By Giuseppe Amatulli, Ph.D.

Thursday, May 4th.  CGIS South Building, Room S354.

View a recording of the presentation.

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Brief introduction to GIS, and the CGA workshop training series, to help students determine workshops that are appropriate for their individual needs. Students will use online and desktop GIS software.

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Leader/Instructor: Nicole Alexander

Database design is a key step in GIS data modeling. GIS data modeling is the process of representing specific aspects of the real world in a computer. This workshop gives an introduction to GIS data modeling and the 3 phases of database design: requirements analysis, schema refinement, and physical database design. It also covers specific design considerations when capturing data for GIS applications using GPS. Students will design a Geodatabase for use in ArcPad on the Trimble GeoXT.

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This study applies a GIS-based spatial fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation model to determine agricultural feasibility in China based on physical variables such as accumulated temperature, sunshine, precipitation, hydrology, elevation and soil properties. The resulting agricultural feasibility index layer is then overlaid with nightlight images from 1992 to 2013, which are considered as a proxy to urban land use, to determine the spatiotemporal variation of urban encroachment on feasible agriculture land. The result reveals the severeness of agricultural land loses to urbanization, especially in the most recent decade.

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Geography-related scholarship has had a long, evolving, and at times controversial, history at Harvard University. The current presence of geography is largely through its Center for Geographic Analysis, a small and ten-year young service center with a mission to support research and teaching with geographic analysis across the university. In doing so, the Center pushes the envelope of the established geospatial technologies and dabbles into applied research of GIScience, including spatiotemporal analysis, big data analysis, and collaborative mapping platform development. The unique interaction with multiple disciplines at the Center also provides a special angle into examining the relationship between geography, GIScience and GISystem.

This talk will give a brief overview of the history and current status of geographic analysis at Harvard, leading into a discussion with the audience on the relationship between geography and GISystem. The key questions to explore are:

1. Which disciplines contributed most to the advancement of GIS, and which disciplines benefited most from it?
2. Should the rich geographic knowledge become an integral component of a GIS?
3. What are the challenges in doing so (such as modeling fuzzy and uncertain geographic objects, incorporating time into coordinate systems, building spatial ontologies)?

In summary, what GIS needs from geography, or in other words, what geography can contribute to GIS?

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This study applies a spatial fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation model to determine agricultural feasibility in China based on physical variables (accumulated temperature, sunshine, precipitation, hydrology, elevation and soil properties). The resulting agricultural feasibility index layer is combined with nightlight images (1992-2013) to determine the spatiotemporal variation of urban encroachment on feasible agriculture land. It reveals the severity of agricultural land losses to urbanization.

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As online mapping platforms proliferate, thousands of mapping systems have become available, capable of sharing millions of live maps (map services) with one another. However, such map services are often not shared, in large part because there is no easy way to discover and access them. The HHypermap (Harvard Hypermap) Registry platform is being developed to address this problem by providing a scalable way to gather map service information together and make it searchable by others.

HHypermap Registry is built on Apache Lucene and Solr, an open source stack with advanced search capabilities, to which we added new spatial and temporal search capabilities (HHypermap Core).  We also developed a new search client which supports heatmap visualization of geographic distribution of results, and histograms to show the temporal distribution.  Any system can use HHypermap to find distributed data via its open API.

HHypermap includes a scalable mechanism for harvesting and monitoring remote OGC and Esri map services.  In addition, it supports gathering of usage statistics to improve search; caching and reprojection of map services to improve performance, reduce load on remote servers, enable instant previews; date mining to extract time information from metadata; and feature extraction to improve layer search.

HHypermap Registry provides the search capabilities in WorldMap V 1.5., and HHypermap Core is a key component of other systems including the Billion Object Platform (BOP), designed to support spatiotemporal visualization of billions of objects, being developed with funding from the Sloan Foundation.

This work is partially funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Implementation Grants, Award No: HK-50091-13. For a complete list of sponsors to the WorldMap project, please visit http://about.worldmap.harvard.edu/sponsors.

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Recent technological advances in remote sensing are moving terrestrial ecosystem monitoring beyond land cover change mapping, in the form of imaging spectrometry able to detect light intensity from tens to hundreds of contiguous spectral bands, providing more resolved information on ecosystem composition.

In this project, imaging spectrometry was used to provide spatially-comprehensive measurements of plant functional type (PFT) composition in an 710km2 area in the Southern Sierra Mountains of California.  AVIRIS (Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer) data (18 meter resolution) from the recent HyspIRI Preparatory Mission (Hyperspectral InfraRed Imager) were used to estimate the sub-pixel fractions of seven PFTs: Grass, Shrub, Oak, Western Hardwood, Western Pine, Cedar/Fir, and High-elevation Pine, with Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis (MESMA).

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Moorcroft Lab

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Presenter:   Dr. Leif Isaksen   Senior Lecturer in Spatial History, Lancaster University, UK

Watch the video of this seminar on Youtube (1hr 14min).

Location:  CGIS South, S354

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Presentation by Drs. Robert Sampson and Dan O’Brien. 

Room S354, CGIS South Building.

Speaker bios: Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, and Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Harvard. He also taught at the University of Illinois and was a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation.  Professor Sampson’s research and teaching cover a variety of areas including crime, disorder, the life course, neighborhood effects, civic engagement, inequality, “ecometrics,” and the social structure of the city. 

Dan O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology at Northeastern University.  Prior to this he was with Harvard University where he was the research director for the Boston Area Research Initiative. In this role he led and coordinated a range of interdisciplinary projects that bring together local researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the study of Boston. His research uses large, administrative data sets (i.e., “Big Data”) in conjunction with traditional methodologies to explore the behavioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods, particularly surrounding “broken windows theory.” 

Lunch will be served.

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