Geography Commons^™

Ethnographic Collector, Gideon Singer

Purdue GIS Day

Ethnography can be enhanced by utilizing both ArcGIS Online and Arc Collector. Throughout 2015, I have designed and utilized the Ethnographic Collector web map to record qualitative observations, spatial records, and multi-media attachments. Data was recorded while conducting pilot research on the e-waste landscape of Tippecanoe County, Indiana and a class ethnography project on the neighborhood of New Chauncey. The Ethnographic Collector has augmented qualitative data collection via participant observation and go-along interviews and can likely be utilized in tandem with participatory GIS.

Evaluating A Process To Make An Online Environmental Model Accessible Under Ada, Kehara Taylor, Larry Theller

Purdue GIS Day

Assure compliance with federal (ADA) and international accessibility guidelines to reduce the risk of litigation and penalties. / / Increase site usage by making all of your Web properties accessible to people with disabilities (WCAG, Section 508, AODA, Canada's Standard on Accessibility). / / Prevent privacy breaches involving personal and health information. / / Protect confidential company and OPSEC information from leaking to the public through online exposure. / / Web content and applications, as well as Microsoft Office and PDF documents can be validated for any compliance regulation including custom rules. /

Map-Based Mobile Apps For Ios And Android, Larry Theller, Hemil Desai

Purdue GIS Day

The STEPL model is a web-based spreadsheet tool designed for the estimation / of pollutant load and to analyze how creation or practicing certain sustainable / activities will reduce pollution in a watershed. For example, leaving a strip of / grass between a farm field and a water feature like stream of lake, will have an / estimated impact on the amount of soil and fertilizer which runs off in to the / river. / The model uses soil properties database, precipitation database and other / factors to make an estimate of pollution reduction after an action. It can then …

Naturalized Daily Streamflow Reconstruction For The Upper Wabash River, Sanoar Rahman, Laura C. Bowling

Purdue GIS Day

During the 1960s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers constructed a number of dams in the Upper Wabash watershed in Indiana, primarily for flood control, hydropower and recreation. In order to investigate the impact of other environmental changes, such as changes in land management and climate on streamflow, it is necessary to reconstruct what the natural flow of the impounded river would be without the influence of the upstream reservoirs.

Human Mobility Patterns Probability Measurement: An Example Using Twitter Data At Purdue, Yuqian Huang

Purdue GIS Day

Nowadays, social tools are really important to people's daily lives. And it is also valuable to data researcher that Twitter, Facebook and other social tools are emerging as a key resource of free and open volunteered geographic information (VGI). And this research is trying to take advantages of twitter data around Purdue campus. It tracks the most active twitter users in order to find out their behavior patterns and to provide probability of when and where the users will show up.

User Interface Design Evaluation For L-Thia Watershed Analysis Tool., Lakshya Garg, Larry Theller, Yichen Zhong

Purdue GIS Day

This project is a semester-long analysis of the user interface deign of the ABE web-Based Decision support tool "L-THIA Watershed Management System". The goal is to evaluate the components such as user inputs, logical flow, graphical display, navigation, operational feasibility and technical feasibility. The process includes comparison to the interface of other of other well-known online mapping web tools. The student team will be evaluating under GIS specialist Larry Theller (Purdue ABE) some other online watershed analysis tools. The result of this study will be incorporated in the next phase of tool development for L-thia and several other ABE web …

Coordinating Gis In Indiana, Phil Worrall, Jim Sparks

Purdue GIS Day

This presentation summarizes the joint effort between Indiana State Government and Indiana Geographic Information Council in coordinating and sharing geospatial information across the state.

Geocoding Workshop, Amanda O'Daniel

Purdue GIS Day

This is a hands-on workshop to introduce you the geocoding resources from the State of Indiana.

Modeling And Visualizing Regular Tweeting Pattern Of Purdue Campus, Yuki Huang, Jie Shan

Purdue GIS Day

With the strength of social media, many crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration projects can benefit from this kind of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). And this project is trying to find out the potential spatial and temporal pattern of the twitter user and provide the probabilities of the clusters.

Summer Internships In Software Engineering In Abe, Larry Theller

Purdue GIS Day

We discuss the various software engineering projects which were assigned to a group of 8 undrgrad computer science interns who worked in Agricultural and Biological Engineering this summer. All projects involved mapping, mobile apps, REST services or online map-based decision support services. All students completed soem ESRI Virtual Campus training.

Indiana Freshwater Use Projection And Spatial Analysis For Renewable Water Supply, Sanoar Rahman, Laura Bowling

Purdue GIS Day

Often, when governmental and non-governmental entities attempt to make plans for future water supply and environmental flows they fall into the trap of developing strategies for specific locations rather than working together and approaching a problem from a basin or regional scale. The problem persists when lack of knowledge of local situations and confining management plans with city and county lines merge together. The purpose of this study is to project future water use and then to reveal if there is any pattern in renewable water supply in Indiana to provide a basis for policy makers and stakeholders to consider …

Electrical Infrastructure Mapping At Purdue, Purdue Physical Facilities

Purdue GIS Day

No abstract provided.

Rain Garden Inventory Responsive And Mobile Site, Larry Theller, Richard Andreas

Purdue GIS Day

This project is to create a responsive website to allow the public to input their various rainscaping practices into a database and viewed on a map. In addition, their data will be calculated and capacity will be shown.

This inventory website is responsive and will change between desktop and mobile view automatically based on the parameters of the browser.

Gis Project Design: Brainstorming & Ideation Workshop, Frank Garofalo

Purdue GIS Day

• Who should attend:
  • Do you have a new project or existing project, and looking to generate some new ideas?
  • Come with a project in mind or just come to learn some new collaboration and brainstorming techniques.
• What participants will learn… techniques for:
  • Working with others to create a common direction and vision, then generating alignment
  • Evaluating current state situations, strengths, complications and implications
  • Identifying and forming consensus on key target audiences
  • Generating ideas to prioritizing capabilities for new solutions and the related benefits
  • Specifying key objectives to measure and gauge for success

Habitat Selection Of Wolverines: A Geospatial Analysis Of Wolverine Movements In Southwest Montana, Bryn Karabensh

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Wolverine research in the contiguous United States is not abundant and understanding of the ecology of this species is not fully understood in this ecosystem. Specifically lacking in research is data regarding wolverine movements. This paucity of data and analysis inhibits the ability to effectively develop and implement conservation and management strategies. This paper seeks to identify patterns and habitat preferences of wolverines with respect to their movements. Specifically, do they avoid roads and clear-cuts zones from timber harvest and do they display a preference to topography features during movements? Using GPS locations of wolverines a regression analysis was applied. …

Applying Voronoi Tessellations As A Non-Orthogonal Grid Methodology To Inform Public-Private Mix Efforts In Nigeria: An Examination Of The Distribution Of Private Healthcare Providers In Six States And The Covariates Underlying Their Utilization, Trinadh Dontamsetti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

TB care and prevention is led by the public sector, but many TB symptomatics first seek care in the private sector, highlighting the importance of engaging these facilities. This report examines basic TB epidemiology (such as the gap in case finding that could be addressed in part via private sector activities), health-seeking behaviors (HSB) and diagnostic delays, the size of the private sector, activities of professional societies, and financing. It examines the potential utility of integrating Voronoi tessellations as a GIS-based method for informing and improving Public-Private Mix (PPM) efforts throughout six states in Nigeria. Further, it explores a potential …

Selection Of A Reanalysis Meteorological Product For Use In Solar Resource Assessment, Anthony Lopez

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and collaborators are updating the National Solar Radiation Database with the next-generation satellite-based solar resource assessment known as the Physical Solar Model (PSM). This is part of an effort to achieve NREL and DOE’s goal to make solar energy technologies cost competitive with other forms of energy in the United States. Required in this effort is the selection of an appropriate meteorological reanalysis product- that provides critical inputs for solar energy estimation. This analysis quantitatively and qualitatively assessed the spatial and temporal accuracy of three meteorological reanalysis products using ground measurements. …

Tracking Of Karst Contamination Using Alternative Monitoring Technologies: Hidden River Cave Kentucky, Caren Raedts, Christopher Smart

Sinkhole Conference 2015

Karst groundwater contamination presents great challenges for efficient monitoring because of rapid, discrete transport and the diversity of contaminants. Here a low cost approach is described and applied to Hidden River Cave, Kentucky, where a long history of contamination has been experienced. Local knowledge was acquired through informal interviews and coupled with observations of contaminant residues, faunal distributions and fluorescence spectra in the cave. The resulting patterns were interpreted using Google Earth and Street View to identify specific contaminant sources in the affected sub-catchment of the cave. Despite success in matching contaminant sources with the contamination history and pattern, the …

Using Future Benefits To Set Conservation Priorities For Wetlands, Samuel B. Merrill

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

In an era of rising sea levels, costal land managers including land trust representatives, municipal planners, and others contributing to decisions about whether to develop or protect coastal parcels do not have viable means of evaluating future values on wetlands that will be created when sea levels rise. This project develops and tests a software modeling approach to help address this issue, in combination with a novel, expert-opinion driven benefit-cost framework. The beta test used three parcels in Scarborough, Maine: Hampton Circle, Maine Audubon, and Pine Point. It used a group of experts to 1) allocate initial values to these …

Online Mapping Tools For Geolocating Amish Settlements, Andrew M. Wilson, Brian J.B. Lonabocker, Megan E. Zagorski

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

This technical note demonstrates the value of using online mapping tools as a method of geolocating Amish settlements. Primarily using freely available Bing and Google maps and published lists of the addresses of Amish ministers, we geolocated 1,362 Amish households in Ohio and 1,203 in Pennsylvania, representing about 10% of Amish households in those states. From these data we were able to derive a population density map of the Amish across Ohio and Pennsylvania. We caution that our map is merely a model and based on several assumptions, but the product is a finer resolution map of Amish distribution than …

Food Deserts: Usda Report Review, Christopher Rahm

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

The purpose of this Capstone will be to provide city, county, and eventually state, entities with the knowledge to better identify those areas which would fall under the auspice of the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, as laid out in a report by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Council on “Food Deserts.” Food deserts are those areas in which access to nutritious foods is limited by distance, by lack of transportation, or both. Food deserts have also been linked to obesity in children and adults, with the attendant health problems. With this knowledge, starting at the local level, …

Crowdsourcing Global Wastewater Data, Don Mosteller, Sam Cohen, Cory Nestor, Angel Hsu, Omar Malik

Yale Day of Data

No time to waste: Crowdsourcing global wastewater treatment data

Worldwide, over 80 percent of wastewater is discharged into water bodies without undergoing treatment, severely impairing human well-being and ecosystem vitality along the way. National performance on wastewater treatment is difficult to quantify and is poorly understood due to a lack of common definitions, poor data collection standards, and limited historical data. To address this, the Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a research group that produces a biennial ranking of country-level environmental performance, developed a first-of-its kind national wastewater treatment indicator.[1]

The indicator assesses wastewater treatment performance for 183 countries, …

Evapotranspiration In The Nile Basin: Identifying Dynamics, Trends, And Drivers 2002-2011, H. Alemu, A. T. Kaptué, G. B. Senay, M. C. Wimberly, Geoffrey Henebry

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Analysis of the relationship between evapotranspiration (ET) and its natural and anthropogenic drivers is critical in water-limited basins such as the Nile. The spatiotemporal relationships of ET with rainfall and vegetation dynamics in the Nile Basin during 2002–2011 were analyzed using satellite-derived data. Non-parametric statistics were used to quantify ET-rainfall interactions and trends across land cover types and subbasins. We found that 65% of the study area (2.5 million km2) showed significant (p < 0.05) positive correlations between monthly ET and rainfall, whereas 7% showed significant negative correlations. As expected, positive ET-rainfall correlations were observed over natural vegetation, mixed croplands/natural vegetation, and croplands, with a few subbasin-specific exceptions. In particular, irrigated croplands, wetlands and some forests exhibited negative correlations. Trend tests revealed spatial clusters of statistically significant trends in ET (6% of study area was negative; 12% positive), vegetation greenness (24% negative; 12% positive) and rainfall (11% negative; 1% positive) during 2002–2011. The Nile Delta, Ethiopian highlands and central Uganda regions showed decline in ET while central parts of Sudan, South Sudan, southwestern Ethiopia and northeastern Uganda showed increases. Except for a decline in ET in central Uganda, the detected changes in ET (both positive and negative) were not associated with corresponding changes in rainfall. Detected declines in ET in the Nile delta and Ethiopian highlands were found to be attributable to anthropogenic land degradation, while the ET decline in central Uganda is likely caused by rainfall reduction.

Improving Web Discovery With Maps, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Embedding GIS coordinates into websites enables visual mapping and information linking in new and interesting ways.

Building A Better Model: Variable Selection To Predict Poverty In Pakistan And Sri Lanka, Marium Afzal, Jonathan Hersh, David Newhouse

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Numerous studies have developed models to predict poverty, but surprisingly few have rigorously examined different approaches to developing prediction models. This paper applies out of sample validation techniques to household data from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, to compare the accuracy of regional poverty predictions from models derived using manual selection, stepwise regression, and Lasso-based procedures. It also examines how much incorporating publically available satellite data into the model improves its accuracy. The five main findings are that: 1) Lasso tends to outperform both discretionary and stepwise models in Pakistan, where the set of potential predictors is large. 2) Lasso and …

Women Workin’ It In Gis: A Mixed Methods Study Of Underrepresentation And The Gendered Experience Among Female Gis Practitioners, Livia M. Betancourt Mazur

Theses and Dissertations

Through novel empirical research, this thesis explores the experience of women working in the professional field of geographic information systems (GIS), adding to GIS literature, as well as to academic geography and wider science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discourses, addressing gaps in these bodies of knowledge.

Transportation And Sanitation Drivers Of Land Use/Land Cover Change: Loss Of The Jamaica Bay Wetlands, Margaret Joy Cytryn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an analysis (1830-2014) of the historical events of land use/land cover change in the Jamaica Bay estuary, identification of the agents of change, and a perspective on the potential drivers of transportation and sanitation in land use/land cover change.

Image Interpretation-Guided Supervised Classification Using Nested Segmentation, A. V. Egorov, M. C. Hanson, David P. Roy, A. Kommareddy, P. V. Patapov

GSCE Faculty Publications

We present a new binary (two-class) supervised non-parametric classification approach that is based on iterative partitioning of multidimensional feature space into variably-sized and nested hyper-cubes (partitions). The proposed method contains elements of active learning and includes classifier to analyst queries. The spectral transition zone between two thematic classes (i.e., where training labels of different classes overlap in feature space) is targeted through iterative training derivation. Three partition categories are defined: pure, indivisible and unlabeled. Pure partitions contain training labels from only one class, indivisible partitions contain training data from different classes, and unlabeled partitions do not contain training …

The Foundation Of Cistercian Monasteries In France 1098-1789: An Historical Gis Evaluation, Jon Eric Klingenberg Rasmussen

Masters Theses

Historical geography focuses upon those relationships which have shaped the evolution of place and landscape over time. One fundamental approach used to achieve this objective is the set of theories associated with spatial diffusion. This includes the spatial and chronological paths, the periodicities and rates of spread, as well as the identification of areas of void or avoidance. An emerging trend in historical geography is the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A GIS provides the researcher with the necessary tools to re-evaluate and challenge long-standing interpretations of any given event, historical or otherwise, as well as develop new insights …

Les Rues Des Tableaux. Géographie Du Marché De L'Art Parisien (1815-1955), Léa Saint-Raymond, Félicie De Maupeou, Julien Cavero

Artl@s Bulletin

Continuation of a first socioeconomic analysis of the "art dealers" in Paris between 1815 and 1955 (Artl@s Bulletin 2, no. 2), this paper presents the results of a spatial study of the Parisian art market at that time. Departing from serial geographical data given by a homogeneous source, the Bottin du commerce, we mapped a 140 years spatial evolution of the "art dealers", using a geocoding system with composite locators. The article exposes the spatial dynamics of this market and studies them in a multi-scalar way, making the connection between the global evolution of the Parisian economy and …