 2006.  

These programs were developed to assist in filling data gaps, and ultimately to support stock-assessment modeling activities at both single and multispecies scales, maximize the biological and ecological information collected for several recreationally, commercially, and ecologically important species and to quantify geographic and seasonal distribution of these species.  

To access the web GIS application visit the VIMS website:

We have already mentioned the issue of peak conventional oil, but oil is not the only non renewable resource we are consuming at ever increasing rate disregarding the fact that we live in a finite planet with finite resources.

Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the availability of metals and the data they provide highlights the need to re-think technology and consumption.

He estimates that we have about 10 years before we run out of viable indium, extensively used in making flat screen TVs. Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram.

The same goes for many other rare or becoming "rare"  metals such as platinum, tantalum, antimony and even the more common zinc, copper, nickel and the phosphorus used as fertiliser. Many renewable sources of energy rely on the availability of some of these minerals including fuel cells, solar panels and wind turbines. So just what proportion of these materials have we used up so far, and how much is there left to go round? Getting the exact number is not easy as both annual global consumption and extractable amounts can only be estimated. But the best estimates made with available information by this group of scientists should have drawn some attention.

We here feature a map showing where the main reserves of minerals are located around the world together with the consumption rate by average western citizen and estimated time it will take for the reserve to run out. Resources grabbing has always been at the base of most political tensions and wars.

Read more here

The Vegetation Continuous Fields dataset provides proportional estimates for vegetative cover types: woody vegetation, herbaceous vegetation, and bare ground as a 250 meters resolution grid.

The product is derived from all seven bands of the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor onboard NASA's Terra satellite.

The continuous classification scheme of the VCF product may describe areas of heterogeneous land cover better than traditional discrete classification schemes.

While traditional classification schemes indicate where land cover types are, this VCF product is great for showing how much of a land cover such as "forest" or "grassland" exists anywhere on a land surface.

Concurrently to the above product, a Global land water mask was created at 250m spatial resolution and released on August 2009. It was generated from remotely sensed data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and data from the MODIS instrument. It represents a vast improvement over the 1km spatial resolution product that proceeded it as it corrects numerous errors in locations of rivers and identifies whole new landscapes of small lakes in the far North.

To download the dataset visit the Global Land Facility website.

Dramatic interactive satellite images to see parts of the north-eastern coastline of the United States before and after the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy were produced by a NOAA and Google collaboration and are available on the ABC news site.

You can hover over each satellite photo to view the before and after comparison.

To contribute to its environmental commitment Mappamondo GIS has run in 2012 a series of free seminars on sustainability in the "World Café" open format.

We covered subjects such as natural resources availability, peak conventional oil, energy sources and EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested), the ecological and carbon footprints, fundamental human needs, system resilience, programmed obsolescence, limits of the growth economic model and the GDP index, green washing, industrial agriculture and alternative food production systems including permaculture.

Stay tuned for further news on these subjects!