East Anglia Peatlands revisited

Update1: see clipped oroginal and working vector datasets posted as detailed at bottom.

Update 2: added DIY map-mapping workshops & notes to help citzen science

As news abounds about Arctic Permafrost & Peatlands degrading faster than thought (Copilot), this may be a good time to bring back some Natural England and Environment Agency data under Open Government License (OGL, National Archives). The upshot is that returning peatlands to their original state is the biggest climate change mitigator in the UK detailed here & here: briefly, peatlands either degraded thru neglect or converted to farm land, not only shrinks & stops being floodwater catchment, but it converts carbon sinks through sphagnum moss into carbon emitters thru windborne dried peat. In other words, re-watering peatlands dwarf efforts from other mitigation of climate change (see sources at bottom).

Most of my Story Maps and Web Maps were lost, when I couldn't keep them on arcgis.com. That was because the significant amount of open data needed to be reposted, after cleaning it up as discussed at bottom here. That simply exceeded my volunteered geographer (VGI, Wikipedia) budget.

Also stopped posting megadata on Amazon Web Services (AWS, blog), as even 'tiny AWS instance' hosting cost exceeded VGI budgets. 

As in my previous post on a very specific subject here, I resorted to QGIS & QGIScloud to host datasets for free under 50 Mb. Intricate datasets described above, totalled 250Mb in vector format are best for GIS study (send comment below if interested). But the same, rasterized to the data resolution of 50 m., take an order of magnitude lass space: that tucks them in under the free-tier cloud hosting limit. 

(full screen here, "Easr_Anglia_Environ_web4" is a typo but is correct)

This is the result, with full Natural England documentation and shape files posted here and  here respectively: all work is CC BY-SA 4.0 as per my blog footer; it's derived under Open Government License as atop this post. Again, please post questions in the Comment Section below.

Project data

Raster data posted above were derived from vector data that exceeded the free tier as explained. The full vector datasets are stored here as shape files, and here a Esri map package* and QGIS geopackage together with Natural England PDF documentation. 

East Anglia clipped subset of Natural England original dataset with metadata links and current ArcGIS map file is posted as a zip file here. Again, note the work that went into cleaning up what was shared as an old version map and personal geodatabase file here.

*: Esri original includes bivariate posting of GHG (greenhouse gas) flux and total carbon, in addition to the full complement  of Natural England (NE) and Environment Agency (EA) data, all under OGL mentioned atop, and derivation CC BY-SA 4.0 here.

Open mapping

 This is all posted in the framework of citizen science to encourage public engagement:

• paper on story maps in Anthropocene Review
  Map stories can provide dynamic visualizations of the Anthropocene to broaden factually based public understanding
• DIY how-to's on open & closed GIS paltforms
  Build your own Maps (start with  Read Me First)
• previous blog Google Earth & QGIS data for Beechey Island
  Beechey (start with readme.txt)
• Documenting and mapping a tree replanting effort along the River Cam
  NewFlamingos (strart with readme)
• DIY how-to on public data mapping a global marine expedition of that name
  HMS Challenger (start with readme)

Public data

Altho Creative Commons here was the intended purpose, these are critical starting this year as US open data are being curtailed: they have been for a while thru neglected web or ftp sites, lack of funding making open data not so open; see this almost a decade ago, and a win-win 12 yrs ago here, as well as needed fixes mentioned above here... I followed the open vs. cost-recovery policies in CAN, US & UK guvs since I helped a startup publish data on CD-ROMs before the internet changed all that! See unpublished chapters in 2003 & 2005, articles in 1988 & 1992, and abstracts in 1988, 1989 & 1990.