Category: Slideshow

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Environment General GIS GIS in Environmental Studies GIS in Geography GIS in Sociology Map Apps Slideshow Videos

Go Philly! GIS helps improve access to healthy food in the city

Yesterday’s NY Times had an opinion piece praising Philadelphia’s efforts in recent years to improve access to healthy food for its most disadvantaged neighborhoods and citizens.  In ‘Go Philly!’, Mark Bittman describes the collaborative efforts of Philadelphia municipal government, the Commonwealth of PA and a whole host of local non-profits (including my former employer, the newly renamed  Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition) in developing programs to bring supermarkets and healthy food options to under-served neighborhoods.

What he doesn’t describe is the critical role that GIS has played in bringing these programs to life.  See below for some background information and resources related to using GIS for improving access to healthy food.

1. Watch this short video (Ch. 3 of Episode 2 from Penn State’s Geospatial Revolution video series) to learn more about the role of GIS in Philadelphia’s ‘healthy food’ success story.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYzHcPHRhWQ

2. Read reports from the Food Trust and The Reinvestment Fund (TRF) describing their work in Philadelphia and other communities. Both organizations are Philadelphia-based non-profits that have been at the center of Philadelphia’s efforts to improve access to healthy food.

“The Grocery Gap: Who Has Access to Healthy Food and Why It Matters” – click here

Food Trust/TRF Report on the Fresh Food Financing Initiatives projects – click here

TRF’s resource page on food access – click here

Sample map from Food Trust/TRF report on the Fresh Food Financing Initiative:

“Map 1: Residence of ShopRite Employees by Poverty Rate of Census Tract.  Each star on the map represents a Brown’s ShopRite store, with the location of the store’s employees illustrated by correspondingly colored dots.”

 

3. Watch a video created by TRF in collaboration with the Brookings Foundation to describe their use of GIS and findings in their  “Getting to Market” report on healthy foods initiatives across the U.S.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp1w9s4kkHU

 

and/or explore the project website for “Getting to Market” – click here . The project site includes profiles of food access in major U.S. metropolitan areas.

 

4. Explore interactive web mapping applications featuring data on supermarket access:

ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Supermarket Access Map – click here

TRF’s PolicyMap Data on Supermarket Access – click here

 

Sample map from ESRI’s Supermarket Access Map:

 

Sample maps from TRF’s PolicyMap application:

 

Categories
General GIS GIS in Psychology Map Apps Slideshow

Mapping happiness

New social media mapping sites are popping up all over the place these days – whether it’s crisis-mapping sites like Sinsai.info or this new ‘happiness’ map from PhD student Alex Davies.

Davies, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Computational and Biological Learning Lab, created a statistical model to analyze the sentiment (happy or sad) of Tweets from around the world.  In Davies’ model, individual words within Tweets were correlated with happiness or sadness, then used to predict the overall sentiment of the Tweet. Tweets were geo-tagged and summarized by area to calculate a composite ‘happiness’ ranking for states within the U.S. and for countries worldwide. The results are presented on Davies’ website in an interactive web map app. Raw data from the Tweets is presented alongside the maps to give viewers a sense of which Tweet words were correlated with happiness or sadness.  See below for maps of US happiness and world happiness – and an image showing some of the worldwide ‘happy’ words.

Happiness map of the United States:

 

Happiness map of the world:

Happy words for the world:

 

 

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Map Apps Slideshow

NPR Story on Crisis Mapping in Japan

Last week NPR ran a story on crisis mapping in Japan – focusing on the open-source, citizen-driven Sinsai.info website. Here’s the description from the NPR website:

Open source software called Ushahidi allows people to add and update information to maps that anyone with an Internet connection can access. In Tokyo, a crew of volunteers is using the software to map everything — from health services to the location of emergency aid workers — in Japan’s hardest hit areas. Patrick Meier, director of the crisis mapping segment of Ushahidi, says that because of the robust Internet infrastructure in Japan and tech-savvy citizenry, online crisis mapping is being utilized to its fullest potential.

Click here to hear the NPR audio clip. Thanks to Deb for the heads up about this story!

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Bucknell/Local Interest Data Digital Humanities Environment Events/Calendar General GIS Slideshow

Details on $520K Mellon grant for environmental studies, GIS integration

I posted a few weeks ago about the $520K grant awarded to Bucknell by the Mellon Foundation. Here are some additional details on how the grant money will be used to strengthen environmental studies and GIS integration across the university. From the Library & IT Matters newsletter:

  • Up to twelve faculty members will receive $400 to participate in either a 4-day (intro) or 2-day (advanced) summer GIS workshop. Click here for more details on the intro and advanced workshops.
  • Faculty members may submit requests to receive up to $1,000 to revise a course to include GIS ($5,000 total)
  • Four student researchers will be provided with summer research funding to conduct research projects involving GIS technology
  • Funds will be available to support consultants and student workers to create new maps or to develop new datasets for use by faculty in integrating GIS for their curriculum and courses
  • Additionally we have support to help with the acquisition of data which can only be obtained through purchasing data sets or through membership in consortia which provide access to proprietary datasets

Contact me by e-mail at janine.glathar@bucknell.edu or by phone at x. 1990 if you are interested in any of the options listed above.

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Bucknell/Local Interest Data Environment General GIS Slideshow

New data available on Pennsylvania forest patches

New data on Pennsylvania forest patches is available on Xanthus.  The datasets were created by the Pennsylvania chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). The forest patches were delineated using the new 2006 NLCD data (also available on Xanthus).  The TNC defines forest patches as “contiguous areas of natural cover bound by any linear fragmenting feature (roads, railroads, rights-of-way) or non-forest edge.”

Two files are available – (1) forest patches for all of Pennsylvania; and (2) forest patches greater than 100 acres in size.  One important caveat to keep in mind is that the  dataset is intended for analyzing patterns of forest cover and forest patch sizes at a relatively small scale (e.g. state or regional as opposed to small sections of a particular forest or locality).  The NLCD land cover data from which the forest patches were derived is relatively coarse in resolution – so the forest patch boundaries are approximations and not intended for use in applications where exact measurements are needed.

Please contact me if you need to get access to the Xanthus data folder.