Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘GIS’ Category

Roadside leafiness from space – Part 2

In the last post in this series, I showed some pretty maps of roadside leafiness, created by extracting NDVI values near roads – like this: This time, I want to move away from pretty images to some numerical analysis – and also move from a local scale to a national scale. My first question was: […]

Roadside leafiness from space – Part 1

If you just want to see some pretty maps of roadside leafiness then scroll down…otherwise, start at the top to find out how I did this. I’ve recently started doing a little bit of satellite imaging work again, and started off with a project that was inspired by a post on James O’Connor’s blog. He […]

Quick way to delete columns from a shapefile

I haven’t posted anything on this blog for a long time – sorry about that. I’ve been quite ill, and had a new baby – so blogging hasn’t been my top priority. Hopefully I’ll manage some slightly more regular posts now. Anyway, on with the post… I recently needed to delete some attribute columns from a […]

Resources for learning Python for Remote Sensing – or switching from IDL

I’m supervising an MSc student for her thesis this summer, and the work she’s doing with me is going to involve a fair amount of programming, in the context of remote sensing & GIS processing. She’s got experience programming in IDL from a programming course during the taught part of her Masters, but has no […]

Software choices in remote sensing

I recently read the article Don’t be a technical masochist on John D. Cook’s blog, and it struck a chord with me about the way that I see people choosing software and programming tools in my field. John states “Sometimes tech choices are that easy: if something is too hard, stop doing it. A great […]

How to: Convert OSM waypoints defining polygons into Shapefile

Today I got sent a file by a colleague in OSM format. I’d never come across the format before, but I did a quick check and found that OGR could read it (like pretty much every vector GIS format under the sun). So, I ran a quick OGR command: ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” Villages.shp Villages.osm […]

Configuring legends in ArcGIS – a (slightly) less horrible way to do it

I must say that I’m not a huge fan of much of the ArcGIS interface – and I particularly dislike the many levels of nested dialog that you have to use to change various options while creating printed maps. Some of the worst of these are the dialogs for inserting, styling and configuring legends – […]