Jan 9
I have been thinking about how ones brain interprets spatial stats. For example, when talking about spatial scale, the popular media often quote, ‘an area the size of Belgium/Wales/Texas’ and with that they try and invoke in your mind the impressive scale of whatever they are describing.
The most recent example I discovered is a report about a newly designated marine protected area in the South Orkneys. The area stands at 94,000km
2- an area the size of
Portugal. Impressive you may think….
This led my train of thought to marine protected areas in general and how much of the sea has been targeted for protection. While this isn’t the arena to rattle on about UN mandates and conservation conventions, the rough amount of sea that would ideally be protected from us human beans is 10% - an area the size of
AFRICA (now we are talking). For me the size of Africa seems a lot, and also, I like to
see stuff to believe it.
I thought the easiest way to visualize this was to displace all the African nations across the seas. So that’s what I did.
Using a simple random placement algorithm I picked up each country in Africa and slung it in the sea (with a little help from ArcObjects). I constrained the randomness so not to allow countries to overlap with each other or the coastline and outputted a simple map to see the results. For me, I think it looks like a large part of the sea needs protecting and if these targets which have to be met in two years are going to be, there is a pile of work twice the size of Belgium to achieve it.
Caveats: I wouldn’t recommend designing the marine protected areas network on this analysis, there is no account of whether protecting a Kenyan shaped area in the Atlantic would be useful or not- better than what we currently have I suppose, but as my biology teacher regularly told me ‘you must do better…’
Oct 11
Question: Are local people in the most important areas for biodiversity likely to be able to connect to the internet?
Why do I ask? Well, we want biodiversity knowledge, protected areas knowledge, species knowledge. We assume the best knowledge is local knowledge and the cheapest way to capture that knowledge is harnessing the tentacles of the internet. We want to focus on areas of the world that are most important for biodiversity and are facing serious threat. So in true back of the envelope style, I have taken two sources of information. One, biodiversity hotspots from Conservation International, the other, a random google search 'internet usage by country' and squeezed them together (with a splash of ESRI Country basemaps) to do a quick comparison.
The techy part is really simple (or so it seemed). I simply wanted to know which country polygons intersected the biodiversity hotspot polygons. The challenge, I didn't have a floating license of ArcGIS (hurry up with the license checkout ESRI PLEASE!) so thought I would use Qgis. Unfortunately the select by location tool crashed each time I used it. Maybe it was too big a job for my laptop, so I simplified and dissolved where I could- again fail (2 hours wasted...). So, with my last breath I imported the whole lot into postgis and did it all there with no fuss, 6 second query, bob's your uncle. Anyway, here's the interesting bit. How well connected are the most import countries for biodiversity? Well, not very well. Out of the top ten countries for internet usage only 2 contain biodiversity hotspots, in the top 20, there are 6 with hotspots. The long and short of it is, at this moment, there is serious internet capacity problems in many areas where biodiversity is high. So does that mean we should drop the internet as a tool to collect better biodiversity information? Of course not. Given connection to the internet is as important for global economic growth as electricity, the growth and expansion of people all over the planet hooking up to the internet whether through the ground or via mobile networks is going exponential. Africa alone is set to increase its internet usage by 3000% in the next 2 years. So even if its not in these important regions this very minute- check back in a year (even a few months); it will be.
Caveats: The main caveats are this is truly back of the envelope stuff- I make no guarantee it's correct or the data are the most suitable. I have simply squeezed together data that is freely available (well done CI) and see what sticks and hope people find it interesting enough to talk about. I know hotspots don't include all important species or threats and the internet usage data are a few years out of date. But hey, this is the first blog so only my mother will read it anyway (hi mum).
