I'm pleased to be here representing Mapillary. I want to talk about island mapping. It's gonna be a bit of a visual journey How many people here today are from an island country or live on an island or work on an island? Australia's too big New Zealand's about right though

So it's a pretty high number I'm from Montana in the US, so I'm not from an island And I've actually never been to Oceania before but I have been to quite a few islands across the world and done some mapping projects There so I want to share some of the experiences I've had Especially in a visual way and see what it might inspire the rest of us to do when you go back home after this conference

So I want to talk about These physical aspects of mapping which is things like connectivity infrastructure urbanization But also as things that are rather intangible community community participation and collaboration

There's several tools that I was using in what we'll look at in the visualizations here It's really quick. It's the tools that Mapillary provides such as our API's our open source GIS Sorry open source viewer Mapillary JS the overpass API from OSM

Some boundaries from who's on first OSM and X to get networks and QGIS to work with all that data. I Also thought this quote gave a great example of why I want to look at islands Something as small as an island is really great to study especially as far as mapping it to completion or mapping

Both what's there as well as the people who live there and it helps us understand the greater world at large a little about Mapillary Mapillary is a platform that allows you to upload images and create street-level imagery It's not a model in the way that many maps are but rather it gives a snapshot of reality on the ground

so we'll actually take the images that you upload and the we're able to extract data from them things like traffic signs or road assets crosswalks benches and Making Mapillary work really well involves mapping all the roads you have to be comprehensive

But because of this it's also participatory by nature. We need someone who's actually out there on the roads on the trails On the beaches wherever it might be that you can bring a camera and Snapping photos of that in order to visualize it and bring it back into a mapping context It works with any camera anywhere it ranges from phones to action cameras all the way up to any type of

360 camera you can put on a vehicle So let's take a journey First I want to talk about island biogeography so I mentioned that studying an island is really great for understanding the the larger context of the world and

We think about a place like the Galapagos Islands for this which was famous for biology for studying how species thrive survive and evolve especially in isolation and You also see different constraints even among people who live there, but things such as migration emigration the constraints of size and limited space

Influence from the mainland as well as a transforming environment whether it's humans changing it or animal species or plant species So I want to think about these Older concepts, but in terms of humans and cities and urbanization on islands When I first started with Mapillary around three years ago one of the first projects I had the opportunity to work on

Involved mapping Santa Canada Islands, which is right off the coast of Los Angeles and California So on the left side you can see some of the issues this island would face Then many of them might sound very familiar to you fresh water is scarce

There's a lot of endemic species. It's important to preserve them. They don't exist on the mainland There's many artifacts of native cultures that were there hundreds and thousands of years ago There is congestion of traffic locals can only own cars tourists have to drive golf carts around and you have just one small town on that island that is very easy to map in detail if you put the effort in and

You'll see on the right the timeline and again it might look very familiar The island was settled thousands of years ago by native Americans, but it was later colonized As we get closer to the modern day most the natives are entirely gone The land was privatized a lot of it's now in Nature Conservancy

It was ravaged by grass fires and finally we went there to try to map it after all this history had already Transformed it from what it might have been 500 years ago So we went there and set up base in the fire station and with the group of map time La we were able to go out and capture street-level images as well as collect a lot of data like

addresses on houses and points of interest So just a quick look at the town of Avalon that's on this island we were able to capture most the center of it around as well as the surrounding roads, but it's a very limited area and once we captured the street-level imagery Mapillary also

Classifies every pixel in the images as belonging to some category so you can see things like vegetation buildings pedestrian areas So we'll take a look at how this can be helpful later beyond just using the images as a reference I Mentioned already the Galapagos Islands These are very unique compared to many others that we might talk about because they have no indigenous humans

Fascinating for the species there, but today Humans are not only they're studying Biology, but there's a tourism explosion and because of that there are many people who come to work on the island So housing needs to be built there are restaurants their hotels Roads Being also need food. It's surprising how much of the land on a place that's supposed to be a very natural paradise is

dedicated to farming and pasture and Again, fresh water is very scarce. So many of these might sound like familiar problems So a team from the University of Chicago and Mansuetto Institute for Urban Innovation For this year for the second year in a row they went in this

Around June and July to go map the island with 360 cameras So they would mount the camera on top of a bicycle helmet and ride a bicycle around all the roads that were accessible on two different islands and One of the students Ryan cutter. He was able to take some of the data that map were extracted from those images and

Split it into categories such as urban natural or other Along all the roads and be able to kind of measure an urban density from this We'll take a look at that. The Faroe Islands are another important one for mapillary You can see here the capital is a small dot of light With some nighttime imagery so small that you probably can't see it actually

This is an interesting island because it has a lot of influence from the mainland in Europe But it's kind of out on its own in the Atlantic and it's very autonomous, but the Danish government Generally provides most of the funding for the infrastructure that has a lot of political influence and there's a bit of tension around that

There's a lot of tourism. There's a lot of sheep But there's also something that popped up called sheep view The locals there made a petition to Google They said we want street view we want it for all sorts of reasons people want to just see what's on the map it can be useful for tools for tourism and So they actually put a camera on top of a sheep and started having it run around the island

mapping places and This garnered a lot of attention in the media. So eventually Google came but it took many years The in-between that time around 2016 one of our founders He traveled with his son spent a week in the Faroe Islands had cameras all over his car duct tape to the top

hanging off the side and Mapped quite a few roads on the island and then a few of us from Mapillary actually returned this spring and filled in some of the gaps so you can see we Have the 2016 imagery. It's in green covering quite a few of the roads and

It's a little more comprehensive by 2019 And this made the local news there is just probably one of the more exciting things was going on that week But it also means there's a lot more Imagery on the ground that people can use to extract a lot of detailed features enrich the map so here's just an idea of what it looks like in the Faroe Islands or driving around and

Then you can also see what the color-coding what it looks like when the machine learning is able to analyze it Hawaii is another great example of an island that faces a lot of common island problems And has a very rich history that still endures today into its issues

Originally is the kingdom of Hawaii as annexed by the United States Today it's part of the United States a US state it has very few images It's rather well maps on open street map. It's usable But once you get there using the map to get around you can see there's a lot of inequality in how the infrastructure is

distributed There's quite a bit of cultural tension between people who are native to Hawaii and people who came from outside whether from North America from Asia many places There's a huge amount of tourism running the economy, but there's also a lot of environmental damage some of its from invasive species some of its from human developments

So here's just an example of a more rural part of Hawaii That's pretty well paved roads, but you can see also there's a lot of vegetation There's a lot of just the natural world mixed in with where people are living in these areas Whereas you may go to an urban area in Honolulu, and you can see they have skyscrapers a lot of tree cover

But once you're underneath the trees at the street level you can also see there's a lot more that might be relevant to a detailed map There's things like whether or not they're sidewalks benches trash bins a lot That's hidden under the tree cover. You might not see from an aerial view

Hawaii has quite a few roads on several of its islands, but on the island of Oahu You have also a few federal roads, so these are built and maintained by the government based in Washington DC and If you look at them closely you can see that they're actually coincide very well with where the military areas are on this island as well as the city of Honolulu and

It's kind of clear that these roads which are the nicest ones by far on the entire state Were built to make sure that military traffic can get from an air force base to a navy base to an army base to a marine base, so you really ask like who does this infrastructure benefit and

Who's kind of left out because they don't live near it or who's forced to live near it in order to make life work? So here you can see a very beautiful part of this highway and It even cuts through a tunnel that allows people to get across the island much more quickly so many islands have a common problem that takes a long time to get somewhere and

Many of the roads are clustered around the coasts. It takes a lot of money to put something in like this another contentious point on Hawaiian Islands was the Especially a lot in the news this year. There's a telescope and astronomical facility on top of Mauna Kea

which is one of the tallest mountains on the main island of Hawaii and There was plans to actually expand it I forget how much exactly but several times larger than it currently is and So you can see on the imagery on the left here many native Hawaiians many locals and support all lined up to protest this

They blocked off the access road that leads up the mountain Only the employees were allowed to go up, but tourism there stopped And it had a very effective message people were very aware of how important this issue was there But it shows a tension between what's culturally important. What's spiritually important to people who live there and

Other goals like saying that we absolutely need an observatory on this because it's such a prime location for it It's a great question of what gets prioritized and who has a stake in deciding how to do it so just to look there where the the observatory is in the middle of the island where the yellow marker is and

This road that connects the east and west coast of it also was a very important piece of infrastructure, but Tended to coincide with making sure that that observatory had access to the coasts Otherwise for years before that people were going all the way around the island or taking a very rough interior road to get across it

Another great example is Sicily This one also has been colonized throughout history Most people who were indigenous Sicilians are long absorbed into different populations Colonized by Greeks Romans Arabs Norman Vikings and today. It's part of Italy, but this is kind of contentious as well

It's famous of course we know many movies that reference Sicilian mafia But there's a lot of corruption on the island a lot of money is unaccounted for as soon as it comes in from the mainland Unemployment is very high especially among the youth there's a lot of decay and the infrastructure a Lot of migration coming up from Africa across the Mediterranean into Europe

But it's also very popular for tourism, so there's a lot of strain on this place and Driving around there mapping I'd spotted this graffiti more than one time saying Sicily is not Italy and most people don't think of it that way unless you really understand the differences between the Sicilians and Everyone that they're connected to on the mainland

but in a place like this also you see that the Rampant corruption can lead to poor accountability so a lot of money goes into the island to help with services like waste management Yet driving on a back road away from the coast you'll happen upon a scene like this where trash just lines the roads and It shows that a lot of the money just gets pocketed by someone the trash gets thrown here rather than dispose of properly and

It's just a challenge to fix that somehow There's also limited space so all this will build up over years and over years. It has nowhere to go So This is an example of something you can map also. It's out of sight out of mind when it's on these back roads

It's near an abandoned railway station but you can map it as Land-use landfill with informal yes something we've seen other projects in Africa for example mapping And once it's on the map you bring that issue forward it brings it into our minds Finally another one is Zanzibar, which is a great example of community and participatory mapping

There's multiple islands in the archipelago There's a lot of drone mapping that's going on there. There's a Zanzibar mapping Institute and There's a lot of activity between international groups as well as local groups like the university We're sharing knowledge and collaborating to go ahead and map all the infrastructure as well as just build better data to support response to

To weather events like rainfall flooding and drought as well as to help with planning and urbanization So it has beautiful drone imagery that's very effective for mapping things on open street map from an aerial view and

the project continued over quite a while with a grid based system that you'll see in things like the tasking managers for OSM and Really effectively map the whole thing We went there with several cameras and we tried to map the old city Which is a lot of struggle because of GPS problems

But we also passed on some of the technology and the knowledge left cameras there for local geospatial students to use and We've seen that get used after we left as an effective way to help map the island So overall with urbanization, I mean traditionally we look at it from a bird's-eye view and

We see urbanization is as easily detected from satellite imagery You can look at it from night time imagery, but it's often not participatory It's done not just from far away, but from space from people that have access to data that locals don't So I want to look at just other ways we can measure these urban footprints and

you can see on the right side the type of things that mapillary can detect and on the left what it looks like and In QGS you can pull these in just an example is you can make cells over an area You can classify the density of those things we detect in those cells

And Then you'll end up with Let's see if I froze there. You can do things like show the density of urban versus natural features. So here's Catalina Islands The Galapagos Islands and you can see how the more central port areas are actually that lighter color which means more urban density And finally the Faroe Islands

The capital city of Torshavn there again, you can see it's very urban. It's very developed. There's a lot of sidewalks There's a lot of power lines Which is a lot different from a place like the Galapagos where the built-up areas with roads are actually Not that built up once you get away from the water And finally another example from Reunion

Saint Denis, so overall with mapping an island. It's very important that we have local information That's what makes things accurate, but also meaningful And we really highly depend on local mapathons local data collection taking your own pictures Going out with your own device and mapping what's important to you

Having the infrastructure on the map is definitely important as well for understanding the physical geography But it's not the whole we need to know about the people who live there. We need to know what matters to them and Having a local participation in that mapping is really what brings it alive

An open street map. I just want to point out that we now Give back data on request if you're capturing map layer images So it's a great way to go out with a camera and capture your own photos locally Send us a message and then we send back a lot of these map features Which is activated as a layer in open street map, so you'll see it on the data layers and the ID editor

It's live now And overall I just want to say that a lot of these things are tools But it's the people who are able to take them and carry out a mission So I ask people to think about what tools you can provide to your community Think about what issues need documenting and as a local mapper think about how you can not just show a static map

But things like change growth and decay So I encourage you to get involved with Mapillary get involved with open street map And raise a community really build one to go out and build your own local map of your island So thanks very much for attending

I just want to announce to you We're giving away a camera if you can find the image somewhere in Oceania on my players website that has this comment There is an island that comes up somewhere I Guess I might have lost it so it might not have made it into my presentation but there's an island in Oceania that

contains this image and If you find it come let us know and you'll be the lucky winner But thanks a lot and let me know if you have any questions

I Was just wondering if you Watch your and take on having the cultural landscape included into these sorts of projects To inform not just the communities, but the professionals that are doing the way so that

We could make more informed decisions Yeah, I think the The idea behind this is really making sure the tool is is neutral so that people can use it To serve their own purposes, so I think that's a very great idea OpenStreetMap can sometimes

Have difficulties with how to properly classify these sorts of things so I know that's an issue and sometimes that means you need to just Create your own map So with Mapillary we're supportive of using it outside of OpenStreetMap as well. You can use QGIS. You can use your own tools and I really hope to see it be helpful to people who want to actually

Show a different perspective than just a very traditional map Thank you, like your comments about the urbanization how your data can sort of reflect that I'm wondering what is the how do we measure organization is where people do stuff where people live and

And how that relates to what we then want to mine out of those It's Yeah, it's it's very broad right now, which is unfortunate

It's just a very new concept So we're kind of aggregating different categories like power line groups sidewalks all these as urban features So there's not really any weight to that density, and I'd hope to see in some future projects I'm working on with different students across the world is seeing if we can make it more fine-grained so people want to look for specific things like

We classify shop signs and advertisements, so it can be more of a commercial area We also want to see if we can do some machine learning on land use parcels in Order to do a training data set and then go to another city and see if we can actually predict what the land uses Whether it's residential or commercial or industrial just based on the ground level imagery, so it's very early for this

But there's a lot to be done in the future for sure