Development of GIS as an information management system: a case study for the Burden Center

For a park site, it is very important and necessary to let the local planning authorities realize and understand the important aspects and benefits of the site and to establish the long-range development strategies for the location. In order to succeed during the planning process, the communication and information that flow among all the participants must be well organized. In this situation, a project-wide Geographic Information System (GIS) would be a good solution. The goal of this project is to explore the possibilities for administrative authorities to implement a GIS database system to support the site planning and management of a park site. The research is based on three parts: The first involves components related to the field of park planning and GIS technology. It provides an outline of the park planning and management process, GIS techniques, and GIS-based strategies that have been developed for use in park planning and design. The second part provides a method of developing a GIS database prototype for park planning and management. An inventory of existing assets and options for future development can be integrated in a GIS database. Then this provides a platform for the gradual development of a comprehensive park management system. The third part involves the development of a prototypical GIS database design for an existing park site. It represents a practical implementation of a GIS system for the Burden Center, an historical and agricultural research center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This system will give quality information about the Burden Center site and will serve as a foundation to facilitate park planning, decision-making, facility management, future development, and resource interpretation for educational purposes

The Mirror DBMS at TREC-8

The database group at University of Twente participates in TREC8 using the Mirror DBMS, a prototype database system especially designed for multimedia and web retrieval. From a database perspective, the purpose has been to check whether we can get sufficient performance, and to prepare for the very large corpus track in which we plan to participate next year. From an IR perspective, the experiments have been designed to learn more about the effect of the global statistics on the ranking

Modeling structural change in spatial system dynamics: A Daisyworld example

System dynamics (SD) is an effective approach for helping reveal the temporal behavior of complex systems. Although there have been recent developments in expanding SD to include systems' spatial dependencies, most applications have been restricted to the simulation of diffusion processes; this is especially true for models on structural change (e.g. LULC modeling). To address this shortcoming, a Python program is proposed to tightly couple SD software to a Geographic Information System (GIS). The approach provides the required capacities for handling bidirectional and synchronized interactions of operations between SD and GIS. In order to illustrate the concept and the techniques proposed for simulating structural changes, a fictitious environment called Daisyworld has been recreated in a spatial system dynamics (SSD) environment. The comparison of spatial and non-spatial simulations emphasizes the importance of considering spatio-temporal feedbacks. Finally, practical applications of structural change models in agriculture and disaster management are proposed

Mapping of intact forest landscapes in Sweden according to Global forest watch methodology

Currently, most of the world’s forests are directly or indirectly affected by some kind of human activity. More people are getting concerned with the state of tropical forests. However, the international community has not tracked the rate and extent of ecological change in forests of the boreal zone, which is the largest biome in the world and comprise one-third of the world's forest area. Although European temperate forests were transformed centuries ago, there are still some large areas of forest in a relatively natural state left in boreal regions of Russia, Canada, Finland and Sweden. Five years ago, a team of Russian experts associated with non-governmental environmental organisations started to create new maps of Europe's last remaining wilderness forests, using high-resolution satellite images in combination with GIS, existing topographical maps and field work. The result of their effort, “The Last Intact Forest Landscapes of Northern European Russia”, was released by the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch (GFW) project and Greenpeace Russia in October 2001. The maps were created also for the rest of Russia and the “Atlas of Russia’s Intact Forest Landscapes” was released early in 2002. The project “Mapping of Intact Forest Landscapes in Sweden” was initiated by GFW in May 2002. The GFW Pan-Boreal Mapping Initiative originated as an idea to extend the unique Atlas of Russia’s Intact Forest Landscapes (Aksenov et al. 2002) over the World’s entire boreal zone. A number of non-governmental organizations and academic institutions in five countries (Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Canada) were involved in creating a map of “Remaining Wildlands in the Northern Forests” as the first result of their cooperation. The map was presented as a poster at the Johannesburg Summit 2002 (26th August - 4th September 2002). This MSc thesis describes the background context of mapping undisturbed forests in Sweden, as well as the criteria and methods set by the initiating GFW project. Swedish forest conditions are partially covered in the Literature survey chapter, where the history of forest management and the natural characteristics of northern boreal forests are characterised. Previous works about mapping virgin forests in Sweden and related studies dealing with remotely sensed data are mentioned. The essence of the study focuses on the detailed description of the methodology (GIS in combination with the interpretation of satellite data) and the material used to create the map of intact forest landscapes in Sweden. Further, the comparison with other existing old-growth inventories can be found in the Discussion part, where also the significance of the output and the applicability of the Russian criteria to the Swedish vegetation conditions are evaluated

An assessment of the frequency and cause of concentrated flow on agricultural fields in the Virginia Coastal Plain portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed

Agricultural lands are the largest non-point source of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment that is delivered to Chesapeake Bay. There has been an increase in the amount of these nutrients and sediment being delivered to the Bay over the last century, which has caused extensive eutrophication and subsequent anoxic zones in the Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Act attempted to mitigate this problem by mandating 100-foot riparian buffer zones between agricultural fields and perennial streams in the Coastal Plain region of Virginia. Previous studies have shown that riparian buffers increase infiltration of runoff into the groundwater system, where nutrients and sediment can be removed from the water before it discharges into perennial streams. However, riparian buffers require flow to be widely disseminated throughout the buffer area in order for them to be effective. No declining trends have been noted in the amounts of nutrients and sediment being delivered to Chesapeake Bay since 1990, when buffers were required to be maintained in the Coastal Plain region of Virginia. I hypothesized that flow concentration, which can promote channel incision and allow agricultural runoff to bypass riparian buffers, is widespread in the Coastal Plain region of Virginia and may be one reason why reductions of nutrients and sediment in Bay waters have not been as great as expected. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used to determine flow accumulation patterns across 74 agricultural fields in the Coastal Plain region of Virginia. The percentage of each field drained by the 5 field margin points of greatest flow accumulation area was used as a proxy for measuring flow concentration. The cell size for points along each field margin was 3 m by 3 m. Further, 4 field indexes that related topographic and soil parameters on a field (wetness index, topographic index, water retention index, sediment transport index) were calculated for each field. These indexes were analyzed to determine if any were correlated with and could be used to easily predict places of flow concentration over a large geographic area, such as the Coastal Plain region of Virginia. Flow concentration occurred on all 74 study fields. On average, 70% of a field was drained through just 5 points along its field margin. The strongest field index relationship existed between the Wetness Index and flow concentration (R2 = 0.323). The field indexes were not good predictors of areas of high flow concentration because for any given value of an index, there was a large range of possible flow concentrations. Of the 6 topographic/soil property characteristics analyzed by these 4 field indexes (specific catchment area, runoff source area, slope, saturated hydraulic conductivity, depth to impermeable subsurface layer, and rainfall erosivity), the field slope showed the strongest relationship with flow concentration (R2 = 0.270). Principle component analysis on these 6 topographic/soil property characteristics had a first component that described 47% of the variance among these 6 variables and displayed the strongest relationship with flow concentration (R2 = 0.403). Rather than being attributable to characteristics of the topography or soil that vary from place to place, flow concentration seems to be a phenomenon that is of widespread occurrence in all areas of the Coastal Plain region of Virginia. I recommend requiring farmers to maintain riparian buffers on their land yearly. Future research should focus on determining how to reduce flow concentration through and increase the effectiveness of riparian buffers in the Coastal Plain region of Virginia

Sequencing spatial concepts in problem-based GIS instruction

AbstractIn this paper, we sketch a general framework to help educators sequence problem-based GIS instruction. This framework weaves together: (1) problem based learning with GIS, (2) cognitive load theory in problem solving, (3) the structural view of spatial knowledge, where higher-level concepts are constructed in part from lower-level concepts, (4) how the form of representation used to solve problems influences the development of spatial thinking skills

Efficient Parallel and Distributed Algorithms for GIS Polygon Overlay Processing

Polygon clipping is one of the complex operations in computational geometry. It is used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Computer Graphics, and VLSI CAD. For two polygons with n and m vertices, the number of intersections can be O(nm). In this dissertation, we present the first output-sensitive CREW PRAM algorithm, which can perform polygon clipping in O(log n) time using O(n + k + k\u27) processors, where n is the number of vertices, k is the number of intersections, and k\u27 is the additional temporary vertices introduced due to the partitioning of polygons. The current best algorithm by Karinthi, Srinivas, and Almasi does not handle self-intersecting polygons, is not output-sensitive and must employ O(n^2) processors to achieve O(log n) time. The second parallel algorithm is an output-sensitive PRAM algorithm based on Greiner-Hormann algorithm with O(log n) time complexity using O(n + k) processors. This is cost-optimal when compared to the time complexity of the best-known sequential plane-sweep based algorithm for polygon clipping. For self-intersecting polygons, the time complexity is O(((n + k) log n log log n)/p) using p In addition to these parallel algorithms, the other main contributions in this dissertation are 1) multi-core and many-core implementation for clipping a pair of polygons and 2) MPI-GIS and Hadoop Topology Suite for distributed polygon overlay using a cluster of nodes. Nvidia GPU and CUDA are used for the many-core implementation. The MPI based system achieves 44X speedup while processing about 600K polygons in two real-world GIS shapefiles 1) USA Detailed Water Bodies and 2) USA Block Group Boundaries) within 20 seconds on a 32-node (8 cores each) IBM iDataPlex cluster interconnected by InfiniBand technology