Computers, Society, and Nature

You can now add shapefiles to Google Earth without having to pay $200 for the “premium” service.

If this is done for Google Maps then this will change the face of web GIS.

Good article in the NYTimes on how Google Earth is worrying some governments (including the US) because of what the remoted sensed images–satellite images and aerial photographs–reveal. Governments such as South Korea and India have petitioned Google to remove images of sensitive features. Military bases spring to mind but, for India, features even include bridges. The conclusion of the article? Governments may be concerned; however, the “cat is out of the bag”. Now that the images are in Google products–indeed, now that the images have been shot–they can’t be kept from widespread distribution.

The article mentions potential applications of Google Earth for emergency services such as firefighters. I can’t wait to see applications for environmentalists. Depending on how easily the keyhole software (the basis for Google Earth) can be interfaced, all sorts of filtering algorithms could be applied to, for example, check patterns of land use or deforestation.

Here’s a previous post on Google Earth.

I was asked recently whether online mapping technologies such as scalable vector graphics could rival Google Earth in becoming the next killer app. Saying that SVG is competition is missing the point. What Google Earth (and, more recently, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth) does is marry mapping functionality with data. Without the data, users will always have to scramble to find the information they need. Irrespective of added functionality–SVG and online GIS have far greater mapping functionality–these other technologies will be displaced by Google Earth and Google Maps. Google mapping products may become ubiquitous to the extent that they may become the de facto interfaces to other GIS software packages.

Thanks to Miki in the Intro GIS course, who chose this application because it connects geology to GIS (and may help her find a job!).

An GIS called online United States Geological Survey (USGS)Water Watch displays real time stream flow and compares it with historical stream flow for the day of the year the site is being observed. As a geology student, job options are in the resource companies, research facilities or environmental consulting companies. Jobs also are available in federal agencies, which is why I chose to show a GIS application from the USGS.

The initial spatial layer shows the United States stream flows for that day, and gives the user the option to zoom in to specific states. By clicking on a state, you can view the stream flow for that state at much closer inspection. Then you can move your cursor over a specific site and see attribute data about drainage area, discharge, gage height, percentile and class symbol. Click on specific sites and you can see all available parameters for the site, specify the number of days you want to see, and choose to graph the data or see it in a table.

Water Watch helps the user understand how the stream flow on that day compares with the average from the past 30 years. If there was a huge flood, one could view the map and see how much higher the water is on that day than it usually is. So for the situation in New Orleans, one could view how the water levels compare with water levels from the exact same time of year (same day) in the past. I found the posted information to be informative and self-explanatory.

The site also contains some poignant messages that imply the high cost of maintaining the data collection:

Due to the loss of funding from the Atlantic Salmon Commission, the streamflow data for Pleasant River at Crebo Flats, 01022220, is no longer available. If the streamflow data is important to you, and you would like to become a partner in funding the collection of this important data, contact Gregory Stewart at (207) 622-8201 x 118, or email gstewart @ usgs.gov

One more post from a student in the Intro to GIS course.

Climatologist Dr. Steven Quiring has developed an interactive, web-based research tool to help farmers predict when to plant and when to fertilize. The name of his project is “Developing a Real-Time Agricultural Drought Monitoring System for Delaware Using a Geospatial Framework”. It uses information collected from databases and from nine environmental observation stations across the U.S. State of Delaware to show rainfall and model soil moisture content in a GIS. Eventually, Quiring wants the program to allow users to simply click on a spot on a map and get crop yield predictions for an area as small as 2.5 square miles. Quiring said:

The purpose is to allow the farmer to make decisions based on current soil moisture conditions and how they will impact yield and to use that information to make decisions like should I fertilize, should I irrigate. If they have better information, they can make better decisions, which will put more money in their pockets.

Quiring hopes to post a public interactive monitoring web site very soon, which he believes will have commercial applications as the site tracks reservoir levels, likely mosquito-breeding sites and additional agricultural data. Sounds like a pretty great project to me!

More information on Quiring’s work can be found here.

Here is Microsoft’s entry into online GIS/remote sensing for the masses: Virtual Earth. Some of the images are much clearer than Google’s, although Google Earth is supposed to have far greater coverage. Who knew that online mapping/digital gazetteers would become the killer app?

Now let’s see Microsoft release an api.

Thanks to a student in the introduction to GIS course.

Maps have been used throughout history to illustrate and dispute political borders. Maps first were used for navigation purposes and, among other regions, helped explorers chart the New World. As charting was inextricable from claiming ownership, European powers began using maps to chart borders. Each country produced its own maps, and the maps often purposely drew borders to benefit the mapmaker’s home country. The first such map to employ this technique was produced in 1656 by the French. Since much of the interior of North America was unexplored at this time, liberties were often taken with cartographical features. In the particular map Le Canada ou Nouvelle France, the cartographer places Lake Erie very near the border of Florida, at that time a Spanish possession. This placement maximizes the amount of French territory by squishing the English colonies right up to the coastline. Does this represent an unintentional distortion because of minimal knowledge of a region or a deliberate distortion to maximize ownership? Sometimes it may be hard to tell.

Like other economic powers of the time, the French continued to use this technique of selective border placement. A map published in 1718, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississippi, claimed the Carolinas for France, in addition to placing Lake Champlain entirely within French territory. This map also minimizes the amount of territory shown as being controlled by the English, by squishing the colonies against the coast. After years of map-making by the French, the English fought back cartographically by publishing their own map. Their 1755 map of North America showed the borders of the British colonies extended over the Mississippi River. Maps like these continued to be published until the world became accurately charted to minimize scale distortions. Border disputes are another matter entirely and not a matter of navigational skill and cartography but of politics.

On the other side of the world, China and India have had a long running dispute over the province of Arunachal Pradesh, located in North-East India. The territory was ceded to India by Tibet while Tibet was an independent nation. China, however, never recognized the independence of Tibet, and thus claims that Tibet did not have the right to cede the area to India. Although the territory is presently controlled by the Indians, maps published in China extend China’s political boundaries to include the territory, without mentioning there is a territorial dispute. In addition, the Chinese maps also show the Paracel and Spratly islands as being entirely under Chinese control, ignoring the fact that they are claimed by no fewer that eight different countries!

The advent of GIS, remote sensing, and Global Positioning Systems presumably should put an end to border disputes. These tools are sold largely on the basis of their ability to accurately depict where locations (borders) are, characterize what’s going on at particular locations, and allow flexibility when users want to make changes. In theory, these tools should ensure that borders around the world are accurately delineated. Because GIS allows for extensive attribution of features, areas and regions could be characterized by their social, historical and ethnic makeup. Negotiators acting in good faith could create a GIS that determines whether peoples are closer culturally to the Chinese or to the Indians. Areas that are more Chinese could be awarded to the Chinese and vice-versa. A further application of GIS in this dispute could be to use remote sensed and raster images. Negotiators could analyze the topography of the region to decide what areas of the region could be better economically integrated as a part of India or as a part of China. Because the area is quite mountainous, such an analysis could indicate the feasibility of transportation links that could facilitate economic development. Most importantly GIS offers more flexibility than a map in terms of changes. Each side could view changes visually to see how it would affect them; if changes need to be made then they could be made quickly. In the past this was not possible and each time border negotiations occurred, paper maps had to be produced, thus dragging out the process. From all of this, spatial technologies should help avoid border disputes, and when they do occur, also should aid in solving them.

[Of course, borders disputes aren’t solved with new technologies. Borders aren’t rivers or mountains but political, social and historical creations. Greater accuracy and precision don’t make for smoother negotiations but may actually work in the converse: to give greater technological ammunition to each side that his/her case has the stronger argument and is therefore, right. This is one more example of the need to temper technology with political context.—sieber]

Links

International Map of Tibet
Chinese Map of Tibet
Look closely in the south-eastern portions of the map. In the Chinese map, Arunachal Pradesh is part of China. A closer examination reveals that that there are no roads or towns in the region. On the Western map, the disputed area is clearly indicated.

Le Canada ou Nouvelle France
Note the positioning of Lake Erie and the border of Florida.

Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississippi
The text below ‘Carolina’ clearly indicates that it is French territory, although in reality they had no claim to it.

This article discusses how GIS helps solve border disputes.

Just came across a very interesting application of GIS: tracking the spatial distribution of hate. This is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that was created in 1971 to follow, report on, and litigate against hate groups in the U.S. The site, a part of SPL’s Intelligence Project, shows the point distribution of Neo Nazis, racist skin heads, White Supremicists, Ku Klux Klan, as well as Black Separatists. It also shows the cartographic power in choosing appropriate symbology. Like the disaster wiki, this application demonstrates the benefits of GIS.

The hypothesis of MO in the Intro GIS course:

Since we talked in class about GIS as a tool for war, I thought that it would be good to find an application about one of the most controversial wars, the war in Afghanistan. This war implicated the U.S. alone. We know that the Pentagon bought the commercial rights of the images of Afghanistan that can be distributed since 9/11, so we might think of a reason for that: maybe stopping the terrorism is not their ultimate goal. Maybe they target a more ‘in-depth’ objective.

This article explains the technologies, such as maps, sensors and aircrafts, used to cover the country of Afghanistan. The introduction is particularly interesting since I pose a hypothesis of hidden truth as a motive for the U.S. to engage in a war in Afghanistan. The primary source of images for the US to map the Afghanistan are optical satellites, such as the French SPOT, the Indian IRS, the European ERS-2 and the Canadian Radarsat. The advantage of these last two is that they can operate under all weather conditions, as well as during the day or night. Two of the Lacrosse satellites that belong to the U.S. were operational before September 11, 2001. One of these satellite has a resolution of 1 to 2 meters per pixel. Some satellites are comparable to the Hubble telescope in terms of targeting specific points at a very high resolution. This might be considered ‘defective’ because the satellites can observe an area for only 10 to 15 minutes a day. A solution to this problem is the use of aircraft, which can observe a specific area through clouds for a longer period of time. Furthermore, these aircraft, at any altitudes, cannot be reached by Taliban weapons. The most effective of these technologies is the U-2 aircraft, which operates with electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) imagers and can exchange data in real time with the ground stations.

In this selection from the National Geographic, there are examples of the type of maps the US created on Afghanistan. You can select different views among the cities and attacks, the satellite view, the northern alliance, Taliban and refugees, the ethnic groups and the drought and vegetation. It appears that the US authorities know everything about Afghanistan. With their high surveillance technology, they can observe whomever they want, whenever they want. They know the behaviour of people, they know where the supposed “terrorists” are, they know where the civilians are and they know what those people do each single day of their life. I presume they can even spy these people on their telephone lines. As we can see, the Afghan community is completely checked and watched. The US has the absolute power over them. This power is the ultimate goal of the war in Afghanistan because it is the key to give the US the freedom of their political and especially economical actions, without any restrictions, over this country.

Thanks to MG from the Intro to GIS course.

UNESCO’s Regional Office for Culture in Asia and the Pacific is charged with preserving cultural heritage. UNESCO has completed quite a few interesting projects involving GIS as a tool to analyse the results and to manage the newly obtained information. One of the projects lead by UNESCO Bangkok is called GIS-Linked Social Sentinel Surveillance Project. People in the project have created several interactive maps predominantly with the purpose of establishing the patterns of trafficking routes, the trade in girls and women, the manifestation of AIDS, and the movements and migrations of people. In this mission, GIS makes intervention much more efficient because it enables various trends to be mapped and the information to be stored for future uses.

One example of the problems stated above is the human trafficking of women, which is the main cause for the spread of HIV/AIDS in Thailand. Thailand’s sex industry draws women and girls from China, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Mostly minority women are targeted for this trade due to their poor monetary situation and ignorance about their rights and the threat of trafficking. UNESCO, government organizations and non-governmental organizations have been gathering data to enable the development of specific objectives through GIS analysis of the data. For example, project members could build an educational plan in a particular region of Thailand if it is what’s needed there. Intervention groups could make linkages between the different maps and aim for a solution that really targets the sex industry and its components. Furthermore, intervention groups and the government could produce maps to continually monitor and thus dismantle networks of girl trafficking.

The UNESCO Bangkok website hosts a GIS Map Collection on issues such as sex data, migration, economics, and highland people. Here is an example animated choropleth map showing the dramatic increases in HIV/AIDS 1989 and 2003.

As we have just observed World AIDS Day, it’s a good time to examine the application of GIS to this global epidemic.

The BBC has an in depth feature that shows the progression of HIV/AIDS in the world. It really helps demonstrate the most affected areas and the progression throughout the years, especially in Africa. I think it is a cool application of GIS because the maps help you see just how big the spread of the virus is. I personally did not know until I saw this, that HIV was a major problem in Russia. I find the BBC uses GIS alot, they have another section helping visualizing the spread of the avian flu.

A specific instance of the BBC’s use of GIS in tracking AIDS is the best case scenario for 2010. The Best case scenario in 2010 is based on a study that estimated the possible effects that preventative action could have on the spread of HIV/AIDS. It contrasts predicted infections with figures from 2002. Even though the disease is still predicted to expand greatly, the estimated 29 million people that could be spared from infection is demonstrated by the grey persons. The areas that would benefit the greatest from these preventative measures are Sub- Saharan Africa and South and South East Asia. The use of a person icon as a symbol–each person represents about 1 million people–helps the viewer see just where the disease is more prevalent. Moreover, after looking at all the maps, one can obtain a full understanding of the future of HIV/AIDS virus. We are so often bombarded with facts about HIV/AIDS, this application brings greater meaning and understanding to all the statistics and predictions about its spread.

The use of GIS when dealing with these topics, I find, helps people see the global ramifications and understand such widely discussed topics better.

Thanks to a student in the Intro GIS course for the post.

Geographic information systems are most often utilized for functional cartographic and spatial analysis purposes. Seldom is it remarked for its aesthetic and artistic capabilities. Whereas GIS is a valuable and functional tool for industries, environmental research, resource management, engineering and the like, seeing GIS displaced from its functional realm as a creative force is surprising. How do these tools for visualizing spatial functions, normally embedded in a language of complex algorithms and numbers, have any relevance to the world of art?

Ingo Ghunter has been making ‘map-art’ for nearly a decade. His globes illustrate the spatial interpretation of some rather mundane statistics on global wealth, environmental issues, and trade. Certainly, the art is appealing on a visual level, but it also serves as a critique of the Western world and the globalizing economy. Many of the globes illustrate the geographical disparity between rich nations and poor nations of the world, where geographical scale and colours assist in illustrating the point in a more profound way than by way of any statistical table or graph. These exaggerations in scale and colour effectively illustrate the capacity that cartography has in revealing a function, and divulging information to its audience beyond the simple purpose of representing space.

Of course, these representations might not be entirely useful for analytical purposes, but beyond their aesthetic appearance, they do illustrate some important observations created through exaggerating and distorting space and scale. There are installations of his work in Bonn, Germany and a recent publication in Wired magazine.

This art could be considered to represent the convergence between GIS and psycho-geography, where GIS is a system for creating awareness in a creative way of the global landscape. As a purposeful device for spatial analysis, and as an innovative and artistic device for social commentary – GIS is a broadly utilized tool that has a great capacity for visualizing many different spatial and aspatial phenomena.

See also

GIS Art
Juan’s Freire’s blog postings on GIS
Radical Cartography

Hat tip to Roy for the post.

Thanks to a student in the Intro GIS course.

Landscape ecology is a field that focuses on understanding processes at the landscape level. Due to the inherent spatiality of this field, GIS is especially well placed to make a contribution in terms of predictive research and thus enhance conservation management and policy-making. The Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), makes extensive use of GIS. Founded in 1965, PRBO has accomplished many feats in terms of bird ecology research, using partnership with other private and public institutions. It has initiated a division whose goal is to integrate GIS into its research and into monitoring activities of birds and their habitats.

One interesting project launched by PRBO has been to predict how wetland birds in the South San Francisco Bay could be affected by changes in their habitat. Over time, the original salt marshes of the area had been converted to salt ponds. This has diminished habitat space for certain migrating fowl species. There has been a recent push to convert the space back to its original form. The PRBO is working to create a habitat conversion model to plan the optimal means of achieving this goal.

The GIS staff at PRBO combined data from bird surveys, aerial photos, statistical analyses and spatial modeling. They were able to discover useful knowledge concerning the possible effects habitat conversion would have on the wildlife. They quantified preferred variations in terms of size, location, as well as certain physical attributes of salt ponds, channels, and tidal marshes. Analysis of this information has allowed PRBO to create different restoration scenarios. As such, they have contributing to the management of the area.

GIS can thus be quite useful in terms of furthering knowledge of landscape ecology, and on all the impacts this field has on the management of different species worldwide.

[PRBO is also notable for its real-time implementation of GIS during a fire at the park. It’s a great story of what GIS can do in crisis situations as well as the strong support by GIS vendors of conservation efforts. To give you a sense of the short-time horizons of the project, plotters were air-lifted into the newly formed PRBO GIS office while the fire was raging.–Sieber]

From Ariel:

Fashion retailing is a large business in Hong Kong. Due to expensive rents, retailers want to choose store locations where they will earn the highest profit. When retailers choose a good location for the store, it allows for a greater chance of success for the company both in growth and finance. In Hong Kong, GIS is usually applied in areas like construction engineering, environmental science and land development. Recently, there have been more businesses using GIS because it helps promote business decision making capabilities.

One new application of GIS is in fashion retailing. A study was conducted in Hong Kong between two shopping plazas with the aim to model a shopper’s walking pattern through a mutli-storey plaza by identifying “a set of environmental or spatial variables, correlating them with non-spatial ones like frequency of passing-by, degree of familiarity.” The two shopping plazas that were chosen had different characteristics. One of the plazas, the Grand Century Place is modern and 7 – storey high while the second plaza, the Prudential Center is 6 – storey high.

To model walking patterns, nodes represented the facilities and entrances, exits, and escalators; whereas the plaza stores were represented by polygons with their entrances represented by nodes. Line segments represented the paths and feasible walkways between the nodes. Then attribute tables were created to associate the spatial entities such as a store table and a path attribute table.

The study concluded that the stores next to key entrance points, especially next to bus terminals or the transit system, were most advantageous. The study also found that shoppers walked through spacious, open passages more then narrow passages and there were indications that there was a concentration of shoppers on the lower level in the Grand Century Place. The concentration of shoppers may be due to the fact that the plaza is extremely big and it would cause the shoppers fatigue if they walked through the entire plaza.

This application demonstrates that GIS can be valuable to the fashion industry because it can help retailers select a profitable location when deciding where to situate their stores. Choosing a good store location increases the stores’ profits because within a plaza: there are many stores that sell similar products so shoppers have a variety of choices. This creates competition among the stores since shoppers can compare the products sold. With the use of GIS, store retailers can better determine the variables that could affect their profit. It would be inappropriate to rent an expensive location if a profit will not be made and with GIS, retailers can make determinations before they rent the location. By routing the pattern of plaza shoppers, the study also provides the fashion industry with shoppers’ preferences. The shoppers’ preference will give the fashion industry an indication as to which type of store would earn profit if it was situated in that location. Although this study was conducted in Hong Kong, GIS could benefit the fashion industry in other countries as well.

This goes along with a previous post on the application of GIS to tennis. From a student in the Intro to GIS course:

In an attempt to reach Americans as well as the few ashamed Canadian baseball fanatics, I examined Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball”. In this top-selling sports/business hybrid novel, Lewis writes about the elusiveness of an accurate way to measure defense. The typical statistic used to gauge a player’s defensive skill is his number of errors, meaning the mistakes a player makes throughout the season. However, Lewis challenges this simplification of defense, reasoning that a less fleet-footed athlete might not even be afforded the opportunity to make some mistakes due to physical incapability to even get to the ball.

The solution to this conundrum, Lewis says, is a new breakdown of defense, in which the entire field is broken into smaller units of areas, known to GIS people as the implementation of the raster model. With this type of structure, every ball hit to any fielder can be documented with set of geographic coordinates. The fielder’s position prior to the ball being put in play is also noted. Both the velocity with which the ball travels, as well as its trajectory, is also tagged to positional location as attribute data.

The Oakland Athletics, a major league baseball team, have implemented these tactics, along with other scientific methods, and have experienced tremendous success. With one of the smallest budgets in baseball, they have used GIS to efficiently spend their meager funds to acquire players that provide the most production for the amount of money they are willing to pay. Over the past five years, the Oakland Athletics have been among the league leaders in victories per season despite their inescapable “poverty”.

Being from New York, I constantly have it drilled into my head that the Yankees are the team to beat and that rooting for anyone else is futile. I despise the Yankees. Where is the fun in rooting for a team that’s expected to win because of the throngs of hundred million dollar contracts they hand out on a yearly basis? The Oakland A’s, however, have successfully shown that money can’t buy everything. The Yankees are Goliath, and the A’s are David, with their heads buried in science books. The Yankees continue to chase their own tails, failing to win a World Series since their payroll ballooned to over $200 million, compared to Oakland’s $40 million. Baseball may not look like a battle of intellect, but behind the scenes brilliant minds (many of whom are experts in GIS) are quickly gaining respect and snatching up all the jobs previously bestowed upon those who were said to have an immeasurable “baseball sense”. It appears that what you need to win at baseball is not the biggest muscles, but rather some thick coke-bottle glasses, a McGill diploma, and a computer loaded with ArcGIS 9.

So, to all my Canadian friends: before you write baseball off as a useless “American Pastime”, you should realize that there is a growing market demand in this sport for those who have skills in GIS. Major League Baseball is accepting applications now.

References: Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. W.W.
Norton and Company, Inc., New York, 2003.

Thanks to Mongoose girl for this post:

The study of the spread of diseases has tended to focus primarily on human suffering and mortality. In many cases, animals were the vectors of transmission for the virus or bacteria to humans. However, a study from the journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases is attempting to assess human’s negative impact on animals’ health. This study utilized GIS to research the spread of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in free-ranging mongooses in Botswana and suricats in South Africa (also known as meercats).

In these areas of Africa eco-tourism has emerged as a profitable way to support local economies. It has many positive attributes such as encouraging local communities’ autonomy, preserving wildlife habitat, and encouraging responsible resource use. However, increased human presence in what used to be remote and fairly undisturbed areas has resulted in disease transmission to animal populations. This is one of the first studies to consider the transmission of a primarily human pathogen into free-ranging wildlife.

Researchers required a tool to assist them in tracking the geographic locations infected animals as they roamed throughout the day. Researchers also needed to map all of the human infrastructures in the animal’s range, which included national parks and multi-purpose lands. GIS was an ideal solution as it allowed them to overlay multiple layers and look for geographic similarities between human presence and sites of disease transmission. Point layers were used to depict tourist facilities, garbage dumps, and locations of mongoose TB cases. Lines and polygons were used to portray roads and land use. To monitor the disease outbreak, mongoose troops were followed by patrollers in both the morning and evening. They collected and then georeferenced information such as animal sightings, important geographic locations and individual TB cases. This created enough graphical and non-graphical attribute data to determine the rate of infection spread, by calculating the time and distance between new outbreaks. The GIS output was also useful in visualizing the extent of TB’s spread within the mongoose populations and the humans’ role in transmission.

GIS technology has allowed for the domains of epidemiology, geography and wildlife biology to be incorporated into one analysis. Future emphasis can be placed on protecting wild species, either by limiting visitors contact or by simply ensuring that garbage is hygienically disposed of. Ecotourism plays an important role in supporting rural communities. However, animal health cannot be neglected. After all, there needs to be something wild left to encourage visitors to come!

For more information see: Alexander, K., Pleydell, E., Williams, M., Lane, E., Nyange, J. and Michel, A. 2002. Mycobacterium tuberculosis: An Emerging Disease of Free-Ranging Wildlife. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 8: 598-601. Accessed November 25th, 2005.

A post from Solizma in the Intro GIS course.

Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA uses GIS applications to treat illnesses, address medical issues, and analyze health abnormalities. The only hospital with a full-time GIS staff, Baystate initiated its health geographics program in 1998. Since then they have been awarded the ESRI “Special Achievement in GIS” Award in 2002 and ESRI “Vision” Award in 2004 at ESRI’s International Health GIS Conference. (The latest conference proceedings are here.)

Baystate’s GIS staff have experience in demographics; cancer, cardiovascular disease, and injury epidemiology; hospital facilities; non-hospital facility siting; healthcare marketing; bioterrorism; and emergency preparedness, planning and support. Current applications vary in scale from single human organs to the whole hospital to multiple states.

The medical center staff are developing a “four-tiered conceptual model for hospital surge capacity planning and response” which they have named the “Healthcare Preparedness Infosphere (HPI).” This GIS-based model is made up of four “health information systems” that provide hospital healthcare, situational awareness, incident management, and decision support at multiple levels ranging from the individual hospital to multiple states. The model allows tracking of patients, resources, and assets, and it can be used to support improved
healthcare and quality. It is applicable to both routine situations or emergencies and disasters.

Another current initiative of the GIS unit at the medical center is flu tracking: staff are mapping the historic geographic distribution of flu and pneumonia patients to identify areas of higher incidence. Staff will use this information to plan vaccination clinics and educational activities accordingly.

The “Rays of Hope” breast cancer program used US Census data to determine areas of breast cancer screening nocompliance by looking at geographic areas with a high advanced-stage-to-case ratio (ASCR). That is, they looked for areas with a high proportion of advanced stage breast cancer cases out of the total number of cases, which indicates that the cases are not getting detected as early as they could or should. The screening noncompliance areas were identified by spatial analysis and their demographic characterisics were evaluated. Based on these results, researchers were able to design screening programs to target high-risk areas, allowing optimal allocation of resources and a maximization of screening yield.

[Of course, the assumption above is that this is a geographic phenomenon when instead it may be more strongly correlated to poverty or availability of health insurance–Sieber]

At a much finer scale, Baystate staff are using GIS to analyze results of Transanal Endoscopic Microsurgery (TEM). This surgical procedure requires parallel positioning of instruments in a 4 by 20 cm long rectoscope. Researchers want to determine whether location of the polyp requiring operation in the rectum correlates with difficulty in performing the surgery. A cylindrical coordinate system and topology is being used as a basis for both 2-D and 3-D visualization and analysis. Findings indicate that polyp location may be relevant to the
limitations of the surgery.

Other initiatives and applications at Baystate include hospital mapping, route optimization management for delivery trucks and drivers serving home-bound patients, trauma surveillance, and development of a regional geodatabase to provide basemap support for regional emergency preparedness, planning, response, recovery, and hazard vulnerability assessment. See the links below for more information.

Overview of Baystate’s Health Geographics Program

Baystate Health

ESRI: Medical Center Improves Community Programs with GIS

Thanks to Simon in the Intro GIS course.

The term gerrymander was coined in 1812 after the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. The term applies to the process by which political districts are reorganized to weigh voting in favor of the dominant political party. In this way the opposition is concentrated into few districts or the minority strength is reduced and diluted over many districts. Gerrymandering is a commonly used legal practice in U.S. states to influence the voting outcome.

The spatial and attribute data supplied by users of GIS now makes the process of gerrymandering easier than ever. With a click of a mouse district boundaries can be remapped according to racial, household income or polling statistics, to name a few. Whereas GIS can be used to ensure fair redistricting, it also facilitates redistricting on a basis of political power.

Of particular concern to me as an environmentalist are the effects of gerrymandering on environmental policies. Gerrymandering not only redistributes voter opinion in unwieldy patterns over counties, but stretches districts over multiple distinct bioregions. How can voters adequately express their opinions on key environmental issues when they are clumped into the same district as other regions that have completely separate environmental concerns?

Without a formal template to assign districts, GIS provides politicians with a tool to perform increasingly sophisticated analyses on voting behavior and assign districts based on a desired outcome. One solution to this problem is to assign districts to watersheds or ecoregions. In this way GIS could be used to define districts based on bioregions rather than voting behavior. The outcome would be a reasonable redistricting system, where the inhabitants of each bioregion could express their opinions on related environmental issues.

For more information of gerrymandering, visit Fair Vote: Program for Representative Government.