[lug] BLUG meeting announcement - July 10th, 2014

[anna]

The July Boulder Linux Users Group meeting is coming up

Speaker: Guido Cervone

Title: Assessing the potential impact of shale gas extraction on fauna in
rural areas using UAVs

Abstract:
The worldwide exhaustion of traditional sources used to produce energy has
lead to a ‘race for what it is left’.  New sources are sought in areas of
the world which are geographically or geopolitically more dangerous, and
often pose unprecedented stress to areas of the environment which have
never been explored or exploited.  In the United States shale gas has
rapidly increased due to  technological improvements in hydraulic
fracturing and horizontal drilling, offsetting declines in production from
conventional gas reservoirs. These new sources are usually located in rural
areas, thriving with an important ecological and biological diversity.

It is paramount to assess the potential impacts on the environment of these
new shale gas extraction in order to understand the risks and potentially
mitigate them.   Whereas land cover can effectively be studied using high
resolution remote sensing imagery, it harder to understand the effect on
fauna, as their density and movements are usually not precisely known.
Specific animals are tagged with low-power radio-transmitters, which are
tracked and monitored over time.  These signals are very faint and are
tracked with handheld receivers that must be within a few hundred meters of
the transmitters.

In this talk, an application is proposed to use UAVs equipped with
broad-band radios powered by a small Linux system to detect and geolocate
these signals.  The main advantage is that a UAV can cover a much larger
area  in the same amount of time and are impervious of obstacles.  This
project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between a geoInformation
scientist, a biologist and  an electrical engineer.


  When : 7:15 p.m. on Thu, July 10, 2014

  Where : Applied Trust, 1033 Walnut St, Bulder, CO 80302

  Applied Trust is on Walnut Street in downtown Boulder. It is the door
just west of Amante Coffee.

Map : http://lug.boulder.co.us/meetings.html

Parking : Parking on the street is free after 7pm and there are 2 public
garages on Walnut at $1.25/hour and bike parking on the sidewalk in front
of the office.

Bus : Less than 2 blocks from Broadway which is served by the Skip busses.
Less than 4 blocks from the Boulder Transit Center which serves almost all
routes.

Pre meeting food
----------------

Food will be available at the meeting location, so please show up around 6:45
pm and join us for a bite to eat. We'll start the meeting about 7:15.

See you there,
Anna
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