As the unprecendented Midwest floods continue to play havoc with people’s lives and property, one of the hardest hit is the farm sector. With millions of acres of farmland under flood waters, farmers are facing billions of $ worth of crops losses. However, all is not lost for these farmers. Uncle Sam does offer a little bit of help. According to USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), the agency tasked with providing crop damage assistance, what was a one time farm disaster aid, has been made permanent in the latest farm bill. So how much aid is available?

Based on a complicated formula a farmer who lost 35% or more of his crop to natural disasters may expect approximately about 25% of the market value of the lost crops. While searching for the detailed farm aid data, the FortiusOne data-team came across this interesting data-set on the FSA website. Its a set of excel spreadsheets, that shows natural disasters by counties between 2005 and 2007, which would help farmers figure out whether they are eligibile for the crop damage assistance. The list of disasters includes drought, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, hail storm, winter storm, excess heat, excess moisture, lightning, insect infestation and (crop & plant) disease.

The only thing not mentioned, but is sure to be covered, is damage due to earthquake and volcanoes. Shown below are the 3d-maps of the results of geocoded natural disaster events by counties in the lower 48 state counties for 2007, 2006 and 2005. Colors indicates total number of natural disasters while the height indicates the count of types of disasters. Thus brighter shades of red mean more number of disasters.

Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2007 Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2006 Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2005

You may download data/shapefiles for these maps from Finder! by clicking on the links below.

FSA,USDA, Lower 48 eligible counties for Federal Disaster Assistance, USA, 2007

FSA,USDA, Lower 48 eligible counties for Federal Disaster Assistance, USA, 2006

FSA,USDA, Lower 48 eligible counties for Federal Disaster Assistance, USA, 2005

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Popularity: 14% [?]

After a marathon of 50 plus primaries/caucuses while raising record sums of campaign money and more than a year and half of campaigning that had more twists and turns than a roller coaster, Obama clinched the nomination after crossing the threshold of requisite number of delegates on 3 Jun, 2008 and received the full endorsement last Saturday, from his once bitter rival, Clinton. No doubt, for a young 46 year old black gifted candidate and a one term senator from Illinois this is a cause for celebration and a little R&R. However, the path-breaking presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party cannot afford to rest on his laurels.

And why is that? Let’s look at the landscape of state level wins/losses. The 3-d map below shows the share of Obama vote in the lower 48 states. The height of raised polygons in the shape of the states with shades of blue/purple and green represent Obama’s share of votes, while the dark red/brown and beige/wheat hues represent Clinton states.

Considering the map above, Obama campaign would do well to realize the challenges that they now face in the race for the White House, both in the states that Obama lost to Clinton (CA, NY, PA, OH, FL, AR, TN, IN etc.), and the states that he won handily (SC, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, NC, MT, NC, NE, ND, ID, OR, WA, VA, MD, MO, UT etc.). Obama campaign will have to compete with McCain in all those states that are shown in shades of green. It also does not bode well for him that the states that he won in the primary (blue and purple) traditionally vote for a Republican president.

The difficulties he will encounter become visible when one analyzes the landscape of voting patterns in the primaries at the sub-state level such as counties and congressional districts. The map below was constructed from dozens of data-sets available on the Finder!, while the data for the map was compiled from more than 45 on- and off-line sources.

Much of the county level data came from election divisions of each state’s office of SOS (Secretary of State), while the congressional district level data was scraped from from the mother of all election information sites, TheGreenPapers.Com and a few state Democratic parties and news papers. The map shows share of Obama votes by county and by congressional districts, a hybrid born out of the necessity of geocoding the default data available for different jurisdictions in the lower 48 states.

The sub-state level primaries voting patterns with bluish hues are where Obama did well. The areas with the orange and red hues where Clinton did well are the so called “Guns and Religion strongholds“. With Obama’s 50 state strategy, these are the same places where Obama campaign will have to spend enough time and money for the general election campaign. As is apparent from the map, the the rival campaigns will compete with Obama in blue hued areas, at the same time some of the independent 527s could swift-boat Obama by playing up Obama’s pastor problems in the red/orange hued Clinton country. In brief, what Obama campaign has experienced so far is just a primer to the challenges they will have to face during the General Election campaign.

All of the data for these maps, including county and congressional level data is available on Finder!, except for North Dakota and Wyoming, the really red states that appear blue in these maps, mainly because Obama’s win in the democratic primaries and whose respective SOS (Secretary of State) offices have not posted the primary results data yet. For the rest, you may search/download/map the state/county and congressional district level data on Finder! using tags such as ‘elections’, ‘primary’, ‘presidential primary’, ‘democrats’ and ‘politics’.

Popularity: 21% [?]

GIS Blog discusses the launch of the Acrobat 9 maps feature. The program receives support for the new PDF maps from ArcGIS 9.3. An additional benefit to the feature is that the free Adobe Reader also supports the mapping features, creating the possibility for quicker adoption than we’ve seen with GeoPDF.

Who wants to be a member of the new geospatial coalition? According to GIS Lounge, URISA released a press release revealing the creation of the Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO). COGO, currently made up of 10 geospatial organizations, and provides a forum for those concerned with national geospatial issues.

A SARS Mapping Web site uses GIS as a vital tool for investing the cause and spread of deadly diseases in the world. Geography Matters reports that ESRI China developed the site to track where reports of SARS cases have been filed. Currently the site is inactive due to the end of the epidemic.

Geospatial Semantic Web Blog (GSWB) deems Geohash a useful algorithm for encoding mapping coordinates. GSWB claims that the Geohash algorithm constructs URL or URI “point” locations easily. The algorithm is also advantageous in building simple spatial index and spatial search.

The 2008 Summer Olympics has brought quite at stir in Beijing. City8, a company based in Shanghai China developed a streetview imagery for thirty Chinese cities, including Beijing. The company develops and markets virtual tour software and solutions, allowing individuals and companies to produce colorful VR contents on their own.City8 hopes to release an English version before the Olympic Games.

Popularity: 15% [?]