UC GIS Week

Enhancing Route Data for Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk

Since 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner (and UCSB alum) Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000 mile journey following the path our ancestors traversed from Ethiopia, through the Middle East, down to Southern India, Eastern Asia, and eventually crossing the Bering Strait into the Americas. The journey in its entirety has been logged by Paul Salopek, himself, and is known as the "Out of Eden Walk". This summer, as an REU Research Fellow with NSF and the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University, I used GIS to perform a multitude of calculations, interpolations and tools to enhance the some 7,500 miles that Salopek has currently traveled. A few of these calculations included finding the the true distance of Paul's route (accounting for changes in elevation and projection differences), enhancing each of the ~1.5 million GPS points with data on the surrounding population density, nearest village, land cover type, and more. In addition to this, I geo-referenced and digitized route sketches created by Paul throughout sections of his voyage where his GPS was untraceable, and interpolated time values for the missing route portions. Once the data is published to National Geographic's Out of Eden Walk map, it will provide site users with enhanced and accurate data related to the path's surroundings at each step of Salopek's journey, and help us make connections between the current state of our urbanized world and its past.

dis-Orienting the Map: Alternative Cartographies for Alternative Futures

Academic debate around whether or not it is possible to decolonize through mapping has dominated recent scholarly discourse in critical cartography (McGurk and Caquard, 2020). Arguments for or against often weigh the emancipatory, anti-colonial power of Indigenous mapping (Lucchesi, 2018; Hess, 2021) against the capitalist realities of making and maintaining mapping infrastructure, the proprietary nature of geographic information systems, the inaccessibility of open source alternatives to non-coders, and the dependence of digital maps on colonial web standards. Through a cartographic collaboration between Sogorea Te and studio.geo?, it has become markedly clear that every option for Indigenous and other communities interested in “decolonizing the map” (c.f. Akerman, 2017) requires unacceptable compromise. Furthermore, neither option offers any deep adherence to principles of decolonial thinking and Traditional Knowledge beyond superficial data or the aesthetics of the cartographic. Opportunities for decolonisation, or even anti-colonial resistance at the level of the computational system - the software itself - are thus limited to software engineers and computer scientists, who are rarely trained in decolonial politics. In this presentation, we will cover our progress on this pursuit of disorienting the map - from the cartographic, theoretical, and material conflicts which sparked this effort, to the map so far, to plans for the future.

The Homelessness Hub at UC San Diego: Turning Data into Action

The mission of the Homelessness Hub at UC San Diego is to advance research, education and policy on housing and homelessness. Our portal is powered by Esri’s ArcGIS Hub with a focus on supporting and assisting policymakers and researchers through the use of spatial data, maps and analysis. We started in the spring of 2020 and recently received private funding to expand and continue for 5 years. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the Homelessness Hub and highlight a couple of our projects. H-Hub has a service agreement with the San Diego Eviction Prevention Collaborative (EPC) to construct a database where EPC can collect, store, and analyze the information about outreach and services provided by their partner organizations. The work includes developing streamlined surveys to obtain public records and through Jupyter Notebook, transferring the data collection to dashboards for displaying the reports, stats and maps. The fundamental workflow is to connect ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Online Notebook, and ArcGIS Dashboard together to maximize the usage of different products. People experiencing homelessness are often associated with public transit, especially in the  cities in California. We recently completed a research synthesis, funded by the UC Institute of Transportation Studies. This study aimed to humanize people experiencing homelessness as active, rather than passive, users of transit. As part of our work, we mapped the spatial accessibility of people experiencing homelessness and homeless shelters in relation to various forms of transit. Our analysis shows that many people experiencing homelessness are within close proximity to transit. This may either be a cause or an effect of the phenomenon of people experiencing homelessness being associated with transit.

‘Unmasking’ masked address data: A medoid geocoding solution

In recent years, there has been a consistent push for more open data initiatives, particularly for datasets collected by public agencies or groups that receive public funding. However, there is a tension between the release of open data and the preservation of individual and household privacy, whose balance shifts due to increased data availability, the sophistication of analysis techniques, and the computational power available to users. As a result, data masking is a standard tool used to preserve privacy, in which the data publishers obfuscate some identifying features in the dataset while attempting to maintain as much accuracy and precision as possible. For spatial datasets, the geocoding of administratively-masked data has been a consistent problem. Here, we present a medoid-based technique that geocodes masked data while minimizing the spatial uncertainty associated with the masking approach. Unfortunately, many commercial geocoding software packages can either not geocode administratively-masked data at all or may provide false positives by assigning points to city or street centroids. We demonstrate the results of our medoid-based geocoding approach by comparing it to commercial geocoding software. The results suggest that a medoid geocoding approach is mechanically simple to deploy and maximizes the spatial precision of the resulting geocodes.

Proximal Sensing

Topographic Correction of Proximally Sensed, High Resolution VisNIR Soil Spectra for Horizon-Scale Chemomapping

Soil properties are highly spatially heterogeneous both vertically and laterally in the subsurface making soil behavior particularly difficult to characterize and predict. Intact, horizon-scale soil monoliths can be collected to maintain soil heterogeneity and allow spatial analysis of soil properties using laboratory-based proximal sensing methods such as VisNIR hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy (HSI). HSI measures reflectance intensity spectra at 1.2 nm spectral resolution in the visible and near-infrared (400-1000 nm) with a pixel size of approximately 0.25 mm by 0.25 mm. However, surface roughness caused by the natural size, shape, and arrangement of soil aggregates and pores poses a challenge to mapping soil properties using HSI because non-flat surface topography influences the measured spectral signature. HSI methods currently handle the influence of surface roughness by artificially leveling the surface of intact monoliths. However, this approach could potentially disrupt the arrangement of the soil properties of interest. We aim to correct soil spectral signatures collected from non-flat surfaces for the influence of the angle between the hyperspectral camera and the surface being scanned (slope) and the direction the surface is facing in relation to the light sources (aspect) using a custom 3D printed sample array. This sample array presents homogenized soil samples with known composition at 91 prescribed orientations under the hyperspectral scanner. A novel algorithm was applied to discern the relationship between surface geometry and the observed reflectance spectra at each orientation. This new method allows predictions of soil properties to be made from pixels presented at any orientation in relation to the hyperspectral camera and light source. This advancement allows investigation of the spatial distribution of multiple soil properties on samples that have been prepared for soil structure and macropore network characterization and hence display a naturally rough surface (e.g., intact soil monoliths).

ArcGIS Indoors

Utilize a subset of campus buildings, our multi-disciplinary team performed the following tasks:

1. Instantiated and managed an ArcGIS Enterprise Indoors portal

2. Georeferenced CAD floor plan data to pre-determined specs

3. Attempted integration between Tririga (space system of record) and GIS, utilizing FME software

4. Attempted integration with parking space and building occupancy data

5. Where automation failed, manual efforts were employed to enhance data

6. Created ArcGIS Pro web scenes and uploaded to ArcGIS Enterprise

7. Developed presentation graphics from Indoors Viewer

Expanding Care with GIS

Improving accessibility and outreach are critical in providing effective health care services to communities of all kinds. Combining spatially-aware strategies with location intelligent technology, health organizations can achieve a clearer understanding of their work at the population level and identify areas where service gaps or potential opportunities for collaboration may exist in local communities. This project, in collaboration with UCLA’s Asian Pacific American (APA) Health Care organization, aims to demonstrate how APA can adopt and implement GIS applications into their strategies and aid in improved decision-making as well as visualize client demographic, socioeconomic, and health data.

COVID Transmission

The Geospatial Agent-based COVID-19 Transmission (or GeoACT) portal is a browser-based gateway application that allows users to simulate and compare COVID mitigation strategies for K-12 schools. Scenarios with a range of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions are used to generate realistic simulations of viral transmission with an agent-based model that uses school floor plans and classroom layouts.to calculate maps of infection risks. While most of the risk is attributed to aerosol transmission, the uneven spread of viral load emitted by infectious student agents requires tracking these agents’ location and proximity to others, along with the duration of time spent in shared enclosed environments such as classrooms, school cafeteria, or school buses. These environments themselves are also modeled as ‘agents’, with attributes relating to the spatial dynamics of the room, including the seats in which agents are expected to spend the majority of their time. Other environments can be modeled in a similar way with minimal changes, such as public school buses or theaters. To allow for these methods to be used for large numbers of students, along with running many simulations to account for differences in initial conditions between experiments, the gateway apps are deployed to an Apache Airavata portal configured to submit simulation jobs to the Expanse supercomputer. The science gateway portal hosts several modules. The Scenario module is used to run and compare simulations for different levels of intervention parameters, such as student vaccination rates at 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100%. The Meta-analysis module enables analysis of a series of previously-generated scenarios. The portal also features a ‘San Diego Schools and COVID-19’ dashboard, which presents case counts, infection rates, and other characteristics by zip code and in the vicinity of schools in San Diego county using spatial data services from San Diego County open data portal.

Randomforest

Utilizing hospital data, we predict risk factors for ED visits of asthma in children. To demonstrate complementing multivariate cluster analysis for random forest.

To Zero or Not to Zero? Reactions to a Deforestation Ban by Farming Systems in Paraguay

In December 2004 Paraguay passed the Zero Deforestation Law after years of high deforestation rates. This law banned deforestation in the Eastern region of the country. However, the law did not bring deforestation to zero, as the name suggests. High levels of forest loss continued. If deforestation continued, what did change? Forest loss in this region is driven by agriculture. Small subsistence-oriented farmers and large-scale commercial farmers coexist in Eastern Paraguay. In this work I bring together global spatial datasets on forest cover and land characteristics to look at how these different farming systems reacted to the Zero Deforestation Law. I use a variety of sources, including the widely used layers on forest cover loss from the Global Forest Watch dataset and from the Tropical Moist Forests dataset. I also generate my own spatial data layers from these and other spatial datasets. I use the resulting dataset, compiled from these diverse spatial data sources, in regression analysis. Preliminary evidence shows that the Zero Deforestation Law’s ban on deforestation in Eastern Paraguay had a larger impact on larger scale farms, who slowed deforestation more than their smaller counterparts after the ban came into effect. 

Soil Suitability to Crop Rotation in California's Rice Country

Rice is an important global cereal crop for human nutrition and agricultural livelihoods. Most rice cropping systems are continuous rice, supporting one, two, or even three rice crops per year. While these systems can be highly productive, they face sustainability challenges including water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing weed pressure. California’s Sacramento Valley is home to one of the most productive rice growing regions in the US, and most of the region has been in continuous rice for multiple decades due to consistent high yields and high market prices. This region also has unique soil attributes including high clay content, high salinity, and cemented subsurface layers and there is a long-standing assumption among farmers, extension agents, and policy makers that these soil features are not suitable for production of crops other than rice. We use satellite derived land cover data, soil maps, and a random forest model to test this assumption across the entire region. Our analysis shows that only a small portion of the current rice area is under some form of rotation (6%). Soil pH, salinity, and water infiltration were the most important soil features in predicting a rice field’s suitability for rotation. Finally, we estimate that only 15-20% of the total area could accommodate rotations based on soil properties. This work highlights the difficulty of diversifying modern high yielding cropping systems. There are many barriers to adopting sustainable agricultural practices including market prices, access to markets, and access to equipment. Soil biophysical properties should be considered in ongoing efforts to overcome these barriers. 

Practical GIS in Forestry

Forest and natural resource managers in California are under increasing pressure to manage larger landscape areas with a declining workforce. Furthermore, modern resource management has evolved to include extremely complex suites of objectives, necessitating managers to become proficient in a wide variety of disciplines. GIS is the key intersection of these needs, being a tool that crosses multiple boundaries and combines many types of data to drive the planning, analysis, and implementation of resource management.

Traditionally, geospatial analysis in management planning has been siloed to a select few who are responsible for the analysis needs of an entire organization. Beginning in 2018, UC Cooperative Extension began offering GIS trainings to forest practitioners with an emphasis on dissolving barriers of entry for technology-averse managers, while introducing post-graduate natural resource professionals to newer, more efficient cartographic and modeling tools. Participation from state regulators, natural resource agencies, and forest managers identified a need for this type of education and highlighted the various applications of GIS in forest planning and management.

Shifting the Gravity of GIS to the Web

A modern GIS is a web GIS that revolves around data services, cloud architectures, configurable applications, and automation. However, the curriculum and structure of GIS education has not kept pace with these changes. Looking at the skills required in the field today, there is a clear mismatch with the desktop-centric GIS education that is still the foundation of many GIS courses and curriculum. This session will review the changes in industry and computing driving the need for changes in GIS education and it will also feature resources, case studies, and lessons to assist educators and students.

GIS Freelancing

I have been freelancing since 2017. In this course of time I have been able to complete 370+ projects in 5 years with 4•9☆/5•0☆ Rating. I want to guide GIS students to make a part time career in freelance sites like fiverr and upwork. I will arrange a workshop for guidance on how to make freelance accounts and how to get orders by convincing clients about the job.