Administered by:
Trying to come up with a tool to help find land for homesteading or solarpunk communes. A way of overlaying various datasets to figure out ideal locations
Besides things like climate, water access, and rainfall what type of data would you want to see?
@dualhammers
- tree density
- vegetation type (common to area or site specific, either would be helpful)
- geography/lie of land/terrain
- wildfire/bushfire risk level
- soil/terrain type (clay, saline, sandy etc)
@KnivesOnly I bet there are good datasets for some of these
@dualhammers the vegetation and soil types might be a bit more difficult to source, depending on location and proximity to agricultural and higher (population) density areas.
I think there're either already things running that can accurately assess tree density & terrain. the wildfire stuff will be country/state/locality specific, but i have little doubt that someone's developing something to do the grunt work there too
I'll look for example datasets for bushfire risk here in Australia for you!
@dualhammers and will keep an eye out for tree/vegetation datasets too! hopefully I can ask some ag/eco acquaintances for ideas
@KnivesOnly I was planning on starting with US only since that's where I can probably move reasonably but if I write the code right it will allow for importing other data sets
Please keep me apprisesd
@dualhammers hahah rightio then
@dualhammers History of nearby businesses/ownership -- is this downstream from an old battery factory (to quote a local example that was luckily discovered before a community food garden was established there)? Or links to environmental status report in the area -- in the US there are many available because of the required EIS processes for things like road construction and realignment.
@yomimono The latter is probably easier than the former. A website that visualizes data-sets on a map first requires a lot of verified data
@dualhammers Growing zones. Avg air quality.
@dualhammers relevant treaties or lack thereof with indigenous people
@Lizsmells that might be a hard dataset to find. I think this tool will require open collaboration
@dualhammers true. also i dont actually know how to accomplish that. but i can contribute like $1/month and make supportive comments every so often
@Lizsmells I was going to start with building the tool and then hopefully if it's useful I can add functionality so folks can add more data like this to it
@dualhammers nice! godspeed :)
@dualhammers b l e s s
In the UK there is https://landexplorer.cc that does this.
Looks like they've changed it so you have to create an account.
Had a play early this year and was impressed.
@Antanicus
@dualhammers
Think @oli did some of the coding @Antanicus
@dazinism
This looks great!
@dualhammers
@dualhammers Proximity to fracking, landfills, anything bad like that.
@dualhammers Soil conditions? Not sure how feasible that is, but knowing what growing conditions are like would be useful.
@dualhammers sorry, I misunderstood your previous message and lost track 
Maybe you can look for fiberoptic backbones and dispatch points
Or wimax towers
@Antot you can jack into a dispatch point with a high frequency tower? That must take a bunch of energy
@dualhammers can you set tourself as a community or private Internet Service Provider ISP in the US?
@dualhammers where I live in europe there are a bunch of community and associative ISPs
Power-wise, a point to point link is very efficient, probably more than 10W but less than 100 to deliver a useful bandwidth
@Antot ooh! I will have to look into this as well. Thanks
@dualhammers you should also compute thing like « distance to the nearest road », drive time to the nearest city, but also bike 
time to the nearest city
Nearest internet access to create wireless long range links( Yup, I’m a nurd!)
Maybe adding history of use (archeological sites) can give insights on the liveability of a space
@Antot distances sound doable. Range to the nearest wireless hub for a mesh will require a large data set of locations that I'm not sure exists
@dualhammers cell tower coverage may be good enough to do that
Line of sight view to a city also
@Antot hmm! I will need to do more study on the subject
@dualhammers you have a few solution to bring the internet to a remote area at a cheap price:
Satellite is the most expensive
Then you have wireless links
The cheapest and DIY way to do it is to use standard wifi hardware and pumped-up antennas, this requires line of sight and is barely legal (high gain antenna are regulated in the wifi bands)
Proper solution is to use higher frequency links like this:
https://hackaday.io/project/1482-off-grid-open-community-mesh-network
@Antot I know the basics like that - just have to understand how a high frequency link works to figure out what data to acquire and how to filter