California Burning

Crews are exhausted. Every municipality has lent firefighters to adjacent, or further, counties. The sky was brown all day — a breeze has kicked up tonight; maybe it will be better tomorrow.

Maybe it will be worse.

They get a blaze out then it rekindles somewhere else.

It’s still, folks, only June…

Green Almonds

For Beth, and M and J.

Davis Open Mapping Party

Yesterday I got an email announcement about a Davis OpenStreetMap mapping party to be held today. The OpenStreetMap project is one of these collaborative open data projects that I’ve known about for some time, but haven’t really dived into it, so I was glad to have the introduction to it today. The impetus behind this project is that there is very little street map data in this world that is free in the sense of being legally unencumbered, allowing one to make full creative use of it. The online mapping services provided by Google Maps and Mapquest are good examples of not free-as-in-speech data, but so is map data from most government mapping agencies, e.g. the Ordnance Survey. (The United States is an exception here, since federally-produced mapping data is in the public domain.)

Since everybody and their dog now has a GPS unit, some enterprising geeks came up with the idea to start mapping the world’s streets with their GPSs and make all the collected map data freely available for any use. Thus was born the OpenStreetMap project, which has really taken off in the almost four years it has been underway. As of June 2008 there are over 22 million kilometers of highways and byways mapped in the system, and over 32,000 registered users who are able to add to and update the map, which is essentially a cartographic wiki.

For some reason the project’s founder, Steve Coast, was in town today so a few of us gathered together at the café Delta of Venus at 10 AM to plan our mapping session. Thanks to the public domain TIGER data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, there is good street mapping for most places in the United States, including Davis, already uploaded into the OpenStreetMap, but there are always details to fill in — no maps are ever finished. We decided to work on bike paths and other paths. I opted to head up to the North Davis Greenbelt and collect GPS tracks for every bit of the bike paths there, including the connectors to all the side streets. There is already some mapping of these bike paths in the OpenStreetMap, but there are definitely bits to add.

It was a very hot day today (up to 102° F) and I was glad to return to Delta of Venus for lunch at 1:30 PM. There I got some exposure to the map editing tools but have yet to download the track data off my GPS, let alone start the process of editing the map online.

It’s a great project. There are lots of technical details to learn, much of which are of substantial cartographic interest (e.g. how do you classify the features you’re trying to map), and all completely fascinating from a geographer’s point of view.

Sierra Valley Trip

This weekend we went on the Yolo Audubon Society’s annual trip to Sierra Valley and Yuba Pass. This is the fourth time we’ve done this overnight outing, this time staying in a motel in Portola yesterday evening. Here are some sketches from our trip. At left is a scene from Sierra Valley, and at right are a couple of botany highlights from Yuba Pass.

Colima Warbler for Team Bird Year

The Boothroyds have come to the end of their big year by bike, topping it off with the Colima Warbler. The one that was my 700th ABA bird.

Some stats, from before they made the big hot climb to the Chisos Basin (dated June 3):

Days on the road: 348

Number of days that we have had to drink Budweiser rather than a beer with some flavour: 2 (the last 2 days in West Texas – tonight there will be NO beer!)

Number of bird species identified: 534

Distance cycled: 12,674 miles (20,405 kilometers)

Hottest day: 104 F (40 C) – heat index about 120 F (48 C)

Coldest day: 20 F (-7 C) – don’t know the wind chill, but it was wind chilly

Number of days that we have melted into blobs of fat on a desert highway: 0

Number of days in a tent: 298

Number of flat tires: about 70

Number of meals of rice & beans: too many (and we love rice and beans)

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These guys are INCREDIBLE. Thank you, dear Boothroyds, for being such an example to the rest of us…

Gardens Of The Rock

Nobody expects to find gardens when making a visit to Alcatraz Island. Yet the varied inhabitants of the island, starting with the military personnel when it became a fort in 1853, and then the prison officers and their families living on the island between 1934 and 1963 brought plants over to try to civilize the island. These gardens fell into neglect, until in 2003 the Garden Conservancy started restoring them in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Yesterday the island was quite crowded, a fine sunny day on San Francisco Bay, and well into the tourist season. (Alcatraz gets about 1.3 million visitors annually.) This is the season when the western gulls take over all bits of plant life — I think there are about 1500 nesting pairs on the island. And on the western slope of the island there is some fairly lush growth that hosts many nesting black-crowned night herons and snowy egrets.

Here are some historical photos of the gardens of Alcatraz.

Escape to Alcatraz

Tomorrow we’ll be going to Alcatraz Island. I think the last time I was there I was four; I got my picture in the paper. There were still inmates, then. (My mother tells me that was San Quentin. I have never been to Alcatraz before.)

We’ll be participating in PRBO’s International Migratory Bird Day Festivities. But it’s also International Drawing Day, so I’m hoping to get some sketches of gulls and other nesting seabirds while we’re on the island…

Land Of Olives

There are fledgling efforts in this state to promote agri-tourism. Yolo County, which leads the country in direct sales of agricultural products to customers, seems a good place to start. Perhaps surprisingly, Yolo County has become a center for artisanal olive oil production. This directory lists 13 olive oil producers in Yolo County, including Yolo Press, home of the only working olive mill in Yolo and Solano counties, UC Davis, who got into the olive oil production business a couple years ago when their grounds crew came up with a creative way to deal with the hazard fallen olives would create on bike paths, and others such as Frate Sole Olive Company, Hillstone Olive Oil, and the Story Olive Oil Company.

Acorns in the Laundry

For the past few years my officemate Jim has been raising valley oak seedlings from acorns in any place he has been able to find, including his own laundry room. The campus student paper the California Aggie reported today on his considerable efforts at native oak restoration.

Here Comes The Heat

An unseasonably strong high pressure ridge sitting over the Eastern Pacific is resulting in a heat wave here in Northern California. The high temperature for the next three days is expected to reach 102° F. Today it wasn’t that hot; some high cloudiness circulating in from the north moderated it.

This Saturday we will be providing radio support for the Davis Double Century, the 200-mile bicycle event that starts in Davis and circles through five counties. They are not going to have an easy time of it in this heat.