Latest news with #ArcGIS
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Weekend warriors yank out invasive plants to save L.A. River
The Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve suffers from many of the ills that might be expected of a natural area located in the middle of the nation's second-largest city, including litter and even biohazards such as discarded needles from nearby drug use. But on Saturday morning a few hundred volunteers had another culprit in their sights: Rhamphospermum nigrum, a nonnative plant better known as black mustard that has flourished in the 225-acre reserve and the wider Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area. The plant, with its four-petaled yellow flowers in bloom, fills the basin's meadows and paints a bucolic picture that belies what it really is — an invasive weed that crowds out native plants such as sage and poppy that are crucial to the health of the basin, its natural wildlife and the Los Angeles River that runs through it. "It does look harmless, but it becomes a mono crop, and this is the main enemy to biodiversity," said Dan Mott, environmental educator with Friends of the Los Angeles River, which held the event with the California Native Plant Society and San Fernando Valley Audubon Society. "The native species can't be here, and all the birds and the insects that are supposed to be in this area, they don't want the mustard." The grasslands also capture less carbon and aren't as effective as native species in filtering runoff that enters the river, he said. The plant is native to North Africa, temperate regions of Europe and parts of Asia, and it is believed to have been introduced hundreds of years ago. The environmental group has been conducting habitat restoration in the reserve since 2019, with this weekend's event also a late celebration of Earth Day, after a prior event was rained out. On Saturday morning, the volunteers spent hours pulling up the black mustard, focusing on a patch of land with five large coast live oaks. The tree is native to California and resistant to fire, but not if surrounded by thick mustard weed undergrowth. Read more: 8 L.A. trees to love that aren't jacarandas "If there's a bunch of invasive species creating fuel underneath it, it's just kind of burning like a bonfire. It overwhelms the tree's ability to protect itself," said Mott, who figures that in five years crucial areas of the reserve should be largely cleared of the weed. Wes Vahradian, 18, who has been volunteering with Friends of the Los Angeles River for four years, was serving as a volunteer leader and tracking how much habitat was being restored using ArcGIS, a web-based mapping software on his phone. By 10:30 a.m., the app indicated that about a quarter of an acre had been restored. "We've done pretty solid here, and it's just a great way for us to kind of measure the impact we're making. We've done it all over the Sepulveda Basin," he said. Vahradian is entering his senior year at Campbell Hall, a private school in Studio City that requires students to engage in community service. Vahradian said he was attracted to the environmental group because he has long been fly-fishing in the river — "which is kind of crazy, but you can totally fish in it." He said that although the mustard weed does regrow, progress has been made over the years. "The whole premise is that the Sepulveda Basin is supposed to be a natural ecosystem, a place for birds when they're migrating to come and take a break." The black mustard that was pulled up was collected into 30-gallon paper garden bags that will be hauled away and buried in a landfill. Mott said the goal is to eventually compost the weed. Zia Shaked, 11, who said her favorite activity was reading, had spent the morning with her mother stuffing five bags full of the weeds that had been uprooted by her younger brother and cousin. "I learned that folding the weeds was really helpful before you put them in, because otherwise you get a mouthful of weeds in your face," she said. "I was just putting the weeds in the bag. I didn't even notice how much space that was cleared up and I looked up, like maybe a half an hour later." Read more: An L.A. River champion offers a vision for reimagining the waterway — and the city's future Shanna Shaked, the girl's mother, said this was the second time the Santa Monica family had been out restoring habitat, though it was the first time for her daughter. "It felt like a really good way to spend the morning, to be outside and doing something that felt helpful for nature," said Shaked, an adjunct professor at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. "It was a team effort." Mott said that the habitat restoration events typically draw about 150 to 200 participants but he has definitely noticed an uptick in attendance since the Jan. 7 fires that devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other communities. "I think there was this powerless feeling when the wildfires were happening. You know, we can't go out there and fight fires ourselves, but this work is actually preventing the spread of wildfires. It's just something physical, tangible you can do to help the community and help with that problem," he said. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
25-05-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Weekend warriors yank out invasive plants to save L.A. River
The Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve suffers from many of the ills that might be expected of a natural area located in the middle of the nation's second-largest city, including litter and even biohazards such as discarded needles from nearby drug use. But on Saturday morning a few hundred volunteers had another culprit in their sights: Rhamphospermum nigrum, a nonnative plant better known as black mustard that has flourished in the 225-acre reserve and the wider Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area. The plant, with its four-petaled yellow flowers in bloom, fills the basin's meadows and paints a bucolic picture that belies what it really is — an invasive weed that crowds out native plants such as sage and poppy that are crucial to the health of the basin, its natural wildlife and the Los Angeles River that runs through it. 'It does look harmless, but it becomes a mono crop, and this is the main enemy to biodiversity,' said Dan Mott, environmental educator with Friends of the Los Angeles River, which held the event with the California Native Plant Society and San Fernando Valley Audubon Society. 'The native species can't be here, and all the birds and the insects that are supposed to be in this area, they don't want the mustard.' The grasslands also capture less carbon and aren't as effective as native species in filtering runoff that enters the river, he said. The plant is native to North Africa, temperate regions of Europe and parts of Asia, and it is believed to have been introduced hundreds of years ago. The environmental group has been conducting habitat restoration in the reserve since 2019, with this weekend's event also a late celebration of Earth Day, after a prior event was rained out. On Saturday morning, the volunteers spent hours pulling up the black mustard, focusing on a patch of land with five large coast live oaks. The tree is native to California and resistant to fire, but not if surrounded by thick mustard weed undergrowth. 'If there's a bunch of invasive species creating fuel underneath it, it's just kind of burning like a bonfire. It overwhelms the tree's ability to protect itself,' said Mott, who figures that in five years crucial areas of the reserve should be largely cleared of the weed. Wes Vahradian, 18, who has been volunteering with Friends of the Los Angeles River for four years, was serving as a volunteer leader and tracking how much habitat was being restored using ArcGIS, a web-based mapping software on his phone. By 10:30 a.m., the app indicated that about a quarter of an acre had been restored. 'We've done pretty solid here, and it's just a great way for us to kind of measure the impact we're making. We've done it all over the Sepulveda Basin,' he said. Vahradian is entering his senior year at Campbell Hall, a private school in Studio City that requires students to engage in community service. Vahradian said he was attracted to the environmental group because he has long been fly-fishing in the river — 'which is kind of crazy, but you can totally fish in it.' He said that although the mustard weed does regrow, progress has been made over the years. 'The whole premise is that the Sepulveda Basin is supposed to be a natural ecosystem, a place for birds when they're migrating to come and take a break.' The black mustard that was pulled up was collected into 30-gallon paper garden bags that will be hauled away and buried in a landfill. Mott said the goal is to eventually compost the weed. Zia Shaked, 11, who said her favorite activity was reading, had spent the morning with her mother stuffing five bags full of the weeds that had been uprooted by her younger brother and cousin. 'I learned that folding the weeds was really helpful before you put them in, because otherwise you get a mouthful of weeds in your face,' she said. 'I was just putting the weeds in the bag. I didn't even notice how much space that was cleared up and I looked up, like maybe a half an hour later.' Shanna Shaked, the girl's mother, said this was the second time the Santa Monica family had been out restoring habitat, though it was the first time for her daughter. 'It felt like a really good way to spend the morning, to be outside and doing something that felt helpful for nature,' said Shaked, an adjunct professor at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. 'It was a team effort.' Mott said that the habitat restoration events typically draw about 150 to 200 participants but he has definitely noticed an uptick in attendance since the Jan. 7 fires that devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other communities. 'I think there was this powerless feeling when the wildfires were happening. You know, we can't go out there and fight fires ourselves, but this work is actually preventing the spread of wildfires. It's just something physical, tangible you can do to help the community and help with that problem,' he said.
Business Insider
20-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
A massive seaport in Texas is using an AI-powered digital replica to track ships and prepare for emergencies
The Port of Corpus Christi in Texas is among the United States' most important seaports. It's the country's third-largest port by tonnage, and it exports more US crude oil than any other domestic port. 2024 was a record year, with the port recording more than 200 million tons of shipments, 130 million of which were crude oil. Coordinating a port of this size is a huge logistical undertaking. To manage this challenge, the port commissioned the development of an AI-enhanced command-and-control software called the Overall Port Tactical Information System, or OPTICS. OPTICS is built on the Unity 3D engine, which creates a 3D digital twin — a virtual replica — of the port using real-world data. That real-world data is managed by Esri's ArcGIS, which can handle the large amounts of current and historical data needed to make this project possible. The result looks a bit like Google Earth but shows up-to-date information on the port's operations. "In the acronym OPTICS, tactical is meant in the sense of making smart business decisions informed by real-time information," Darrell Keach, the business systems manager at the Port of Corpus Christi, told Business Insider. "So, that's what we built." Tracking ships with machine learning All large commercial vessels have a transponder that broadcasts the vessel's identification, course, speed, and destination, among other information. But it isn't a real-time system — ships report their position intermittently every few seconds or minutes. "The frequency of updates we get from a transponder varies on a couple of factors," said Starr Long, the executive producer at The Acceleration Agency, which developed OPTICS for the Port of Corpus Christi. "When ships are at rest, we get updates about every four minutes. When they're moving, we can get updates about every two minutes." Long said gaps could be worsened by a switch between tracking systems. Ships outside radio communications relay tracking data over satellite but then switch to radio as they come into port. The transition can extend the interval between updates to about six minutes. Such gaps were incompatible with OPTICS' goal of creating a real-time overview of port operations. The digital replica wouldn't be very realistic if the virtual ships seemed to teleport between positions. The Acceleration Agency used machine learning to help solve this problem. Unlike traditional vessel tracking systems, which may appear to show ships skipping between update points, OPTICS uses an AI model — trained on about a year of ship movement data from the Port of Corpus Christi — to predict a ship's position. This allows a smoother, more realistic view of port operations at any given moment. Keach emphasized the safety implications of this improvement. Larger ships are "almost a thousand feet long, a hundred feet wide, and full of very flammable liquid," he said. "The margins are fairly narrow, so having as much data as possible for navigation is important." The Port of Corpus Christi also has ambitious plans for how this system could expand its scope. Keach said OPTICS' next development cycle would hopefully include vessel-crossing predictions that could anticipate and prevent collisions. Generative AI for emergency response training Many of the ships entering and exiting the Port of Corpus Christi carry hazardous cargo, but the port's infrastructure also has risks. In 2020, a dredging vessel operating in the port struck a liquid propane pipeline, causing a deadly explosion. The Port of Corpus Christi conducts emergency response exercises to prepare for events like this. As part of the deployment of OPTICS, the port wanted to create hypothetical events based on past incidents for training purposes. But this feature could conflict with federal security requirements if it were to reproduce past events with protected criminal justice information. To solve for that, The Acceleration Agency trained a large language model capable of generating situations that are similar to — but not exact reproductions of — real incidents. "What we did was take basically a year's worth of actual security incidents from the police department, like chemical spills, trespassing, vehicle collisions, and trained an LLM to generate synthetic events based on that history," Long explained. The use of AI-generated events, rather than real-life past events, offered another benefit that became clear during development and testing. Initially, the OPTICS software generated trainings that, in some ways, were too realistic. They presented trainees with a historically accurate ratio of noncritical to urgent scenarios — as a result, those trainings addressed fewer emergency incidents, which are relatively uncommon. So Long's team had OPTICS increase the frequency of emergency events. "We had to go back and tell it: 'No, don't do it for real. Do it much faster,'" Long said. The use of an LLM, which can process requests in natural language, simplified the creation and modification of the hypothetical events used for training. The future of port operations Keach said the Port of Corpus Christi's deployment of OPTICS, which started rolling out at the end of 2024, was just the start. He said the port's investment in OPTICS was happening alongside other infrastructure investments, such as weather sensors, cameras, and a private 5G network to serve port operations. OPTICS, which is used only by workers coordinating port traffic, might eventually aid the crews of ships coming into the port, Keach said. He added that OPTICS, equipment using augmented and virtual reality, high-tech sensors, and predictive AI could help ships navigate tough weather conditions, such as fog. Since the port uses third-party tools — Esri's ArcGIS platform and Unity's 3D engine — as the basis of its digital twin, deploying those applications would probably be less strenuous than if it used proprietary tech. These technologies provide the flexibility to add additional data and incorporate additional devices. Unity, for instance, already supports a range of devices, including smartphones and AR headsets.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Esri Canada to make Intelligent Transportation Systems smarter with GIS
Geographic information systems connect spatial data from numerous sources using location, improving decisions on how to increase transportation efficiency, safety and sustainability TORONTO, May 14, 2025 /CNW/ - Esri Canada today announced a strategic expansion into the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) sector. This move highlights Esri Canada's commitment to providing innovative Intelligent Transportation Solutions that leverage geographic information system (GIS) technology to help improve safety, urban mobility and enhance transportation infrastructure safety and sustainability across Canada. Leading this initiative is Daniel Kligerman, Esri Canada's Director of Intelligent Transportation Solutions. With over 25 years of experience with Internet of Things, Smart Cities and the transportation technology industry, Mr. Kligerman brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the team. Under his leadership, Esri Canada will collaborate with municipalities, transportation agencies and private sector partners to develop effective Intelligent Transportation Solutions tailored to the unique needs of Canadian cities. "Transportation concerns such as reducing traffic congestion, road collisions and carbon emissions are inherently spatial," says Daniel Kligerman, director, ITS, Esri Canada. "Intelligent Transportation Solutions powered by GIS use location to integrate real-time data from various ITS sensors and systems and visualize them as maps and digital twins, revealing patterns and insights that help planners and traffic managers make better decisions." GIS makes ITS smarter by: Improving mobility through providing real-time traffic insights, optimizing routing, identifying congestion hotspots, analyzing accidents and emergency response, and integrating public transport systems with traffic management to promote multi-modal transportation. Enhancing road safety through enabling real-time incident management, safety hazards analysis for risk mitigation, better infrastructure design for pedestrian and cyclist safety, enhanced safety planning and visibility of traffic conditions for better decisions and emergency response. Promoting sustainability through optimizing resource allocation, identifying alternative routes or modes of transport to reduce carbon emissions, supporting eco-friendly initiatives such as bike lanes and electronic vehicle charging stations, and designing efficient public transport networks. Esri Canada's ITS solutions are built on ArcGIS, the world's most comprehensive GIS platform. These solutions include the Transportation - GeoXchange®, which facilitates the efficient exchange of insights, enabling collaborative, data-driven decisions. Esri Canada will be showcasing its solutions at the ITS Canada 2025 Annual Conference & Expo in Ottawa on May 21-23. To learn more about GIS in ITS, visit and join the Esri Canada Transportation LinkedIn group About Esri Canada Founded in 1984, Esri Canada provides geographic information system (GIS) solutions that empower people in business, government, and education to make informed and timely decisions by leveraging the power of mapping and spatial analytics. These solutions enable organizations to better manage their resources, plan their future and collaborate within and beyond their organization. Esri Canada's products and services help advance successful digital transformation. The company serves more than 14,000 organizations from 13 offices across Canada and is based in Toronto. Esri Canada has been recognized as one of Canada's Best Managed Companies for 13 consecutive years. More information can be found at Follow Esri Canada on X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn. SOURCE Esri Canada View original content to download multimedia: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Cision Canada
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Cision Canada
Esri Canada to make Intelligent Transportation Systems smarter with GIS
Geographic information systems connect spatial data from numerous sources using location, improving decisions on how to increase transportation efficiency, safety and sustainability TORONTO, May 14, 2025 /CNW/ - Esri Canada today announced a strategic expansion into the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) sector. This move highlights Esri Canada's commitment to providing innovative Intelligent Transportation Solutions that leverage geographic information system (GIS) technology to help improve safety, urban mobility and enhance transportation infrastructure safety and sustainability across Canada. Leading this initiative is Daniel Kligerman, Esri Canada's Director of Intelligent Transportation Solutions. With over 25 years of experience with Internet of Things, Smart Cities and the transportation technology industry, Mr. Kligerman brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the team. Under his leadership, Esri Canada will collaborate with municipalities, transportation agencies and private sector partners to develop effective Intelligent Transportation Solutions tailored to the unique needs of Canadian cities. "Transportation concerns such as reducing traffic congestion, road collisions and carbon emissions are inherently spatial," says Daniel Kligerman, director, ITS, Esri Canada. "Intelligent Transportation Solutions powered by GIS use location to integrate real-time data from various ITS sensors and systems and visualize them as maps and digital twins, revealing patterns and insights that help planners and traffic managers make better decisions." GIS makes ITS smarter by: Improving mobility through providing real-time traffic insights, optimizing routing, identifying congestion hotspots, analyzing accidents and emergency response, and integrating public transport systems with traffic management to promote multi-modal transportation. Enhancing road safety through enabling real-time incident management, safety hazards analysis for risk mitigation, better infrastructure design for pedestrian and cyclist safety, enhanced safety planning and visibility of traffic conditions for better decisions and emergency response. Promoting sustainability through optimizing resource allocation, identifying alternative routes or modes of transport to reduce carbon emissions, supporting eco-friendly initiatives such as bike lanes and electronic vehicle charging stations, and designing efficient public transport networks. Esri Canada's ITS solutions are built on ArcGIS, the world's most comprehensive GIS platform. These solutions include the Transportation - GeoXchange ®, which facilitates the efficient exchange of insights, enabling collaborative, data-driven decisions. Esri Canada will be showcasing its solutions at the ITS Canada 2025 Annual Conference & Expo in Ottawa on May 21-23. To learn more about GIS in ITS, visit and join the Esri Canada Transportation LinkedIn group About Esri Canada Founded in 1984, Esri Canada provides geographic information system (GIS) solutions that empower people in business, government, and education to make informed and timely decisions by leveraging the power of mapping and spatial analytics. These solutions enable organizations to better manage their resources, plan their future and collaborate within and beyond their organization. Esri Canada's products and services help advance successful digital transformation. The company serves more than 14,000 organizations from 13 offices across Canada and is based in Toronto. Esri Canada has been recognized as one of Canada's Best Managed Companies for 13 consecutive years. More information can be found at Follow Esri Canada on X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn.
