Community Blogs

Organizing your AOI and Land Cover Observations   Hello! My name is Sophia and I live in San Diego, California. I recently finished making all 37 observations for my AOI, which I did over the course of exactly one week. I took observations almost every day, spreading out my data-collecting, which I recommend if you start well before your data deadline so you don’t get too burnt out! To start, I generated my AOI grid. Make sure to look at your grid in satellite view to ensure that the vast majority of the points are accessible. Zoom into each point to see ...

The Problem You've got a list of AOI coordinates. Google Maps will show them to you, but it won't tell you the best order to visit them. If you’ve got more than a few points, this becomes a mess—guesswork, wasted time, and unnecessary backtracking.  We need a tool that will plan the most efficient route for us instead of figuring things out ourselves. That’s what this does, here’s how:  The Solution This problem is a textbook example of the classic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP): How can we find the shortest route that visits each ...