A Library of Georeferenced Photos From the Field

Every day hundreds of scientists, students, and environmentally cognizant citizens take photos to document the rocks, glaciers, soils, forests, wetlands, croplands, rangelands, livestock, birds and mammals they observe, as well as events like droughts, floods, wildfires, insect emergences, and the infectious disease outbreaks that occur throughout the world. What if it was a possibility to have access to all of those photos? Can they be accessed in a timely fashion to be shared with students, educators, and researchers all over the world? What is the cost of those photos not being shared by those who take them?

Thankfully, researchers from the University of Oklahoma developed and released the Global Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library (http://www.eomf.ou.edu/photos/map.php), a web-based database designed to be an archive of the photos taken by educators, researchers, and regular citizens who wish to share photos from the field that have been tagged with exact-positioning data.

Changes in land use have a significant impact on the environment. Tracking this use by using georeferenced photos helps give a visual picture to the numerical data, allowing scientist, policy makers, and the general public to put a visual image to the data, and they are an invaluable source to use for documenting land change and usage.

Note: The Global Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library is specialized for scientific applications and educational purposes. 

To view georeferenced photos go to:

http://www.eomf.ou.edu/photos/map.php

         

"A Library of Georeferenced Photos From the Field"

Xiangming Xiao, Pavel Dorovsky, Chandrashekhar Biradar, and Eli Bridge, Center for Spatial Analysis, Department of botany and Microbiology, University of Oklahoma, Norman; E-mail; Chandra.biradar@ou.edu