Check out how Fontana Public Works is using GIS to make sure parks and public landscaped areas are being watered in accordance with drought regulations.

Not long ago, obtaining data for a GIS-based project was an arduous task. Because great time and effort was involved with either creating your own data or obtaining data that someone else created, you had to think carefully about the quality of the data that would go into your project. While it can still be cumbersome to obtain data at specific scales for specific areas, cloud-based data services, crowdsourced maps and databases and real-time streaming make it easy for anyone to obtain vast amounts of data in a short amount of time. In an environment where so much data is available, is data quality still of concern? Read more here.

What do OpenStreetMap, National Map Corps, Wildebeest Watch, Frack Finder, PlanktonPortal, Galaxy Zoo, Disk Detective, Cyclone Center, SunSpotter, Map Give, and Geo-Wiki have in common?  They all use crowdsourced remote sensing for data collection, basically using people’s visual cognition skills which are better than machines to collect data from aerial and satellite images.  Check out the article here.