Blue Raster is proud to announce the launch of Global Forest Watch Pro beta, a decision support tool that empowers companies to monitor their supply chains for deforestation and fires with a focus on preserving the most sensitive landscape types. Companies can upload all of their of sourcing areas, farms, and supply sheds for analysis and view interactive maps and diagnostics displaying occurrences of deforestation, alerts for forest fires, land cover types. Each organization is provided a secure location to manage user access to their areas of interest to ensure that the right people are able to interact with the right data at the right time.

GFW Pro quote

Analyzing Areas of Interest

The public launch builds on the features available during the preview period and dramatically increases the speed of analysis of the user's areas of interest (AOI). Upon upload, the AOIs enter the analysis workflow which leverages AWS Lambda to calculate area-of-intersection with a variety of land-use and land-cover datasets. These intersecting areas are analyzed for tree-cover-loss since 2000, providing a detailed and nuanced view of conditions on the ground. With the latest iteration, Blue Raster leveraged AWS Dynamo DB to improve processing speeds by 700%, allowing GFW Pro to analyze hundreds of thousands of locations per day.

Improved Features

The latest update also provides users with an improved ability to manage locations within their account including:
- Sharing functionality to manage access to AOIs within an organization and send data to users outside the organization in the case of supply chains that include several companies
- Allowing users to re-analyze their AOIs at a click of a button if underlying data re updated
- The ability to upload locations in more geographic projections

Detailed Views

GFW Pro provides an unprecedented ability to view detailed environmental diagnostics of any Area of Interest (AOI) in a supply chain. The Forest Change Diagnostic presents a detailed breakdown of all deforestation since the year 2000 by a variety of global and regional specific land-use and land-cover types, such as WDPA Protected Areas, Peat, and Primary Forest. All data are displayed in intuitive interactive charts and are available for download. As Palm Oil Production is a major driver of deforestation, the Commodity Risk Diagnostic allows users to compare deforestation and fires within mills' supply sheds and empowers them to move palm sourcing away from the riskiest mills.

On the GFW Pro map, users have the option to view their data in the form of immersive, full-screen maps which highlight the geographic extent of surrounding environmental conditions. Additionally, users can sort this data by toggling numerous interactive layers, which are conveniently organized by categories such as forest change, land cover, land use, conservation, and more. It is also possible to monitor the conditions of distinct governmental units (such as states and provinces) or unique user-defined areas (through the polygon-drawing tool).

GFW Pro map

GFW Summit & Beyond

We are extremely proud of our work with Global Forest Watch and we look forward to attending the GFW Summit in this week in Washington, DC. We hope that this program advances supply chain management in the context of a changing natural environment, and that our users are better able to comprehend the human footprint of production across the world’s forests. Please check back soon for ongoing improvements to this application, as well as the release of other new and innovative mapping solutions.

In July 2018, Esri announced a new product called ArcGIS Indoors. Expected to be available for widespread use this year, ArcGIS Indoors provides 3D maps, data, and location information for indoor spaces. With indoor maps, building operators can more efficiently coordinate resources with their facilities and explore their data to operate more competitively.

How does it work?

ArcGIS Indoors places people and objects inside buildings such as corporate facilities, event venues, education campuses, and more. The indoor mapping system uses a building’s floor plans, indoor sensor networks, and other data streams to build a comprehensive map of any indoor space. It is designed to work seamlessly with other parts of the ArcGIS platform, Powered by ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal, ArcGIS Indoors can be accessed and used for visualization and analysis with other Esri applications.

Workshop to Explore the Indoors

Project Manager Christina Phang and GIS Analyst Danny Cassiday had the opportunity to work with ArcGIS Indoors at a hands-on workshop by Esri in Redlands, CA. They learned about converting BIM and CAD into ArcGIS Indoors Information Models and extracting site plans from Aerial imagery to create complete site scale maps. In addition, they completed a technical deep dive into creating and generating routable indoor networks, as well as publishing web and mobile apps. The rest of the team are excited to see what Christina and Danny have learned!

Get Started Today!

Let us help you deploy ArcGIS Indoors. Our team can assist with curating and preparing data for ArcGIS Indoors, authoring maps and scenes for ArcGIS Indoors Web and Mobile Apps, and configuration and deployment of Indoors Apps. We also provide custom solutions to extend ArcGIS Indoors, integrate it with third party systems, and customize the UI/UX (branding, colors, icons, images).

Learn more about how ArcGIS Indoors services and solutions can work for you.

The Washington, DC Office of Zoning (DCOZ) provides assistance and oversight for the District of Columbia Zoning Commission (ZC) and Board of Zoning Adjustment (BZA). DCOZ reviews and accepts applications and enforces zoning criteria. With the help of Blue Raster, robust mapping and GIS tools provide citizens with general understanding and transparency around these criteria, rules and regulations. In 2016, Blue Raster and DCOZ collaborated to create the DC Zoning Map of 2016 and the Historical Zoning Mapping Application. New in 2018, we are excited to announce the next application in the series, the 3D Zoning Map. This new interactive map uses the latest geospatial and 3D technology to provide both residents and developers a tool to navigate and plan the District’s landscape.

To assist developers with visualizing what their project will look like against the current landscape, the 3D Zoning Map allows users to delete current buildings, upload new projects, and perform Before & After and Light Study analyses. Using Esri’s ArcGIS API for Javascript, data from DCOZ and the DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) is added to a Web Scene. Additionally, users have the ability to view zoning information from the Zoning Handbook and link to their address in the official Zoning Map.

The 3D Zoning Map is an innovative public tool from DCOZ for citizens, developers, and agencies to collaborate and understand the zoning regulations in the nations Capitol.

“Our goal at DCOZ is to always be working towards greater transparency and to be increasing the amount of relevant information we can provide in interesting ways. It is our hope that the 3D Zoning Map will further demystify zoning and land use permitting in the District of Columbia and increase resident’s ability to participate in the process. We are excited to continue our partnership with Blue Raster through the release of the 3D Zoning Map.” Matthew Holden, Zoning Data Coordinator, Office of Zoning | District of Columbia Government

Hundreds of companies around the world have signed on to the United Nations (UC) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15: Life on Land and pledged to work towards zero deforestation by 2020. However, meeting these commitments requires the ability monitor deforestation throughout their supply chains. Global Forest Watch Pro provides each organization a unique, secure environment to monitor and analyze these supply chains, and also helps these organizations demonstrate compliance with commitments and policies.

The application builds on the success of past GFW initiatives and leverages the comprehensive list of authoritative datasets curated by the World Resources institute. Data are served to the application from a variety of locations, such as ArcGIS Server, Amazon S3, and Carto DB. Users can upload lists of over 1,000 custom Areas of Interest (AOIs), which are quickly analyzed for deforestation on sensitive areas and by regional landcover types. The application’s two diagnostics provide detailed historic deforestation measurements as well as industry specific risk scores. In addition, an alert dashboard provides real time monitoring capabilities and displays the latest GLAD Deforestation and VIIRS Fire alerts.

GFW Pro leverages AWS Lambda to provide the intensive computational resources needed to quickly analyze these large custom lists while keeping costs as low as possible. Using the latest serverless technology, the application is quickly able to spin up as much compute power as needed to analyze each list, and then shut them down just as quickly. This allows the application to scale horizontally and processes thousands of user uploaded locations a day.

We are excited to see the impact GFW Pro will have on monitoring environmental impacts and global supply chains.

Blue Raster is pleased to work with the World Resources Institute (WRI) on a recent initiative to release new datasets and tools on LandMark– an online, global platform providing maps on Indigenous and Community Lands. The new analysis features and data focus on measuring the impacts Indigenous Peoples have on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

LandMark Tree Cover Loss Analysis

According to a recent study, Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage at least 24% (54,546 MtC) of the total carbon stored above ground in the world’s tropical forests, a sum greater than 250 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global air travel in 2015. Additionally, Indigenous Lands that are legally recognized experience rates of deforestation that are two to three times lower than non-tenure secure lands, according to Peter Veit, director of WRI’s Land and Resource Rights Initiative.

“The new data and analysis features on LandMark take the platform to a new level by not just showing the presence and legal situation of indigenous and community lands, but also their specific contributions to protecting the environment and the threats that they face from outside pressures such as deforestation, concessions, infrastructure development, and more.”

Katie Reytar, a research associate with WRI’s forest program.

Now, anyone can calculate the amount of tree cover loss in specific Indigenous and Community Lands on-the-fly, and learn more information including land cover composition and tree cover density. Additional datasets on the site include:

Intact Forest Landscape and Soil Organic Carbon
Pressures, including Mining and Oil Palm concessions, and Major dams
Land Cover & Change, including annual Tree cover loss and gain all available on a global scale at 30m x 30m resolution

To build the updated site, Blue Raster harnessed the power of ArcGIS Online, an entirely web-based mapping platform that allows organizational access to datasets. By leveraging ArcGIS Online, WRI can add, remove, or edit maps in a matter of minutes and publish their changes instantaneously.

Blue Raster also leveraged WRI’s Global Forest Watch MapBuilder application template to overhaul the design of the map. The map features an improved user-friendly navigation and analysis pane. The MapBuilder template allows anyone with an ArcGIS Online account to turn custom maps into interactive web applications. As part of the project, additional functionality was imported into the MapBuilder core, all of which is formally written in the documentation for anyone to add their own customizations to the template.

See LandMark’s new tools and datasets at www.landmarkmap.org.

Our Work

GFW Pro: Managing Deforestation Risk in Commodity Supply Chains

Analyzing Areas of Interest

Improved Features

Detailed Views

GFW Summit & Beyond

Explore the Indoors with ArcGIS

Workshop to Explore the Indoors

Get Started Today!

3D Zoning in Washington D.C.

Towards Zero Deforestation with GFW Pro

Protecting Indigenous & Community Lands With LandMark