Spatial Points

We have compiled this list as a way of sharing resources within our research group and with others in the field, to provide easy access to these sites and most importantly to ensure that we don’t forget them!

Please leave us a comment if you know of any additional websites, books, data repositories etc that we should know about and we will add it to the list.

Industry Websites & Societies

• Frontier SI
• SmartSat CRC
• Earth Observation Australia
• Digital Earth Australia (DEA)
• IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
• Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI)
• Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society  (RSPoc)
• International Ocean-Colour Coordinating Group (IOCCG)
• International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS)
• Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand Inc. (MSSANZ)

Conferences

• Locate
  • 2020
• Spatial Information Day (SID)
• International Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM)
  • MODSIM 2019
• International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
  • IGARSS 2019
  • IGARSS 2020
• Advancing Earth Observation Forum 2020

Satellite Imagery

• Earth Observation Browser (ESA)
  • Sentinel and Landsat
• Copernicus Open Access Hub (ESA)
  • Provides complete, free and open access to Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P user products, starting from the In-Orbit Commissioning Review (IOCR).
  • Sentinel Hub Playground
• EarthExplorer
  • Allows users to access and download a range of satellite products including Landsat, Sentinel, AVHRR and MODIS data as well as digital elevation models and other land cover products.
• AppEEARS – Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples
  • This platform allows you to access EarthExplorer data using your USGS login but what’s special is that you can request new data and pre-process it before placing the order (e.g. clip to an ROI with a custom shapefile, re-project, pre-select particular bands, etc.). It took about 24 hours for each order to be processed (daily MODIS data for 1 year).
  • Once the data has been processed you can view basic statistics for the order (e.g. average pixel value, standard deviation, pixels quality time-series, etc.) before downloading your dataset.
• GloVis
  • Similar to EarthExplorer, GloVis is a repository of satellite products also run by the USGS. You can access ASTER, Landsat and Sentinel products here.
• Planet
  • As a student or researcher at an academic institution you can create a personal, basic account and download up to 10,000 km² of imagery per month for free. Access imagery such as 4-band 3m PlanetScope scenes, RapidEye Ortho tiles, Landsat 8 scenes, Sentinel-2 tiles and SkySat scenes.

Indices

• Index Database
  • This database helps you to find the remote sensing indices you’re looking for by providing a quick overview of which indices are usable for a specific sensor and a specific application. Available bands of sensors are linked with required wavelengths of indices, so that one can get all sensors usable for calculating an index and vice versa one can find all indices suitable for a specific sensor.

Online Data Processing & High-Performance Computing

• Google Earth Engine
• Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL)
  • Access and visualise a large set of biological, environmental, and climate (including future scenario) datasets and concurrently run statistical analyses on your data without burdening your personal computer.
• Picterra
  • Is an easy to use AI object detection workflow. Users select aerial or satellite imagery over their area of interest and then train the AI by providing examples of the object to be detected. Picterra then runs the object detection model and provides the ability to count, visualise and organise your results as well as export the data and share via a URL.

Ebooks

• Earth Observation: Data, Processing and Applications
  • This textbook is an initiative of the Australian Earth Observation community in order to develop a resource that describes earth observation data, processing and applications in an Australian context. This book is broken into three volumes; Volume 1: Data (available), Volume 2: Processing (available) and Volume 3: Applications (coming soon).

GIS & Environmental Data

• 30-Meter SRTM Tile Downloader
  • This site provides easy access for downloading 30-meter resolution elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
• 30-Meter ALOS Global Digital Surface Model
  • This site provides easy access for downloading 30-meter resolution elevation data from the Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) onboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite “ALOS”.
• National Map
  • Is an online map-based tool to allow for easy access and visualisation of spatial data from Australian government agencies.
  • There is also potential to upload your own data.
  • Some of the data is sourced from data.gov.au which is another repository of open government data.
• Data.SA – South Australian Government Data Directory
• CSIRO Data Access Portal
• TERN Data Discovery Portal
  • ausplotR package. More information can be found on the TERN website.
  • Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia (SALGA) R-package. More information can be found on the TERN website.
• TERN AusCover
• Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN)
  • A one-stop online workbench with access to thousands of multi-disciplinary datasets, from hundreds of data sources and analytical tools covering spatial and statistical modelling, planning and visualisation.
• Water Observations from Space (WOfS; Geoscience Australia)
  • Web mapping server link
  • THREDDS catalogue for download of WOfS individual dates
    • Data is broken up into 100 km x 100 km Albers equal area projection tiles
  • Albers tile index, so you can find out which tile you need

All things coding!

Lovely tutorials

• Coding Club
  • A group of ecology and environmental science students and researchers from the University of Edinburgh have created a wonderful blog. It features free tutorials for all manner of coding topics, including but not limited to;
    • Introduction to Google Earth Engine
    • Introduction to Spatial Analysis in R
    • ggplot
    • Time-series analysis in python
  • they also have a page of links to hand-picked coding resources which is well worth browsing.

R

• R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund & Hadley Wickham
  • Are you new to R? Well this is the book for you! This is a free e-book that covers everything from how to import, transform, visualise and model your data.
• Geocomputation with R by Robin Lovelace, Jakub Nowosad, Jannes Muenchow
  • So you’ve got the basics of R down but now you want to create maps and play with vectors and rasters in R. Geocomputation with R is all about geographic data analysis, visualisation and modelling. This book goes over topics such as the fundamentals of geographic data in R, how to make maps, reprojecting spatial data as well as highlighting just a few of the potential applications analysing data in R can have.
• The Tidyverse style guide by Hadley Wickham
• Mastering Shiny by Hadley Wickham
• Bookdown
  • Are you looking for more books about R? The Bookdown website features a range of books that go into more depth about different aspects of R from handling strings in R, hands-on programming in R, fundamentals of data visualisation, advanced R, text mining and how to creating websites with R Markdown.
• Happy Git and GitHub for the useR by Jenny Bryan, the STAT 545 TAs, Jim Hester
  • If you’re using R and want to use Git as a version control/backup method this e-book outlines how to install and use Git, how to get Git and RStudio to work together, how to develop workflows and much more.
• raster2data tutorial by thejholloway (Jacinta Holloway)
  • This is a beginners tutorial available through GitHub outlining how to work with spatial imagery (rasters) and converting these files to data frames for statistical analysis.

Python

• Handling Raster data with Python
  • This is a useful resource created by Wageningen University that outlines useful python packages for spatial raster analysis along with how to handle, process and visualise rasters.
• Python GDAL/OGR Cookbook!

Posters, Presentations & Graphical Abstracts

• Animate Your Science blog
  • You can find many useful resources to create your next conference poster, prepare a great talk that will not put your audience to sleep or get started with graphical abstracts to make your next manuscript stand out from the crowd.

Design

• Autodraw
  • Trying to create a graphical abstract? Maybe a conference poster? Do you need a simple diagram of a sun or a satellite? Autodraw allows you to draw the basic shape of an object, person or thing and Autodraw will match what you have drawn with a catalogue of simple illustrations created by artists.
• Paletton.com
  • Check out this website if you need help developing a colour scheme for your map visualisation, conference posters, graphical abstract etc.
• Lucidchart
  • Is a great website to take your diagrams to the next level!
• unsplash
  • Free high-resolution images and pictures.
• Flaticon
  • Similar to Autodraw, here you can freely browse thousands of icons (without backgrounds), change or edit their colours and download for use in your presentations, posters and graphical abstracts.

Blogs, Podcasts & Other Media

• Scene from above podcast
• Publish, Perish or Podcast
• Nasa Earth Observatory – Image of the day