Author Archives: rburright
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Where Can Love Be Found? Mapping Valentine’s Day with GIS
An easy yet powerful activity is to map place names using a GIS. Make it even better by mapping names associated with holidays. For Valentine’s Day, I mapped place names containing the words “love”, “heart”, and “rose.” I ran three queries against the Geographic Names Information System, exporting each file as a comma separated value (CSV) file. I brought each file into Excel, deleted a few fields I did not need, re-saved, and brought the file into ArcGIS Explorer using Add Content.
Rose was the most popular (the 591 red circles), then love (the 136 yellow notes), and heart (the 38 blue circles). Candy and chocolate resulted in only 6 and 3 places, respectively.
There seems to be a clustering of “Rose” place names in Minnesota, the southern Mississippi Valley, and along the Delaware River.
Can love scale any height? You top 7,303 feet at Loveland Heights, Colorado, not far from the city of Loveland, where more than 200,000 Valentines are mailed to all 50 states and more than 110 countries, just to receive the Loveland postmark. Sadly, you hit bottom in aptly named Love’s Folly, Maryland, at 7 feet.
You could also analyze businesses and industry responsible for producing things associated with Valentine’s Day. For example, 1,170 locations produced chocolate and cocoa products in 2006, employing 39,457 people, led by California with 128. To access the data, go to http://www.census.gov/, then “Business and Industry,” “County Business Patterns”, then select a state, and look up “Details” for “Industry Code 31, Manufacturing.” Locate code 31133, “Confectionery Manufacturing From Purchased Chocolate.” After noting the number of employees and establishments involved in the manufacturing of confectionery from chocolate, use “Compare” to compare other states. Chocolate comes from cacao trees found in Central and South America and is imported to the USA by confectionery manufacturers. You can probably guess the city where the largest producer of chocolate products is! Next, do the same thing with florists.
I invite you to explore the endless possibilities of analyzing names and industries through the use of a GIS.
May you find yourself in Lovewell Kansas this Valentine’s Day rather than Loveless Park Alabama!
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
Originally posted February 12, 2010
The Grand Challenges of Geographic Information Science
At this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Dr. Dawn Wright (Oregon State University) and Dr. Chaowei Yang (George Mason University) organized a session to address: “What are the grand challenges of Geographic Information Science?” Their definition of grand challenges were “questions and directives that: (1) are extremely hard to do, yet are do-able; (2) produce outcomes potentially affecting millions, if not hundreds of millions of people; (3) require multiple research projects across many subdisciplines in order to be satisfactorily addressed; (4) consist of well-defined metrics such that, through creativity and commitment, can be realistically met and [there is understanding when the] end has been reached; (5) capture the popular imagination, and thus political support.”
Running through the session was the theme of the digital earth—to make accessible a wealth of geospatial data and tools that enables people to make everyday decisions more efficiently and wisely based on the spatial perspective. The now-familiar concept of citizens as sensors was mentioned frequently. That the EPA discussed having citizens monitor air and water quality is another indication that citizen science will be increasingly relied upon as part of the geo-monitoring system for the planet. That has enormous implications for standards, quality, and the metadata and databases that will need to be in place for it to be effectively used.
Dr. Peggy Agouris’ report about the recent NSF-sponsored workshop on geospatial and geotemporal informatics was encouraging. The workshop identified new challenges in information extraction and modeling, stated that data collection was still important and needed to be supported in industry, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies, and identified support for cross-discipline discovery using spatiotemporal information.
Tim Nyerges (University of Washington and University Consortium of GIS) reminded us of Keith Clarke’s UCGIS grand challenges from 2006: What is the cost to the nation of geospatial information that is inaccurate, over-accurate, or out-of-date? What role can geospatial technologies play in eliminating geographic illiteracy? In what ways have we yet to exploit the superiority of digital maps over paper maps? Can we complete a digital earth by 2009? (!) By how much can effective use of geospatial information improve human safety and welfare while reducing the associated costs? How can we best articulate GIScience as a core of interdisciplinary science, supporting information integration across multiple disciplines in large research projects? Tim also spoke about developing an assembly of geospatial technical and social components and activities that implement a regional network for disaster preparedness and response for the nation. This seems especially urgent in light of the Gulf oil spill!
Next week, I will put forward some “grand challenges” for GIS in education, and I welcome your thoughts.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
Investigating the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Using GIS
Like other disasters, human and natural, the current horrendous situation with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a dynamic event, changing rapidly over space and time. Because of this, it can be effectively investigated within a GIS. GIS provides context and content, helping students understand the location and extent of the disaster through taking measurements, overlaying other map layers, and examining scale. Moreover, GIS allows students to understand how physical and human systems are interrelated, such as winds and cleanup efforts, oil and fisheries, and much more. Far from static tools, desktop and web-based GIS tools can be used together with imagery and maps that are updated daily—even by ordinary citizens.
First, download the oil and gas drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico offshore from Texas from the state’s General Land Office and bring it into ArcGIS. The density of these platforms is truly astounding:
http://wwwdb.glo.state.tx.us/gisdata/disclaimer.cfm?dmap=shapefiles/subleases.zip
A set of data available on ArcGIS Online includes forecasted movement of the plume, a 3-D ArcGIS set of data, ASTER and Landsat imagery, environmental impacts, critical habitat, and more, on:
http://www.arcgisonline.com/home/search.html?t=content&q=gulf%20oil%20spill
ESRI created and posted an interactive map that allows the viewing of location-based feeds, including news and videos, and also allows users to add their own content, on:
http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/gulf-oil-spill-2010/index.html%20%20
The ability to add content is provided by ArcGIS Server 10 beta hosted in the Amazon Web Service infrastructure.
Dig deeper and use some remotely sensed MODIS imagery:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
For daily images see:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=USA7
These pages provide GIS compatible imagery. Select “more info,” select the granule of interest from the list at the bottom of the page. Click on the link to get an uncorrected 5-minute swath image, down to 250 meter resolution. Make sure you also download the world file so the image will be georegistered within your GIS. You can also download a KML and use it in ArcGIS Explorer.
For example, a 250m MODIS image is available on:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/?2010119-0429/Louisiana.A2010119.1648.250m.jpg
I encourage you to use GIS in your analysis of the Gulf oil spill to try to make sense of this disaster.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
Examining Land Use and Sustainability in Rond?nia, Brazil, Using GIS
A new lesson in the ArcLessons library invites you to analyze the spatial pattern of land use and consider issues of sustainability in Rond?nia, Brazil using GIS.
The problem statement in the lesson reads as follows: After reading about development and deforestation in Brazil, with your new-found GIS skills, you decide to use GIS to investigate the situation on a deeper level and on a spatial level. Your goal is to make an assessment about the pattern and reasons for development in one of the most widely known parts of the rainforest, the state of Rond?nia, Brazil.
Skills integrated in the lesson include downloading and formatting data from an international public domain data source for use in a GIS. This source is Brazil’s Institute for Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE)). This agency, which operates in part as a national statistics agency, a land management agency, and an environmental agency, is a rich source of data in many tabular and spatial forms. One of my goals in writing the lesson was to help students realize that agencies outside the USA are also placing their spatial data online, and while language and bandwidth may pose challenges, many of these resources are worth pursuing.
Another skill nurtured by the lesson is downloading, formatting, and symbolizing Landsat satellite imagery data for use in a GIS, from the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland. The Landsat image makes it clear what the development pattern has been in the state, how roads have been a precursor to that development, and how land use has changed over time. In terms of GIS management, a skill that runs throughout the lesson is the integration of multiple sources and different scales and spatial extents into a GIS-based project. Finally, while it is important to download and integrate these spatial data sets, the most important skill developed in the lesson is helping the student to analyze spatial data in a problem-solving environment.
I look forward to your feedback on the lesson and also how you have modified the lesson or the idea behind it to meet your own instructional needs.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
Examining Land Use and Sustainability in Rondộnia, Brazil, Using GIS
A new lesson in the ArcLessons library invites you to analyze the spatial pattern of land use and consider issues of sustainability in Rondộnia, Brazil using GIS.
The problem statement in the lesson reads as follows: After reading about development and deforestation in Brazil, with your new-found GIS skills, you decide to use GIS to investigate the situation on a deeper level and on a spatial level. Your goal is to make an assessment about the pattern and reasons for development in one of the most widely known parts of the rainforest, the state of Rondộnia, Brazil.
Skills integrated in the lesson include downloading and formatting data from an international public domain data source for use in a GIS. This source is Brazil’s Institute for Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE)). This agency, which operates in part as a national statistics agency, a land management agency, and an environmental agency, is a rich source of data in many tabular and spatial forms. One of my goals in writing the lesson was to help students realize that agencies outside the USA are also placing their spatial data online, and while language and bandwidth may pose challenges, many of these resources are worth pursuing.
Another skill nurtured by the lesson is downloading, formatting, and symbolizing Landsat satellite imagery data for use in a GIS, from the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland. The Landsat image makes it clear what the development pattern has been in the state, how roads have been a precursor to that development, and how land use has changed over time. In terms of GIS management, a skill that runs throughout the lesson is the integration of multiple sources and different scales and spatial extents into a GIS-based project. Finally, while it is important to download and integrate these spatial data sets, the most important skill developed in the lesson is helping the student to analyze spatial data in a problem-solving environment.
I look forward to your feedback on the lesson and also how you have modified the lesson or the idea behind it to meet your own instructional needs.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
The Nature Conservancy Launches Atlas of Global Conservation
<IMG height=319 src="http://downloads2.esri.com/blogs/images/info_6836.jpg" width=216 align=right
If my description of the document ended with the above paragraph, it might give rise to the sense that the atlas is a picture of gloom and doom. This is not the case. The book devotes ample coverage to actions being taken on an individual to global scale, deeds that are making a difference, and some of which have been spearheaded by the Nature Conservancy through its conversation and outreach efforts (an organization that I’m proud to say I have been a member of for nearly 20 years.)
This does not mean that all is well. Hardly. The conclusion provides a succinct summarization of the three broad drivers testing the present and the future: population growth, overconsumption, and climate change, and importantly it speaks to the atlas’s subtitle: “Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities to Make a Difference.” I particularly liked the importance the summary places on having geographic data and the maps the volume presents in helping us decide our future. Here’s a bit of the text.
The situation is serious and the future can look bleak, but this atlas holds another lesson. The maps can be seen in many ways as a series of symptoms and a diagnosis…Today we stand at a unique point in history, where we understand what is happening. We can even model and predict consequences of future actions…we now have the capacity to drive change in a positive direction.
As I was examining the book, I spied a note indicating that there is a companion Web site, http://www.nature.org/tncscience/maps/. Once on the site, to my delight, I discovered an ArcGIS Server Silverlight (requires plug-in) application which presents interactive versions of atlas maps. (Note: The site indicates that more maps are to come.) Here are a couple of the maps.
As the atlas concludes, “What will these maps look like in the future? It’s ours to decide.” I hope you take actions that help change the maps in a positive way.
George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager
Earth Day: GIS Is Green Technology
What do Earth Day and GIS have in common? Earth Day began in 1970, with one of its goals to help people take steps to ensure that sustainable practices are followed to protect the environment. I like to think of Earth Day as incentive for what we should be thinking about and doing the other 364 days of the year. GIS also began around the same time, during the 1960s, and like Earth Day, its disciplinary roots are older. ESRI began the year before the first Earth Day, in 1969, as an environmental and land use consulting firm. Despite the changes that have taken place since then in how Earth Day is celebrated, and also how GIS is used, they both have empowered people to understand Planet Earth and to do something positive as its inhabitants.
How can GIS be used to benefit the environment? Examine a sample of papers given each year at hundreds of local, regional, nationwide, and international GIS conferences (such as at the ESRI User Conference), books, journals, and articles listed on the ESRI GIS bibliography, and the annual ESRI Map Books. Look at how GIS is used daily by organizations from local to global scale, including departments of natural resources, the Nature Conservancy, and the United Nations Environment Programme. Review the “best practices” booklet showing how GIS is green technology, in which GIS is described as helping site optimal locations for wind turbines and roofs for solar panels, maintaining tree inventories, and improving wetland habitat. But dig deeper than simply topics labeled as “environmental”: When GIS makes vehicle routing more fuel efficient or when GIS restructures city operations so that underground cable upgrades are done before the street over those cables is repaved, those operations are also “green” because they save resources.
All environmental issues have a spatial component. GIS is used for these green applications because it provides a unique, spatial perspective on those issues, promoting creative problem solving. Most of us want a career where we can make a positive difference in the world. Using GIS is not only interesting and marketable—it brightens the future for all of us.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
Icelandic Volcano and Ash Plume: A GIS Education Event Showstopper
For the past five years around this time, ESRI colleagues and I have met somewhere in Europe with education counterparts from ESRI distributors. Among other things, we gather to discuss and share ideas about education user best practices, new software and data resources, the latest in curriculum development, and ways of advancing GIS education. With a rich 3-day agenda, we were set to begin Wednesday, April 21…that is until the
Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland sent an ash plume across European skies bringing air travel to a halt for days such as depicted by the New York Times ash cloud-airport map. Here’s the picture as of April 19:
While some of our international colleagues might have been able to depart from Portugal, Spain, and Norway, the destination was Paris. Next add to the mix the backlog of travelers with canceled flights over several days and even when things reopen, that crush of stranded passengers means a holding pattern for more recent cancellations, like mine on Sunday April 18. The earliest I could make it in would be Sunday April 25, two days after we were to end. The meeting has been rescheduled for early June.
What a geography lesson—earth processes (volcanism and atmospheric patterns) we cannot control clashing with human transportation invention, demographics, and economic interdependence. I have appreciated stories about various types of global air cargo (e.g., cut flowers from Africa and asparagus from California) not making it to European locations and other goods vice versa. It makes you wonder about how things might be altered to ameliorate these interdependencies…or can we?
It’s also worth noting that Eyjafjallajokull is not a newcomer on the scene. Its previous major eruption was during the age of sail and also was an inspiration to at least one noted English landscape painter, JMW Turner. Some of his famed sunsets gracing the Tate Britain and other galleries were a result of that event. Climate change experts are using these snapshots to understand the past.
We have experienced other remarkable volcanic ash plume events such as Mt Pinatubo in the early 1990s and Krakatoa in 1883. It’s worth noting that both were in South Pacific. Not in unpopulated areas by any means but in areas where atmospheric patterns and population may have not come together quite like what we are seeing today from Iceland. However, both and other events like them around the globe have affected the local geography and have had global effects…I just saw a story indicating the current seemingly eastward drifting ash cloud has arrived in North America at Newfoundland.
We live on a global system and we should not forget it. Remember Earth Day on April 22…it’s the 40th.
By the way, to discover more about international efforts to bring GIS to education, visit the ESRI EdCommunity for key links.
- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager
Examining Historical and Current Flood Hazards Using GIS
A new lesson in the ArcLessons library invites you to assess flash flood risk using GIS, historical and current flood records, imagery, and vector spatial data using local public domain spatial data.
Floods are a problem in mountainous areas in part because runoff from rainfall and snowmelt is constrained to narrow river valleys. Many cities at the base of mountain fronts were founded at the places where the rivers flowed onto the plains. Denver, Boulder, Loveland, and Fort Collins, Colorado, were founded at these places on the South Platte, Boulder, Big Thompson, and Cache la Poudre Rivers, respectively to provide settlers and miners access to the mountains and to provide access to water sources for irrigating crops and watering livestock. However, the sites chosen were continually vulnerable to flash flooding from these same rivers. These communities have a record of flash floods that did not end with the construction of dams and reservoirs, but continues to be a threat to the present day. Loveland suffered from the Big Thompson Flood in 1976, in which 139 people died, and in 1997, five people died and several buildings on the Colorado State University campus were destroyed in Fort Collins.
This lesson begins with the following scenario: The City of Boulder, Colorado, has hired you to assess flash flood hazards for the city. You will use historical and current aerial imagery, floodplain data, building data, streets, zoning, historical accounts of floods, stream gage data, ground photographs, and other data in a GIS environment to do your research and to make your final assessment. Skills involved include: 1) Downloading and formatting data from a local government public domain data source for use in a GIS.
2) Analyzing vector and raster data in a problem-solving environment. 3) Integrating historical documents and ground photographs into GIS-based analysis.
The lesson also may help raise awareness of flood hazards—natural ones and those exacerbated by human impact. For example, what do you think is the flood-related problem with the culvert pictured above? It’s not simply that the gully under the bridge would be underwater in a flood—it is a “deeper” issue!
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
10 Tips on Working With Your Local School
A frequent listserv topic amongst GIS professionals is “best strategies for making a presentation in a local school.” While at the USGS, I visited over 300 schools over 15 years, and still visit occasionally as part of my position at ESRI. I realize that this does not qualify me as an expert, but I have selected 10 things I learned through these experiences.
1. First, to be frank, I think that “school presentation” is too one-sided. “School activity” is better. I recommend engaging the students as much as possible. Ask questions and challenge the students. You don’t need to entertain, but help students think beyond the school walls to major issues in their community and the planet, and how and why GIS is used.
2. Keep the workshop local. Not to say that you can’t delve into global biomes or potential sea level rise, but be sure to include some local issues. Ask the students first to name issues that are of concern to them. After asking students to sketch what they think the school will look like from above, show the school as a satellite image. Show other features and identify them.
3. Keep the workshop as hands-on as possible. Leading a GIS-based activity will be memorable. If you’re not in a computer lab, then give a live demonstration peppered with questions, rather than showing a bunch of slides.
4. Don’t count on having an Internet connection. If there is one, it may be slow or your laptop may be blocked; have everything locally stored just in case.
5. Download historic maps from ArcGIS Online and other sources. Then you can examine neighborhood changes around the school over time, part of your themes: Earth is a dynamic planet; GIS helps us manage change.
6. While you should limit one-sided components, could consider showing a short video; my favorites are on: http://www.gis.com/content/gis-career-pathways. I also find the animation, “GIS Touches Our Everyday Lives,” to wonderfully tie GIS to everyday experience. http://www.gis.com/, http://www.gisday.com/ provide additional ideas.
7. Use tactile learning: Use topographic maps and aerials, with some of the ideas I posted here or others: http://rmmcweb.cr.usgs.gov/outreach/topoteach.html. Or, get outside on the school campus with GPS receivers.
8. Focus on GIS being green and cool technology that helps people and the planet. Emphasize how important education is for GIS success, including their language arts, science, technology, social studies, P.E., and math classes. Emphasize that data, analysis, and asking questions are critical.
9. Leave maps, URLs, and posters as resources after your visit has ended. Encourage students to take charge of their own education, and teachers to teach with GIS.
10. Take advantage of the GeoMentor program (http://www.geomentor.org) to connect with local schools.
I look forward to hearing your ideas.
–Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
