irregular-expressions a GIS and spatial blog
February 17, 2025 7:53 PM   Subscribe

irregular-expressions a GIS and spatial blog
I have a new blog irregular-expressions which I'm running on Bear. It will be mainly about using R and QGIS in spatial ecology and working with various data sets (and my own on the ground observations) to understand and manage land better.

One reason I started the blog is I've got a job which is absolutely the perfect site - Finding the trees in the woods (and my client is happy for me to visit when I want).

The site is only 1½ hours drive from home, and a short walk, but once there the terrain is so horribly broken, and with dense forest that I can only really access the edge. So it's a good opportunity to use some of these tools to work out what might be going on within the forest, develop some focus areas and then fight my way through the bush to those locations to see what is really going on and ground truth/falsify my findings.

I also just discovered the Sentinel2 L2A multi-spectral dataset - which updates every five days and is publicly available. So hoping to use that to spatialise weed populations in my patch.

I'll post every two to four weeks - it's primarily for me - unless others find it useful, but also it's helpful for me just to write in a focused way as it makes it very clear what these workflows involve - many tutorials assume users are comfortable mith multi-part files and the command-line when this is not the case.

At this point I have not enabled commenting - that's a learning curve on Bear, so later on.

I welcome comments from anyone interested in the intersection of GIS and ecology.

Why Bear?
• Hosting is free (with an optional US$5/month upgrade)
• There are a lot of good free themes – which are very editable
• It is quite easy to assemble a mix of code, graphics, functions and prose -
• Commenting is possible but de-emphasised
• There are many members pushing the boundaries of formatting and presentation so it’s a good learning space
• It’s an opportunity to learn a little css
Role: Designer, writer, blogger
posted by unearthed (3 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

thanks for sharing this. my son has a research assistantship where he's using R and QGIS. it's not connected to ecology; it's essentially bringing scans of old US city maps into GIS, aligning them with current maps and having consistent layers.
but he may appreciate/benefit from the methods you're using. And he's enough of a budding GIS nerd that he'll enjoy reading about it in general. So I'll pass it along to him today. Thanks again!
posted by martin q blank at 7:06 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]


Great to hear.

Your son may well be interested in my friend’s blog which is much more map oriented, a recent post as an example The Lost Bush of South Dunedin which involved the author going to official archives to obtain an 1837 map, and to consider early watercolour paintings, letters and photographs to recover a meaningful idea of what the landscape looked like before colonisation. I have used one of Mike’s posts to help me gain planning permission for a client.
posted by unearthed at 6:33 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]


oh neat! thanks!
posted by clew at 2:54 PM on March 12


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