Many who have spent time on YouTube have discovered a media/education phenomenon called Crash Course where a variety of complex topics are distilled down into 10-minute, quickly-narrated videos. My spouse, Dr. April Luginbuhl Mather and her colleague Dr. Zohra Calcuttawalla have been writing and content editing for the latest series, Crash Course Geography: It’s pretty cool, because it covers a lot of ground non-geographers don’t … Continue reading Crash Course Geography (and moar)

Conservation and Research A little while back, Charles Ritzler, a PhD student with Case Western Reserve University and employee of Cleveland Metroparks Zoo reached out to me. Charles works with Dr. Kristen Lukas, our Director of Conservation and Research, and as such, his work focuses on improving (quoting Dr. Lukas page) “scientific animal management” and “research on the behavior, health, and welfare” of vertebrate species … Continue reading Mapping animal exhibits using OpenDroneMap: orangutan space estimation for the win.

In the early days of OpenDroneMap, Dakota Benjamin and I discussed the possibility of integrating GRASS into OpenDroneMap to unlock more approaches for processing and post-processing data. We didn’t pull the trigger at that time, in part due to concerns about expanding the universe of dependencies, but later Piero Toffanin added GRASS to WebODM, and we haven’t looked back. Other libraries and tools at the … Continue reading 🌿GRASS is everything❤️‍🔥 (or using GRASS GIS to build elevation models in cities)

As part of our mission to bring awesome drone software, we focus intensively on sustainability (a.k.a. how to pay for development, bug fixes, new features, hosting, etc. for the benefit of all). Open-source is a tricky type of software to fund. I will not cover the details, as other people have already done a great… A new era of open source funding? How we raised $5,099 … Continue reading A new era of open source funding? How we raised $5,099 for core work. — OpenDroneMap

In a previous post, we did a bit of a proof of concept in using OpenDroneMap for scanning a skull. It was the second skull I had scanned with OpenDroneMap. The first was a mountain gorilla skull from the Virungas from the 1920s that I then printed in 3D and brought home with me to Rwanda on a recent trip. These previous scans though were … Continue reading Scanning the samples with OpenDroneMap — part II

In previous posts, we’ve scanned whole cities, cliff faces, down to small things like ukuleles and tiny pits to identify difficult to identify plants. This post goes in a slight different direction, doing a bit of a meta-scan of another kind of voucher: animal bones. I wanted to figure out what other interesting use cases there are for OpenDroneMap. For example, could we use it … Continue reading Scanning the samples with OpenDroneMap