Logan Earth

The North is often underserved by globally available services, one example of which is Google Earth. In the Northwest Territories the satellite imagery that is provided is often old and tends to be of lower resolution. Not only is the imagery is bad but the digital elevation model that it is draped over is worse. In stark contrast, cities across the world in Google Earth are provided in beautiful 3d models with enough detail to see the branches on trees. 

Understanding the reasons why we see these differences isn't hard. The NWT is 1.346 million square km and has a population of ~45,000 people, half of which live in Yellowknife and the rest are spread out across the other 32 communities. I am sure Google spending time and money on updating the Arctic does not make the top of the priorities lists, leaving Northerners to make do with what they are offered. 

The need for a product like this has grown due to the fact that the North is experiencing climate change now. There have already been massive changes to the environment and we need a good tool to be able to demonstrate the changes that we are living with. Seeing is believing people and you can tell them that permafrost is melting but until you give people the chance to observe it themselves it will be hard for people to accept the changes that need to be made.

The fact that changes have already started and the North will be forever different, highlights another need. It is important to start building a 3d archive of the north that is publicly available to allow people to see the boreal forest as it was before climate change. Last year the Northwest Territories lost more than 4 million hectares of forest to fires and the forests will not be coming back the same.  

My solution, Logan Earth, is a high resolution 3d Earth viewer for the Northwest Territories. It allows for an unparalleled view of the Arctic, allowing people to investigate areas before going out on the land, resource companies easier exploration, and researchers a 3d view to gain a deeper understanding of the area. In it's current iteration, it makes use of ArcGIS Online to host the ArcticDEM from the Polar Geospatial Center as a hosted elevation layer which allows for imagery to be draped over it. This digital elevation model is a 2 x 2m pixel as opposed to the 30 x 30m that is used in most of the territory in Google Earth or other applications. This represented a 225 times increase in resolution for the DEM. This changed the terrain from a flat nondescript landscape to the true rugged and rough landscape of the North. By combining this with with ESRI's World Imagery, which has had a focus in the past couple of years in acquiring beautiful and recent imagery of the North,  I was able to create a website that provided the Northwest Territories with a view it hadn't had before. 

Future work aims to upload the ArcticDEM for the rest of North America and incorporating imagery and DEMs that have been collected around communities and areas of interest that have been collected by the local governments. Though this addition represents an improvement to Logan Earth, to be able to create the models we see in the rest of the world we are going to have to collect drone imagery. Part of the next part of the project involves going out and collecting drone surveys of the different communities and other areas of interest. To accomplish this I am hoping to collect imagery myself and find Indigenous partners in the communities who I can hire and train to collect imagery as well.

Currently my solution benefits the 33 communities of the Northwest Territories, but the goal of the solution would be to provide a high resolution 3d viewer to all people of the Canadian Arctic. The Indigenous people who have inhabited arctic Canada are people of the land and have cared for it and navigated across it for millennia. With the advent of modern web mapping Northerners have been continuously disappointed with the low quality of imagery of the landscape that has been made available. While the rest of the world is seeing complete 3d models of their cities, people who are out on the land are given 30m by 30m elevation pixels by which to judge if a new path crosses a cliff or a gentle slope. 

By creating a high resolution 3d viewer that boost higher resolution DEMs as well as imagery enables the Indigenous Peoples of the NWT to travel out on the land safer than before. Logan Earth can also be used to assist with search and rescue operations, as the higher resolution 3d viewer is across the whole territory and provides a much deeper understanding of the terrain than is available on Google Earth. It also allows for clear communication of stories that have happened on the land and exactly where they happened. This can further enhance the sharing of stories and knowledge between generations.

Climate change is also something that is deeply impacting the lives of Northerners today. While we see the some impacts in our daily lives, it is often difficult for us to witness the sheer scale of the changes on our landscapes. A lot of these changes were hidden behind blurry photos on a smooth landscape and did not reflect the dynamic reality unfolding on the ground. This was the other primary driver for the creation of Logan Earth, was my own personal interest in seeing features such as permafrost slums and looking for alternatives to going to them. 

Logan Rudkevitch is currently the only member of the team. Logan is a second generation Northerner, born and raised in Yellowknife and is of Manitoba Metis descent. The work for this project has been guided by complaints he heard around the territory about the low quality of Google Earth, as well as his own displeasure with it. Growing up going out on the land Logan and having an education in GIS,  As the team grows we will be looking for individuals in the communities would also like to contribute to something like this. We would like to hire and train them and let them set the priorities for areas that need to be collected. 

Logan has also participated in workshops across the territory for GIS, such as the Indigenous Mapping Workshop and workshops focused on teaching GIS to First Nations to assist with unsettled land claims. This, on top of a life in the North, has allowed Logan to build start building relationships with those in the communities that have started to work with GIS and position himself well to undertake a larger project like this. 

Though Logan is not a member of a territorial First Nation, being a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation but from the North this could be beneficial, as the project spans across the traditionally territory of many different Nations across the territory. This allows Logan Earth to be a neutral Indigenous Organization that can hopefully work across and with all the different Nations. 

I chose the pilot stage because Logan Earth is a fully functional website and has been operating publicly since April 2022. So far the website has the high resolution digital elevation model(ArcticDEM) uploaded for the entire Northwest Territories and is using ESRI's World Imagery. Over the last 12 months of operation we have averaged about 13 users a day. 

I am applying to Solve for exposure to help others see the climate change in the North, to find a business mentor that can help me grow my project to cover a larger area in more detail, networking to talk with others that build a better world, education on how to build a community of practice and funding to help make a lot of it possible. 

Logan Rudkevitch is a born and raised Yellowknifer, who is proud to call the North home. His family has lived in Yellowknife for the last 50 years before which they called Winnipeg home. Growing up in the North has given him the chance to get out on the land, either in his canoe or on his snowmobile and develop a deep appreciation for the pristine nature that can be found here. Logan also developed an appreciation and respect for the local First Nations due to the integration of Indigenous culture in mainstream lifestyles we see in the Northwest Territories. It is everyday life, it is who lives here. Logan is a true Northerner at heart and embodies the "do it yourself" attitude that has made the North. Since returning back from University Logan has participated in multiple workshops at the community level on composting and GIS across the territory, and is currently the Secretary of Makerspace YK. Logan loves the North and is always striving to make it a better place. 

Logan Earth is currently taking advantage of higher resolution open source imagery and digital elevation models than Google Earth. By working to develop a drone network and therefore take advantage of drone imagery, dems and point clouds we would have a much higher resolution product in areas we are able to collect. 

Logan Earth could catalyze a broader positive impacts by others in the space by simply existing. It shows large companies like Google are not doing work that is easily accomplished by one individual leveraging open data sources. It encourages them to catch up.

Hopefully it has the impact on the market of developing a drone economy for the North. Maybe it can help transition to the collection of imagery to local people using drones for Google, therefore diversifying the NWT's economies and providing much needed jobs in remote communities. 

I expect my solution to have an impact by providing a high resolution 3d Earth Viewer for the North. 

By having access to a high resolution 3d globe for the area, individuals who are travelling out on the land will have better information about the land that they are navigating, which will result in increased safety on the land, leading to less loss of life on the land and less demand on search and rescue. 

Having access to a high resolution 3d globe for the North, everyone is able to see the active changings that are happening on the landscape, leading to more awareness on the urgency of climate action, which hopefully leads to more urgent action. 

Having access to a high resolution globe for the North, we will see impacts similar to what we have with Google Earth for the rest of the world, such as democratizing GIS and giving everyone access to the best data available, which increases interest in GIS in the general population but also provides a virtual geographic environment for geographers, geoscientists, biologists, and even social scientists to collect field data, which leads to more visual discoveries leading to an increase in knowledge creation about the North, in both the human geography and the geosciences (Liang, 2018). 

Having access to Logan Earth will enable teachers to incorporate lessons about the land with an accurate representation of the landscape which has been shown to be correlated to improved visual penetrative thinking ability, leading to a smarter youth population. 

Northwest Territories 

Just myself so far. 

I had been working on the project for around 4 years. 

I am the sole member of the leadership team and I am a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation. Though I am Indigenous, my family has lived outside of my traditional territory for the last 50 years and have called Yellowknife home ever since. One of the goals of the organization, as we grow, is to train and hire Indigenous peoples in the communities where the work is needed. The communities here in the NWT are very expensive to live in and they also suffer from a lack of economic opportunity. My hope is that Northern Made Maps and the collection of drone imagery can be opportunities for employment to these residents. 

Being a Northern owned company and having grown up in the North, I have a lot of compassion for the residents of these small communities. There are not a lot of opportunities and the problems we see here in Yellowknife are often amplified in the communities. Any type of opportunity will be prioritized to these individuals.