THE RAPP MAP IS ON NOW!

We are very happy to announce the release of our “open beta” version for the RAPP Map.

RAPP Map is the spatial data platform for the Rangeland and Pasture Productivity activity which is part of the Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) initiative. The goal of the online tool is to give access to information about the state and condition of global rangelands. It provides time-series data on the vegetation and environmental conditions, allowing national and regional tracking of the resources which sustains livestock production. It has been developed, and is currently hosted, by Data61 with the assistance of IT resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and the AusCover facility.

RAPP Map is supported by CSIRO and through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Programme to whom we are thankful.

This release includes global time-series data of vegetation condition including vegetation fractional cover and NDVI. Data come from the MODIS sensors and is available for the period 2000-2016. We also include global precipitation (CHIRPS) and soil moisture data (from the SMOS sensor). Additional layers include three global land use and cover classifications and livestock distribution (cattle, sheep, goats).

We plan to continue adding relevant layers, particularly country or region-specific data on rangeland vegetation dynamics, carrying capacity and better livestock data. If you want to suggest data for this tool please let us know.

We also plan to add the following layers in the near future:

• Global rangeland biomass
• Vegetation cover for selected regions at 30 meter resolution
• Conservation areas
• Tree density and cover

We invite you to test the tool and give us feedback about the usability, datasets on offer and any other comment you would like to provide.

Below we give an overview of the tools available in the RAPP Map:

HOME PAGE

 

 

When you open the RAPP Map you see the welcome message. You have to click Continue to enter the site.

MAIN NAVIGATION TOOLS

The main navigation panel has two sections. In the left the Search and Add Data options are located, together with a list of the layers on display (Total Vegetation Cover and area labels and borders are loaded by default). Each layer has a button to turn it on and off, an opacity scale and the zoom to extent, about and remove options.

At the bottom the time slider is shown which allows to change the date of the image on display (if a time series is displayed). At the top right there are buttons to change to fullscreen, change the Map view, share the map on display, Related Maps and About (get more information).

ADD DATA

When clicking Add Data a new window is open. In the left the available layers are shown. These layers can also be found with the Search option. The My Data option allows to add either data stored locally in the user’s computer or web data. For the local data option several formats are available including GeoJSON, KML/KMZ, CSV (with lat/lon columns) and shapefiles (which need to be compressed in a single zip file). For web data an url must be provided.

QUERY DATA

The Query Data option opens a menu which gives the user four options for obtaining a time series: a point, a polygon (drawn by the user), and existing region (only Australian regions at the moment) or an existing Polygon (which can be a polygon previously uploaded by the user). Once the point or polygon is selected, the result is shown in the bottom panel.

EXAMPLE OF A QUERY

An example result from the Query Data option is shown above. In the bottom panel a chart is shown with the fractions of Photosynthetic Vegetation (PV, green), Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV, blue), Bare Soil (BS, red), Total Cover (PV+NPV, white) and rainfall (from CHIRPS, in cyan). The download option allows the user to get the data in csv format for further analysis.

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Feel free to go and visit the map (map.geo-rapp.org), and contact us (geoglam.rapp(at)csiro.au) for any feedback.