Scion

A funny thing happened while I was searching for some freeware that would help me manage all the duplicate personal photos on my hard drive... I managed to go off on a tangent, searching for "public domain image analysis algorithms". ScienceDirect directed me to some very helpful articles, one of which mentioned a company called Scion. The good folks at scion.com have available a program called Scion Image. it is used for analyzing medical and other images for research. At the very least it counts pixels, which will provide an interesting comparison to the SamplePoint method of quantifying plant growth. The manual is 107 pages. Once I get through that, maybe I'll be able to batch process the files and export the info directly into a database. We'll see.

Winter hiking

This is an article published in today's Washington Post about a trip Stephanie and I took to Harper's Ferry earlier this month:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012101364.html

Cindy Conner's Cover Crop Video

This is a teaser for Cindy Conner and her son Luke's first instructional video. Another is due out early next year featuring some local gardens in the Richmond area, including the Maymont vegetable garden.

Choose Green... figuratively... literally... digitally

Patricia Donovan, the GIS lab manager at the Blacksburg campus, selected all the very small RGB values from image statistics and captured all the green vegetation. Using tools in the ArcMap software, it is possible to select out only pixels that meet the criteria RGB values <= 0.105 which returns the actual number of pixels. Now it is possible to calculate green vs non-green vegetation, soil, etc.

I am trying to figure out a bare bones way of doing this that can be used as a Photoshop macro. Hopefully we will have something to measure against SamplePoint's results before the end of Winter.

Quantifying Ground Coverage

I originally started this blog (again) to chart my progress with an ongoing project in Richmond. Maymont was good enough to allow me to attempt revegetating an eroded hillside in the middle of the park using a selection of native plants. Above are some photos from earlier this fall.

Asparagus' Aspirations of Greatness or A-ga-ve Whoa oh!

Stephanie and I ran into this thing in Oaxaca last month.