Development – TYC GIS – GIS, Teledetección y Drones

Projects TYC GIS® | Inventory and green areas management plugin for the cities from Banco Santander

Rodrigo Arias Braun — Mon, 20 May 2024 15:02:56 +0000

In the same line as the urban inventory management plugins previously developed for the city hall of Pozuelo de Alarcón and Avilés, we have carried out a new work for inventory management, in this case it will be the botanical inventory of the Santander Bank in the cities of Pozuelo de Alarcón and Madrid.

Despite sharing a lot, this plugin requiered some modifications for the peculiarities of this inventory. We moved on to having fewer shapes, focusing only on general trees, olive trees, bushes, shrub thickets and grasslands. However, the data available for each shape, specially for olive trees and shrub thickets, required a complete reformulation of the data model.

The olive trees have a data model that distinguish them from the other trees, they have a name, date, and being all the elements of the same species, the classification of families and species, and the symbology asociated, had to be replaced. The customer also have pictures of the olive trees, and of other shapes too. To mantain the lightness of the data base and ensure the agile handling of the shapes, an action was introduced that enables the pictures to be opened in the web browser. This allows to make a fast query of the pictures, but avoids the problems that loading a hole shape of pictures may cause.

In the case of shrubs thickets, they are kept as polygonal entities, but we now face multispecies polygons, on which they can coexists up to three species. This required first a change in the logic of the data base, so it can adapt to the existence of several species and to guarantee the logical order of the species inside the table, preventing, for example, that that a species occupy the value of the third species, if there is no species in the place of the main species. A style was created that analyze the amount of species of each polygon and respects the symbology of the main species, but indicating that it is not the only species in that space.

Another innovation introduced, upon the customer request, was a species finder. In previous plugins, to find a species we had to chose first a family and inside it we chose the species. Now, although it can still be done this way, a finder was implemented that search among the species of all families if the family field is blank and can search for the species inside a specific family.

In additon to this innovations, the plugin maintains all the capabillities of the previous ones, giving the control for creation, removal and editing of entities for the “user” access level, user administration for the “admin” level and an additional “visitor” level that allows to make queries without the possibility of making changes in the data base.

Customer:

If you need help with a similar project, contact us here TYC GIS.

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Projects TYC GIS® | Plugin development for urban inventory in Avilés

TYC GIS — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 13:27:13 +0000

Some weeks ago, we talked about a project carried out for EULEN of a QGIS plugin for urban inventory management. This time, we have a new project for EULEN. On this ocassion, for the urban inventory management of Avilés.

It may seem that the elements a cityhall needs to inventory are always the same and sometimes very similar, yet they always have some pecularities and specific needs. That’s why having at our disposal an app created ad hoc for our specific case and needs is an advantage over a prefab software that may require us to adapt to it.

The Avilés plugin consist on 10 layers, 6 of them of lanscaping (tree, bush, green areas, flower massif, hedge massif, bush massif). These layers have their own field and symbology collection, specifically created for the representation needs of the customer data. On the other four layers (Inventoriable assets, Promenades, Fountains and Rolling mills and water sheets), the data base had to be adapted and a new symbology had to be created for the inventoriable assets, given the wide variety of the inventoried elements.

The plugin also has a user administration section that gives control of user administration to the customer. This allows them to create or erase users, as well as assigning and varying their roles. This way, we can vary someones role from a technician with acces to make changes on the elements into an administrator able to creat new users or revoke a workers acces to the data base if he or she leaves the position.

Another challenge in this kind of works is often the massive loading of data that was taken before the creation of the data model, as it does not always the created data model fits the older one or every data taken above adjust o it. Usually, you have to face a series of layers, excel tables or CSV, where the names of the fields change from one data source to other ones, some are incorrect or non-existant, etc. That’s why, during the data migration phase, we generate some data loading python scripts adjusted to the specific needs of the situation. We detect and correct systematic errors with nomenclatures, coding, wrong or missing data.

Once the data uploading is done, the customer inmediately began to inventory using a tablet with windows 10 in the field, which allowed to use QGIS. The performance was good, considering it was not designed to be used on a tablet, and has made it possible to carry out inventory work in the field with our plugin, which has been a great help in facilitating its execution.

Customer:

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Project | Shadow maps to improve working conditions on the streets

TYC GIS — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:52:24 +0000

It is no secret that Spain is, to a large extent, a place that enjoys long summers and many hours of sunshine. This creates enormous potential for sectors such as tourism, agriculture and electricity generation, but also creates problems in day-to-day life. It happens, for example, that thousands of workers have to carry out their work in the street and sometimes have to perform tasks under a blazing sun. This is why the company Rivamadrid, Rivas Vaciamadrid municipal services company, thought of designing routes that would minimize the sun exposure of its workers, thus improving their working conditions and reducing the risks involved in long days exposed to solar radiation and high temperatures. To achieve this, they needed to have information on which areas are in the shade at each hour of the day at each time of the year.

That’s where TYCGIS comes in. Could we generate maps with the projection of shadows on the streets every hour from sunrise to sunset? Yes, we can. To do this we need to know the coordinates of the place and calculate the relative position of the sun (Azimuth and solar or elevation angle) at each hour of the day for the days we will use. In this case we will use the first day of each month and there are numerous online tools for this, such as SunEarthTools, which gives us the data we need just by entering the coordinates, the time we want to consult and the time zone to which this time belongs (we might want to know what time Spanish sunrise is in Lima). To speed up the process and above all to gain flexibility, instead of using these resources, we developed a tool that allows us to obtain a JSON file with the elevations for as many time intervals for the days we need.

Now we need surface models (MDS), first we tried to use the MDS that the National Geographic Institute (IGN) makes publicly available in its download center. Unfortunately, the MDS available are models with a mesh pitch of 2.5 meters, which did not give us a good result, especially when calculating tree shadows. To improve this, we resorted to work directly on the LIDAR data and obtain our own models, using software such as LASTools and CloudCompare, we achieved models of Surfaces with and without trees for the differentiation of the winter months in which the deciduous trees do not cast as much shadow.

As a final result, we made a composition on a base map, where we superimpose a layer with the trees and another with the projected shadows. On these maps, routes can be traced trying to minimize the sun exposure of employees in the development of their work.

September 1st 9h:

September 1st 19h:

As an additional product to the initial purpose, insolation hours maps were also obtained for each day studied. In this case, a simple sum of the hours of insolation for each day was made for each pixel analyzed, but the study could be enriched with solar azimuth and climatic data if other indexes were desired for the calculation of the estimated incident energy for each point in an entire year, in an agricultural season, etc.

In the end, in TYCGIS, we are very used to carry out projects where GIS is used to increase performance from an economic perspective and it is very rewarding when you have the opportunity to do a job that directly affects the quality of life of people and see how you can also use geographic information systems to improve the lives of people, in this case enabling improvements in occupational safety and welfare at work.

Customers:

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Project | Field app development for agroforestry project in Zambia

TYC GIS — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 10:55:50 +0000

TYC GIS has developed for an international agribusiness company with a large presence in Africa,
a customized mobile application for field digitization of the plots of an agroforestry plantation project in Zambia for the generation of carbon credits.

This tool allows field technicians, from a mobile device, to identify in the database the farmers who have participated in the planting project, locate the field location, digitize the plot boundaries and add relevant field observations for the next phases of the project.

Prior to its use by the field technicians, training was conducted in the field for the correct use of the different functionalities of the application.

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