There are millions of ways that Google Earth can help showcase interesting data, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has found a good one — tracking the progress of migrating Ospreys. They’ve built some nice tools for Google Earth that track the location of ‘Mallachie’ and ‘Rothes’ as they migrate from their nest in Loch Garten, Scotland.
The data was very good, but it seemed like they could have done more with it. Trevesy has taken it upon himself to improve on what RSPB has started. For example, they provide a network link-ready KML file, but then give instructions on how to build the file in Google Earth. Why not just provide the final KML, ready to go? Trevesy did, and here is the resulting file
. He also showed them how easily the KML could be displayed as an embedded file using the Google Earth plug-in, as seen here:
This is a neat project for a few reasons. Not only does it show how well Google Earth can display data for projects like this, it’s a great example of how easy it is to take Google Earth data and improve upon it. Trevesy didn’t do anything groundbreaking, but his simple improvements made the data more easily accessible for many people, and presented it in a more interesting fashion.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
“Trevesy didn’t do anything groundbreaking, but his simple improvements made the data more easily accessible for many people, and presented it in a more interesting fashion.”
This is the beauty of open and shared development. Sometimes the greatest gains are through small improvements.
Thanks for sharing and inspiring!
Nice!
Here are some KML tracks from Finnish ospreys: http://www.fmnh.helsinki.fi/english/zoology/satelliteospreys/jukka/
And here is the interesting but sad story about osprey Pete:
http://www.fmnh.helsinki.fi/english/zoology/satelliteospreys/pete/epilogue.htm
Romi Rancken
Thanks for the link love, a good point about the ease of adding to existing KMZ based materials. I know what I’m doing but it’s still very easy to do – I think the edits took less than an hour to put together.
Rich
(aka on Twitter as Trevesy)