New York City

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« Back to Northeast US and Eastern Canada

local organizers

upcoming events

May 8 THURSDAY LUNCH with Empire Dragon Boat Team re: Flushing Bay water quality http://www.empiredragonboat.com/
May 9 FRIDAY EVENING EcoHack project pitches! ecohack.org http://publiclab.org/notes/liz/05-06-2014/ecohack-nyc-may-9-10
May 10 SATURDAY ALLL DAY EcoHack! ecohack.org - oil fluorescence spectroscopy http://publiclab.org/notes/liz/05-06-2014/ecohack-nyc-may-9-10
May 10 SATURDAY AM 10-noon Cypress Hills LDC "Verde" -- tree giveaway and opportunity to table about Public Lab
May 10 SATURDAY MIDDAY 11-3pm Flushing Bay Shoreline Cleanup and scoping out a future aerial mapping http://publiclab.org/notes/carmelfromson/04-25-2014/invitation-to-friends-and-family-day-flushing-bay-may-10
May 11 SUNDAY potential Proteus Gowanus mapping workshop with Eymund, Gena, Becki Boger and her students http://publiclab.org/notes/liz/05-06-2014/prospect-park-spring-mapping-project
May 14 WEDNESDAY EVENING 6-8pm panel on Civic Science in the Gowanus Watershed
May 31-June 1 WEEKEND World Science Festival
June 6-8 WEEKEND Northeast tool-focused Barnraising http://publiclab.org/wiki/potential-2014-northeast-tool-focused-barnraising
and a new workshop series to demo new tools and methods

Lending Library

We have a lending library of tools, instructional materials, and a Makerbot! based at the former Pfizer building in Brooklyn: 630 Flushing Avenue. Inquire about borrowing equipment, attending events, launching a new research project and more on the PLOTS-NYC mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/plots-nyc.

The Public Lab NYC community's mapping efforts are featured in Google Maps.

(Above: a plume discovered with near-infrared balloon photography in the Gowanus Canal in 2011 by PLOTS mappers and the GCC)

Gowanus Low Altitude Mapping (GLAM), Brooklyn

Public Lab northeast's longest running research site has involved hundreds of people in community science and created data that influenced the EPA's Superfund Cleanup process. Read the whole story here: http://publiclab.org/wiki/glam Follow along to get updates: http://publiclab.org/tag/gowanus

Geo NYC May Meetup: Eymund Diegel, Gowanus Canal Conservancy's Grassroots Mapping from OpenGeo on Vimeo.

2014 update: the project has grown to encompass upland portions of the watershed, read more about how springs from Prospect Park contribute flowing groundwater into the Gowanus: http://publiclab.org/tag/prospect-park

Jamaica Bay, Gateway National Park

Gena Wirth is leading a long-term investigation into the wetlands reconstruction effort by the Army Corps of Engineers in Jamaica Bay, New York. See her beautiful high-resolution maps and follow the project at http://publiclab.org/tag/jamaica-bay

Newtown Creek

Project page: http://publiclab.org/wiki/newtown-creek
Follow along to get updates on Newtown Creek research, subscribe here: http://publiclab.org/tag/newtown-creek

The Newtown Creek monitoring project is just getting underway with partners North Brooklyn Boat Club and Newtown Creek Alliance. We are planning an aerial mapping response to the impending release of EPA's Phase 1 assessment of the "State of the Creek" via canoes!

Above: the launch site for the December 7, 2013 Public Mapping Mission with NBBC, NCA, CUSP, and GovLab. Research Note here

Flushing Bay, Queens

Follow this research site at http://publiclab.org/tag/flushing-bay

The women of Empire Dragon Boat launch their boats right next to a large pipe that dumps out 5% of NYC's total sewage overflows. They are interested in building up a community advocacy campaign that features aerial imagery and water quality data.

Staten Island's northshore

Concern about floodwater carrying pollution from former industrial and radioactive sites into adjacent neighborhoods has resulted in the Northshore Waterfront Conservancy and the City University of New York being awarded a 2014 Environmental Justice grant from NY State Dept Environmental Conservation. The project is to identify:

which sites are actually contaminated,
which sites are vulnerable to flooding,
where contaminated floodwaters will / should flow after leaving those sites,
what flood-resistant infrastructure has already been built, and
what flood-resistant infrastructure is needed.

Read more about this project at http://publiclab.org/wiki/staten-island

Williamsburg's southside

el Puente in South Williamsburg has begun using balloon mapping to document greening and community redevelopment sites.

Follow along at http://publiclab.org/tag/southside

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Newark, New Jersey

Follow along at http://publiclab.org/tag/new-jersey

Public Lab is working with amazing EJ activists in Ironbound Community Corporation in Newark, NJ on infrared imagery and garden metrics.

Bronx River at Soundview Park

Several partnering organizations are testing out research methods for a variety of topics and sites in NY Harbor and along the Hudson River including mapping oyster reefs by NY/NJ Baykeeper and mapping phragmites by Nature Conservancy of NY. See oyster reefs (and discarded tires) visible at lunar low tide in the Bronx River:

Freshkills Park, Staten Island

Read all about the project here: http://publiclab.org/wiki/freshkills-park Follow along: http://publiclab.org/tag/fresh-kills

Nick Johnson is investigating Freshkills Park, formerly Freshkills Landfill, as a part of an ongoing project titled Life of Trash, a project dedicated towards better understanding the invisible urban waste infrastructure and supporting community education and awareness around landfill activity. www.lifeoftrash.com

Five Borough Farm

Project page: http://publiclab.org/wiki/5bf

Philip Silva and Liz Barry are Outreach Fellows on Five Borough Farm, a project of the Design Trust for Public Space. Five Borough Farm provides a set of user-friendly tools that can be used by farmers and gardeners everywhere to track and evaluate urban agriculture's myriad impacts. Many of the sites are also being mapped through pole aerial photography in visible and infrared wavelengths -- follow our process at http://publiclab.org/tag/5BF

Cypress Hills

This 8 week Air Quality Class was created for the Cypress Hills Air Quality (CHAQ) Initiative, with support from the United States Environmental Protection Agency's program "Citizen Science: Community Involvement Today and in the Future". This project is in collaboration with the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation. Program participants will spend 24 weeks working with air quality sensors to monitor indoor air pollutants in Cypress Hills and East New York. The students will catalog and analyze the environmental air pollutant hazards that affect neighborhood homes and will share their findings with other community members. Follow along at http://publiclab.org/tag/CHAQ

Lower East Side

Veronica Acosta has mapped Pier 42 with the Hester Street Collaborative and the local community as part of envisioning what the pier can become in the future.

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Wendy Brawer of Green Maps joined the Lower East Side Ecology Center's group bicycle ride along the high water line of hurricane Sandy in June 2013. They used an Infragram to document how street trees were failing to leaf out. Their hypothesis was that due their small treebeds in the concrete sidewalks being full of salt and contaminants, street trees were suffering more than park trees:

Event mapping

Oscar Brett has led events to crowd-assemble party balloons into rigs with upwards of 100 people to map Occupy Wall Street marches: see http://publiclab.org/notes/oscar-brett/5-22-2012/may-day-community-aerial, events and maps.

List of all regional maps created

[updated July 31, 2013] These nine maps have been added to the Google satellite base layer. Also listed, two NDVI/IR maps taken to accompany visible imagery on same date.

These two NDVI and IR maps listed below are not in Google because they are the exact same date as the visible light map and Google can only take one map for any given date/location:

History: our beginnings in 2010

NYC supported the Gulf Coast response to the BP Oil Spill in May 2010. Current and past students of Liz Barry met up outside of class to help the Grassroots Mappers with remote logistics such as connecting volunteer mappers with available spots on boats at specific marinas from which the most vulnerable wetlands could be reached. This group included Molly Oberholtzer, Ian Pugh, and Kaushal Shrestha, and Corey Mullee, and went on to create their own balloon aerial mapping rig with CHDK camera.

The first ever Grassroots Mapping workshop was held in New York City in June 2010 in the collab space and at the Hudson River Piers. Natalie Jeremijenko, Victoria Marshall, Liz Barry, Jeff Warren and about 6 others attended.

An October 2010 workshop was held at Union Square with Parsons The New School for Design, see the blog post on GrassrootsMapping.org. Victoria Marshall was instumental in making this workshop happen. Jen Hudon, Lee Altman, Jenny Chou (who went on to lead aerial mapping in Beijing), and Leif Percifield joined at this time. The New School Geo Club was a briefly lived student group that was active mapping social patterns in Washington Square Park and other sites.

Public Lab Wiki documentation