Data
| January 28, 2012 Analysis Finds Three Times More Farmers’ Markets in Areas with the Lowest Obesity RatesData, MapsAn independent analysis conducted by mapping analytics firm PetersonGIS shows that locations with the highest obesity rates contain the fewest farmers’ markets. To produce the analysis, March 2011 data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on market locations throughout the United States were mapped and correlated with county-aggregated obesity statistics* from the Center for Disease Control ... read more January 25, 2012 New Plant Hardiness Zone MapData, MapsThe U.S. Department of Agriculture has released a new Plant Hardiness Zone Map (PHZM). The map is the first updated in over twenty years and incorporates greater accuracy and detail since the last map from 1990. The new map was developed by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Oregon State University’s (OSU) PRISM Climate Group and is available ... read more January 20, 2012 Wind and GISDataGIS has many applications in wind mapping, analysis and modeling. Geographic data and modeling of wind performance can help site wind turbines. Study of wind patterns also is used for assessing wind damage potential. The GIS staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory provides both national wind resource assessment of the United States and high-resolution wind data. GIS data ... read more  Help Map Medical Locations in LibyaCommunity, DataWith the help of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), GISCorps, and the Stand By Task Force (SBTF) (an online volunteer mapping community), the WHO has been trying to map out all the medical facilities within the embattled country of Libya. The project is an ongoing effort and a call for help has gone out in a memo to ... read more January 16, 2012 National Forest Map and GIS DataDataWhat areas of the United States contain the densest amount of woody biomass? Showing the conterminous United States, the intensity of biomass (a measure of the amount of organic carbon—stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees) has been mapped out with a baseline year of 2000. The darkest green areas are the locations with ... read more January 11, 2012Free GIS DatasetsData, Free GISLooking for free GIS data? Robin Wilson, a PhD student at the University of Southampton, has a frequently updated list of free GIS datasets that he has found in the course of his research and based on recommendations from other GIS users. The list is broken down into broader categories covering Physical Geography, Human Geography, and individual countries. ... read more December 30, 2011 Mapping Air PollutionDataPulling real time data from the city government of Madrid, Into the Air is a project led by Nerea Calvillo (along with a team of architectural students, anthropologists, and designers) to map out air pollutants over the Spanish city. The project was originally developed at Visualizar’08, an annual workshop/seminar that focused that year’s efforts on urban data visualization. The ... read more December 20, 2011 North Korea Mapping OdditiesData, GIS NewsThe recent death of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, dictator of North Korea, has brought this isolationist country to the forefront of world news again. Known in part for shunning most of the outside world, one of the ways information is gleaned about this country is through remote sensing and satellite imagery. For example, Amnesty International ... read more December 18, 2011 Crowdsourcing Historical GISDataPastmapper is an innovative project from Brad Thompson who is seeking to document online the geography of cities over time. Thompson is seeking to answer the questions of “What was here?” and “Whatever happened to..?” by creating maps that look at the state of various cities historically by creating GIS layers that reflect how a ... read more MetadataData, Learning GIS, Spatial AnalysisWhat is metadata and why is it important to document GIS data? Metadata is an important, but unfortunately oft overlooked component of GIS data. Metadata is ‘data about the data’ and it’s vital to understanding to source, currency, scale, and appropriateness of using GIS data. Metadata can be stored as an inherent part of the ... read more |
