Browsing by Subject "Geographic Information Systems"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Evaluation of Road-Map Data for ITS
    (ITS Institute, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2000-12) Shekhar, Shashi
    Road-map databases contain a large amount of complex information, including street names, street address ranges, turn restrictions, one-way street information, etc. In addition, these databases are likely to contain a large amount of time-varying data, which need to be checked for accuracy on a periodic basis. More and more applications are based on map databases, so establishing quality evaluation procedures and assurance programs for these databases is of great importance. In this project, the research designed a prototype user interface for displaying the shortest paths from source to destination. They used the JAVA language, which is platform-independent and allows the execution of interactive software across computer networks. They also evaluated other user interfaces available on the web sites to identify desirable functionalities. Compared with the existing systems (e.g., Maponus), their system goes a step forward in interactivity by providing an interactive map, on which users can click and choose their sources and destinations.
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    Identification of Karst Features in the Portsdown Chalk Fm. from Aerial Photography, Dorset, UK
    (2020-01-14) Hammer, Morena N; Burley, Paul D; Mooers, Howard D
    Cranborne Chase in south central England contains extensive archaeological evidence supporting a large Neolithic population from approximately 3600-3440 BC. Little to no data exists recording the environment that the Neolithic people were living in and how they influenced the landscape through cultivation and related impacts. Typical data archives that would be used for paleoenvironmental reconstruction, such as lakes or peat fens, do not exist in Cranborne Chase because of the well-drained karst landscape. However, during the summer of 2018 a significant drought enhanced the identification of karst features. These features were mapped with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and aerial photography to assist in the identification of potential paleoenvironmental and archeological archives.
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    Identifying Environmental Lead Hazards to Explain Variabilities in Blood Lead Levels of Wildlife Sentinels Using GIS and Implications for Public Health
    (2021-12) Imagawa, Mito
    Due to the persistence of lead in the environment, even with the strides to reduce lead contamination, lead poisoning is still a significant issue to both human and wildlife health. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this study explores the associations between blood lead levels (BLLs) in wildlife sentinels and locations of possible environmental lead exposures in and near the Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota area. Results of this study suggest that road density has an impact on the blood lead levels of our study species of Virginia opossums, gray squirrels, and pigeons. Studying the relationship between animal sentinels and environmental hazards can give us insight into the possible health impacts on humans. The use of wildlife sentinel data, environmental hazard locations, and GIS provides a way to effectively incorporate all components of One Health and to better address public health questions.
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    What's it worth? improving land use planning through the modeling and economic valuation of ecosystem services.
    (2009-07) Sander, Heather A.
    The American landscape is urbanizing without full assessments of urbanization's true environmental costs and is endangering the delivery of critical ecosystem services. This is unintentional, resulting from a lack of known economic values for ecosystem services and ecosystem service delivery models and means for incorporating such models' results into market-driven land use planning. Developing communities could benefit from the consideration of ecosystem services in land use planning, but lack relevant means for such analyses, rendering ecosystem services invisible in their planning. The three studies described here address the need to incorporate ecosystem services into planning by identifying local values for ecosystem services and illustrating how they, along with predictive models of service delivery, can be used to evaluate land use policies' environmental impacts. The first study estimated the marginal implicit prices for changes in two ecosystem services, access to recreational open space and scenic quality, in an urban county, providing solid evidence of these services' values and suggesting how they could inform policy making. The second study expanded the list of services, adding services provided by trees, and focused on a larger, two-county area. This study identified significant positive values for tree cover in local neighborhoods surrounding individual homes, but not on home parcels themselves. This suggests that tree cover provides neighborhood externalities that could be remedied using policies or incentives. The third study, which focused on a single, urbanizing city, illustrates a process for evaluating land use plans based on their environmental and economic consequences. This study identified ecosystem services' values and the likely impacts of land use change on them and used this information to evaluate a local land use plan, thus generating both information and methods to inform the land use planning process locally. These studies' results serve to inform local development, enabling it to occur in a more sustainable manner, and provide an example for later studies to follow in considering the environmental impacts of land transformation in planning. This research has great potential to improve the visibility of ecosystem services in local land use planning and, thus, to improve the ecological functioning of future landscapes.