Society Of Conservation GIS Scholarship Award 2020

Taskade: Multi-platform planner and task manager

The year 2021 is looming over us and I am dying to have some sort of control over what I could be doing for the next 365 days. While 2020 had been a year of 'character building', I discover alot of things about everything around me and myself. For starters, I am an avid planner; surprisingly. But it does not mean that I follow through with them. See what I did right there? I am admitting the truth behind self-study and lifetime of learning.

With alot of things I have planned to breathe new life to my own progress and time management, I went hunting for some interesting stuff in the internet for inspiration and try-outs. And guess what? I found one and I think most people may have been using this already in full swing because the review is 5 ⭐!

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

Taskade is simply a project/team management tool. Ah ah ah...before you write me off, hear me out. Taskade is aimed to help teams to plan, organize or manage their tasks and prioritize output for decision-making. It is simply an interactive planner sans organizer sans dashboard that sees where you're at with your work, what you've managed to get done and communicate tasks among people in your team; IF you have a whole team working on some sort of project. Hence, the chat capability that is implemented in this tool.

At my job, I work in a team of only 2 people; me and another colleague, and we're the regional programme unit which is apart of the bigger unit of team mates spread elsewhere in other regions. So, just because your unit is small, it doesn't mean that your task load complements your pint-sized manpower. So, I've been looking for platforms that could help me organize our productivity and ensure high-quality output. Just because technology is more advanced, it doesn'e mean there isn't any learning curve, right? So I tried just about anything under the sun for project/team management; Asana, Slack, Discord, the pre-existing Google..., but none of them could nail all shortcomings precisely; due dates, assignment of tasks, progress, sub-tasks, interactive commenting, multiplatform sync, brainstorming etc. Channels in Slack gives me headache -- same with Discord, and Telegram channels is too 'static' and 'one-way street' for me to view everything.

I found Taskade after trying to find a complementary 'Forest: Focus' extension at the Google Chrome extensions marketplace. There are plenty of interesting high-quality extensions as of late and I am pleasantyl surprised because earlier this year, most of them were quite 'beta' in their functionality. I saw a 'Bullet Journal' extension that someone raved about and another individual commented: 'Isn't this Taskade?'. The curious cat I am, I googled it and was not disappointed. What are the main keywords that hooked me?:

FREE

Google-integrated

Remote work environment advocacy

Multi-platform

What features do Taskade actually have? ✨

Given that it is an All-in-One Collaboration tool, it is understandable if the GUI is pleasing on the eyes. I do understand that first-impression is everything; color, packaging, fore-front information and visual, but it was really the functionality that delivers me to salvation. If you're an active member of Dev.to, then you'll catch feels with this theme that Taskade delivers. Key features in Taskade that you should try out:

Task list

Collaborators invitation feature (no organizational handle required)

Chat feature (with a call feature!)

Workspace feature (nothing new but...I'll get back to this later)

5 interchangeable neural-forest task list templates; List, Board, Action, Mindmap and Org Chart -- seamless with no error.

The capability to utilize this very platform as a presentation or exported into PDF task list printout.

Safe to say, Taskade buried me alive with the curation of beautiful images for the background; again...not relevant but needed to be said.

The Live Demosandbo lets you try it out for yourself although, at first glance, you may be wondering what on earth you are looking at. But it won't take long before you discover that it is quite intuitive.

Did I mention you can download and access it from just about ANYWHERE? Laptops, browser extensions and even smartphone apps. I'm not kidding when I said Taskade is multiplatform; they work on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Linux. Currently, I am testing it out using the Chrome extension and installed the app in my Android phone. It works like I expect it to so far.

What is the difference between the FREE and PAID version? 💰💰💰

As I just mentioned, you can sign-up for it for free and use it for life...for free. The priced version is seemingly there to accommodate the file size per upload you require; as of now. For free plan, you can upload 5MB file per upload while the paid version increases the size to 50MB per upload. Both versions offer:

Unlimited storage

Unlimited tasks entry

Unlimited project creation

Unlimited collaborators addition

The development team is currently adding more functionalities such as Project Activity Tracking, Integration to Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive as well as Email Integration -- available for free.

Although it is mentioned that the free version of Taskade includes unlimited tasks, collaborators and all essential features, it was also mentioned that you will need to upgrade if you exceed the workspace limits which doesn't actually have any entailing elaborations which I will try to dig soon enough. But safe to say that if you are a single person using this tool, you are considered a team of 'one' where your shared projects in workspace to your 'editors' are still considered free. Only workspace the addition of workspace members are billed. This may imply that there are certain limits to how many individuals you can add into your workspace before you are required to upgrade. So far, visually, I see that the limit may be 2 people that makes up to 3 people per workspace (including yourself). You can find some details to pricing and FAQs here:

Taskade | Simple Pricing

Personally, I don't think USD5 is a hard bargain if you're self-employed and work with external parties collaboratively. If you're apart of an organization, feel free to ask for demo from them. Discount is possible if you're from a nonprofit or educational institution.

How I use Taskade? ☕

Well, given that it was free to sign-up, I tried it out straight away and I'm happy to report that I successfully managed to use it without having to google nor view any how-tos. That is a good thing! In fact, I am quite elated with just how easy it is to use this tool that I have used my personal email to help centralize and manage my work and personal work side-by-side. If you prefer some satellite view of your progress and all the task you need to complete to clear off certain objective, this is not a bad organization.

So I created 2 workspace: one for work and one for my personal tasks. Then I just collate all my tasks into monthly projects.

My personal tasks involve me updating my study progress and curating stuff I like online into my Tumblr blog.

Create studyblr workspace

Create new project in the studyblr workspace to organize and brainstorm Tumblr contents I plan to create and post: Tumblr: 2021/01.

Utilize the Mindmap template from all the options of templates shared and start creating the and organizing the content I want and tasks I need to execute to develop them.

Et voila! There all there is to it! It is easy peasy and you can start adding due dates as reminders and links as resources as well as hashtags for filtering in future. Check out some drafting I did so far in the screenshots below!

For more updates, check out their Updates page that fully utilizes Taskade to share all the updates straight from December 2017 till present and the chat function is there available for you to ask the Taskade team about the feature updates directly. Now that's awesome cause you know something's good if the one who makes them, actually uses them.😎😎😎

🌱 Google Earth Pro 101

Google Earth Pro is one of the most powerful freely available software one can use for location investigation. If you're a non-tech GIS user who needs to know just enough to get your work going, then let's hit the ground running with this tutorial for starters.

🟢 Beginner-friendly.

🆓 Free with no hidden monetary cost.

🖥️ Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Python: Geospatial Environment Setup (Part 1)

Here’s a quick run down of what you’re supposed to do to prepare yourself to use Python for data analysis.

Install Python ☑

Install Miniconda ☑

Install the basic Python libraries ☑

Create new environment for your workspace

Install geospatial Python libraries

🐍 Installing Python

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s December 14th, 2021. Python 3 is currently at 3.10.1 version. It’s a great milestone for Python 3 but there were heresay of issues concerning 3.10 when it comes to using it with conda. Since we’re using conda for our Python libraries and environment management, we stay safe by installing Python 3.9.5.

Download 👉🏻 Python 3.10.1 if you want to give a hand at some adventurous troubleshooting

Or download 👉🏻 Python 3.9.5 for something quite fuss-free

📌 During installation, don’t forget to ✔ the option Add Python 3.x to PATH. This enables you to access your Python from the command prompt.

Installing Miniconda

As a beginner, you’ll be informed that Anaconda is the easiest Python library manager GUI to implement conda and where it contains all the core and scientific libraries you ever need for your data analysis upon installation. So far, I believe it’s unnecessarily heavy, the GUI isn’t too friendly and I don’t use most of the pre-installed libraries. So after a few years in the darkness about it, I resorted to jump-ship and use the skimped version of conda; Miniconda.

Yes, it does come with the warning that you should have some sort of experience with Python to know what core libraries you need. And that’s the beauty of it. We’ll get to installing those libraries in the next section.

◾ If you’re skeptical about installing libraries from scratch, you can download 👉🏻 Anaconda Individual Edition directly and install it without issues; it takes some time to download due to the big file and a tad bit longer to install.

◾ Download 👉🏻 Miniconda if you’re up to the challenge.

📌 After you’ve installed Miniconda, you will find that it is installed under the Anaconda folder at your Windows Start. By this time, you will already have Python 3 and Anaconda ready in your computer. Next we’ll jump into installing the basic Python libraries necessary for core data analysis and create an environment to house the geospatial libraries.

📚 Installing core Python libraries

Core libraries for data analysis in Python are the followings:

🔺 numpy: a Python library that enables scientific computing by handling multidimensional array objects, or masked objects including matrices and all the mathematical processes involved.

🔺 pandas: enables the handling of ‘relational’ or 'labeled’ data structure in a flexible and intuitive manner. Basically enables the handling of data in a tabular structure similar to what we see in Excel.

🔺matplotlib: a robust library that helps with the visualization of data; static, animated or interactive. It’s a fun library to explore.

🔺 seaborn: another visualization library that is built based on matplotlib which is more high-level and produces more crowd-appealing visualization. Subject to preference though.

🔺 jupyter lab: a web-based user interface for Project Jupyter where you can work with documents, text editors, terminals and or Jupyter Notebooks. We are installing this library to tap into the notebook package that is available with this library installation

To start installing:

1️⃣ At Start, access the Anaconda folder > Select Anaconda Prompt (miniconda3)

2️⃣ An Anaconda Prompt window similar to Windows command prompt will open > Navigate to the folder you would like to keep your analytics workspace using the following common command prompt codes:

◽ To backtrack folder location 👇🏻

◽ Change the current drive, to x drive 👇🏻

◽ Navigate to certain folders of interest e.g deeper from Lea folder i.e Lea\folder_x\folder_y 👇🏻

3️⃣ Once navigated to the folder of choice, you can start installing all of the libraries in a single command as follows:

The command above will enable the simultaneous installation of all the essential Python libraries needed by any data scientists.

💀 Should there be any issues during the installation such as uncharacteristically long installation time; 1 hour is stretching it, press Ctrl + c to cancel any pending processes and proceed to retry by installing the library one by one i.e

Once you manage to go through the installation of the basic Python libraries above, you are half way there! With these packages, you are already set to actually make some pretty serious data analysis. The numpy, pandas and matplotlib libraries are the triple threat for exploratory data analysis (EDA) processes and the jupyter lab library provides the documentation sans coding notebook that is shareable and editable among team mates or colleagues.

Since we’re the folks who like to make ourselves miserable with the spatial details of our data, we will climb up another 2 hurdles to creating a geospatial workspace using conda and installing the libraries needed for geospatial EDA.

If you're issues following the steps here, check out the real-time demonstration of the installations at this link 👇🏻

See you guys in part 2 soon!

Peta Gunatanah Malaysia 2014 - 2018

Peta Gunatanah Malaysia 2014 -2018 ("Malaysia's Land Cover 2014 - 2018") web application is a platform generated for the Quality Assessment activity organized by Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM) on 23rd June 2024.

The workshop aims to collect field/reference data from Malaysian's state agencies in the effort to verify the quality of the land cover classification output generated in support of CO2 release measurement from converted agricultural lands.

Participants are able access the app via conventional browsers from their mobile devices and submit drawings/sketches that they have captured within interactive data layers.

This web app aims to support direct input from source onto the task of improving the accuracy of the generated land cover maps. Vectors generated from this exercise are readily standardized with the required data scheme from quality assessment, making full use of the ArcGIS Online ecosystem full to a produce concrete output and actionable information.

survey123 offline

Survey123 for ArcGIS is perhaps, one of those applications that superficial nerds like me would like; it's easy to configure, kiddie-level degree of customization with 'coding' (for that fragile ego-stroke) and user-friendly template to use. 

No app development/coding experience is required to publish a survey form and believe it or not, you can, personalize your survey to not look so meh. 

It took me some time to stumble through the procedures of enabling this feature before I understand the 'ArcGIS Online' ecosystem to which this app is chained to. 

So how do we do it? And why doesn't it work pronto?

This issue may be due to the fact that when we first start creating our forms, we go through the generic step-by-step procedures that leave little to imagination what was happening. Most of the time, we're too eager to find out how it really work. 

When we publish a Survey123 form; be it from the Survey123 website portal or the Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS software, we are actually creating and publishing a folder that contains a hosted feature layer and a form. It is on that hosted feature layer that we add, delete, update or edit data it. From ArcGIS Online, it looks like any feature service that we publish out of ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Pro, save for the special folder it is placed in with a 'Form' file. 

To enable any offline function in any hosted feature layer in ArcGIS Online, you will need to enable the 'Sync' feature. So far, in many technical articles that I have gone through to learn how to enable this offline feature always goes back to 'Prepare basemaps for offline use'. It is a tad bit frustrating. But my experience when deal with 'Collector for ArcGIS' gave me the sense of epiphany when it comes to Survey123. So when you have prepared your Survey123 form for offline usage and it still doesn't work...do not be alarmed and let's see how to rectify the issue. 

1. Locate your survey's hosted feature layer

At your ArcGIS Online home page, click 'Content' at the main tab. We're going to go directly to your hosted feature layer that was generated for your survey when you published. 

Locate your survey folder. Click it open 

In the survey folder, navigate to the survey's hosted feature layer and click 'Options' button; the triple ellipses icon

At at the dropdown, click 'View item details'. Please refer to the screenshot below: 

2. Change the hosted feature layer settings

At the item details page, navigate to the 'Settings' button at the main header and click it. This will prompt open the settings page for the feature layer. Refer to the screenshot below:

At the 'Settings' page, there are two tabs at the subheader; 'General' and 'Feature layer (hosted)'. Click 'Feature layer (hosted)' to configure its settings.

At the 'Feature layer (hosted)' option, locate the 'Editing' section. Here, check the 'Enable sync' option. This is the option that will enable offline data editing. Please refer to the following screenshot: 

Don't forget to click 'Save'

With this, your hosted feature layer which serves as the data model is enabled for synchronization. Synchronization helps to sync back any changes you've made when you're out on the field collecting data; editing, adding, deleting or update...depending on what feature editing you've configured. 

It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it and just bear in mind that the data hierarchy in the ArcGIS Online universe are as follows:

Feature layer (hosted) > Web map > Web application

Once you get that out of the way, go crazy with your data collection without any worries!

🗻 Diorama Drama

So, John Nelson made this absolutely simple tutorial on how to create a diorama interesting features on Earth's surfaces. I have been eyeing alot of people making them and resisting the urge to make one. I mean, I have the habit of falling into a rabbit hole with making maps that I'll definitely be having too much fun to stop. That could mean hours and hours scrutinizing colors, perspective or setups and even legend arrangements. But this...I decided not to overdo it and just make one.

I can't believe how easy it is to make one! Here's a piece of many to come; the elevation diorama of area within the Batang Ai Dam and Batang Ai National Park in Sarawak, East Malaysia.

What you'll learn... 1️⃣ How to extract raster from existing image layer in Living Atlas; that's how we extracted the DEM layer for this elevation data.

2️⃣ How to create a 3D scene in ArcGIS Pro and navigate through them.

3️⃣ How to create a layout layer and export them as a static image format i.e jpeg, png, tif etc...

Check out the video tutorial here 👇🏻

I was thinking that this tutorial is making me feel like there is a possibility of creating some floating island or pixel-like models of isolated pieces of land -- my head is imagining some kind of dragons flying around in some nonexistent Viking fantasy map. But hey...if you're not inspired to create crazier maps from John's tutorial, then are you even a cartographer at all?

He's on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and he even has this supercool blog of his; Adventures in Mapping, where he shares all of his tutorials in full documentation and gorgeous portfolio that could only consist of magic! One such as I can only aspire.

So, that was what our Sunday looked like and I think I'll be playing around with dioramas for a few weeks. Let's see just how many of these I can make 'til the next Sunday.

33rd National Geoscience Conference 2021 (NGC 2021)

Tool: ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Pro Deep Learning extension, Python, Jupyter Notebook Technique: Deep learning; semantic segmentation, cartography, remote sensing

The presentation of abstract outlining the implementation of deep learning in land cover classification across the Borneo island. It uses the Sentinel-2 image data and the band combination that differentiates the bareland, tree cover as well as waterbodies and croplands whilst training the U-Net model using the referenced data collected.

Please find the abstract published here:

Warta Geologi, Vol. 47, No. 1, April 2021

The presentation slide can be accessed at the following link 👇🏻:

Split by Attributes GP tool....when would you actually use this?

There are times when you're making a map but symbolizing using the symbology feature is not enough to characterize the data visually. Thus, having this tool makes cartographical work a little easier by generating copies of the original data, split into separate layers based on the attribute that we need. By doing this, it makes the task of adding the legend much easier in the layout as well.

Most often, when making maps for slide presentation, you would want to segregate data into separate layers with certain uniform values for a certain attribute and a create a new data layer which we can use over and over again.

Although definition query can help with visualizing and showing the features with the attribute value that we want, we may want to create a separate data to avoid compromising the original data or constantly repeating the task of typing/configuring the SQL commands.

This tool is valid for shapefiles and feature classes. Any other data types may need to be converted into those two formats before you can run it. Check out the long-winded demo below:

Since this tool is actually a Python script, it can be integrated into a code for batch geoprocessing or model for iteration over many data layers or interconnection to other tools; automation at its full-on glory! 😁

Story Map for Noobs: Cascade | WWF Network

Story Map is a web application template product that has been popularized in ArcGIS Online for a user-friendly and comprehensive narrative of maps. The ‘Cascade’ template has become the seamless interface of choice due to it’s ribbon transitions and availability of content streaming from external sources. 

Please refer to the following link for resources used in this webinar:

Story Map for Noobs: Cascade web application

📌 Availability: Retracted in 2021