Rhus

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Pics from Northern Belle isle

I've synced up the pictures I collected on the Northern shore of Belle Isle yesterday evening.  Clicking on the outline of Belle Isle will bring up a gallery on the wildflowers site.      The most Northern part of Belle Isle is one of the most wild places in Detroit, really a precious almost rural zone in post urban Detroit.   I believe it was a protected natural area in some capacity for some time, though these days the official trail extends all the way and we see a lot more people at the 'secret' swimming hole than 10 years ago.  It's not a bad thing - it should be valued and hopefully won't change.  Calm stands of Suman, High Bush Cranberry, and others there.   

[rhusopensource]

New pics on Wildflowers

I've synced a first exploration of images up onto http://wildflowers.winterroot.net    You can find a big cluster around the intersection of 94 and 75 on the map.  The tools on the wildflowers site are still pretty rudimentary - you can try a drawing a focus area around the images to create a gallery - but that still seems a little complicated to explain to me.  Later on I'd like to be able to post a link to a bounding area automatically.  For now, though, I've finished up new feature: ability to load into Google Earth via KML.  I've become a fan of google earth, so try this out:

You can load the KML by clicking this link 

http://wildflowers.winterroot.net/_design/gc-utils/_spatiallist/kml/couchapp/documents?bbox=41,-84,43,-82

If you have Google Earth installed, opening the file that downloads will load all the points into google earth.  The easiest way to see what I've been up to today is to use Google Earth's date slider to filter out everything except what I've done today.  Clicking on the points will let you look at the each image!

[rhusopensource]

Syncing Images

New photos don't sync very fast in the field with 3G, and it tends to kill battery power, so I'm just back now at the Foundation getting my Android on WiFi and letting the first round of new photos sync up to our site.  In general it's pretty clear that it's been a hot summer here, but most of plants are doing what they have evolved to do: survive.  I've got great pictures of Milkweed (pods), Evening Primrose, and many others.  In general seeing a lot of honey and bumble bees, but those guys are hard to get to stay still for photo.

[rhusopensource]

Rhus in Detroit

Headed out this morning to some fields in Detroit to get started taking pictures - the Android app crashed on me multiple times.  More 'field' testing required.  Headed over to Cafe 1923 to debug, took about 30 minutes to debug and fix an integer -> float casting error on image resizes (of all things).  Why didn't this show up before, maybe it's Ice Cream Sandwich?  Everything seems good now, heading back out and will update the APK in the Play store later on today of course.