Geospatial Forum

Participatory research methods are increasingly used to better understand complex social-environmental problems and design solutions through diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement. But, participatory research rarely engages stakeholders in co-development and interpretation of computational models that describe system dynamics essential for conceptualizing complex processes and envisioning scenarios of alternate action. Even fewer participatory projects have engaged people using geospatial simulations that represent dynamic landscape processes and spatially-explicit management scenarios. Geospatial participatory modeling (GPM) can confer multiple benefits for participatory research processes, by (a) personalizing connections to problems and their solutions, (b) resolving abstract notions of connectivity, and (c) clarifying the scales of drivers, data, and decision-making authority. Using Johns Island, South Carolina, as a case study of a region facing loss of natural and cultural resources due to urbanization and sea level rise, this presentation illustrates how GPM is bringing stakeholders together to devise solutions in new ways.

Boreal and temperate forests have experienced substantial climate change over the last several decades. However, understanding of how changes in climate are affecting these ecosystems is incomplete. Remote sensing provides an important source of information that can help address this information gap. We present results from recent studies that use three decades of Landsat imagery to map and characterize climate-driven changes in North American temperate and boreal forests, focusing on three main questions: (1) What is the nature and magnitude of so-called “greening and browning” in Canadian boreal forests? (2) Has the timing of spring time phenology in boreal and temperate forests changed, and what is the sensitivity of springtime phenology to climate variation? And (3) Is the overall distribution of plant functional types in boreal and arctic regions changing, and if so, how?

Autonomous vehicles will be here soon and will cause major changes when they arrive, similar to the building of the Interstates in the 1950s. AVs will bring safety, ease congestion, and provide mobility for many people who now find it difficult to travel. They will also erase many jobs, erode highway funding, and take customers from public transportation. For geospatial professionals, AVs will mean great opportunities in mapping, routing, site location, advertising, land use changes, and other areas. This Forum provides a look ahead to the US with AVs and will describe how we need to prepare.

Wildland fire plays an important role in shaping landscapes across the US. As such, land managers are confronted with numerous questions and issues regarding the management of wildland fire on their lands. These issues involve pre-, during- and post-fire stages of wildland fire and require reliable sources of geospatial data to be addressed. Various agencies, including the US Geological Survey, provide a wealth of geospatial data products that are used to support managers in making decisions regarding wildland fire and its impacts. The factors playing into these decisions and the data products developed to address them are the focus of this forum.

Originally developed in the fields of architecture and urban design, space syntax is a concept and method used to describe and analyze patterns of space at both the building and urban levels. In particular, space syntax helps us understand the role of spatial configuration within buildings and cities in people’s experiences and use of these spaces. It is now applied in a wide range of research areas, including transportation, crime pattern and space, wayfinding, disaster management, and air pollution. In this Forum, Dr. Baran will highlight several studies that have integrated space syntax measures and a range of qualitative and quantitative data in the realms of crime pattern analysis, urban legibility, neighborhood inertia, and physical activity.

The combination of physical and biological sounds that form the ambient acoustic environment is increasingly recognized as a fundamental element of habitats. Marine soundscapes are known to influence key ecological processes such as reproduction, larval recruitment and trophic interactions, and there is increasing interest in the use of passive acoustic monitoring as a non-destructive habitat assessment tool. This talk will explore how template matching and machine learning techniques can be used for the detection and classification of the sounds produced by fish and invertebrates with the coastal ocean, and how these data can be analyzed quantitatively to assess animal behavior and biodiversity.

Combining GPS units with accelerometers is becoming a common method of objectively assessing adult physical activity locations. However, few best practices have been proposed for designing these studies. Using accelerometer and GPS data collected from over 200 adults in five cities, 10+ minute bouts of physical activity were given location codes with a Google Maps-based coding protocol. This data was then used to answer the following questions: “How long do participants need to wear a GPS monitor to reliably identify minutes of physical activity spent in specific locations?” and “Do residential buffers accurately reflect the physical activity spaces of adults?”

Synthetic populations are geospatially explicit representations of households and persons. RTI’s nationwide synthetic populations are derived from American Community Survey (ACS) demographic estimates and ACS Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). These synthetic populations match household spatial distributions at 100M grid cell resolution and household demographic distributions at the census block group resolution. Synthetic populations are inherently different from standard area-based geospatial population estimates because they represent households and individuals as geospatial point features rather than as counts attached to polygon features. In this forum, Mr. Wheaton will present an overview to the design, structure, content and applications of synthetic populations in the geospatial sciences.

As the planet continues to warm, many decision makers are grappling with how best to adapt to our changing climate. But for these decision makers, the most advanced global climate models are also perceived as being too ‘wrong’ to be useful for planning and adaptation. In response, an explosion of higher resolution ‘downscaled’ climate models have emerged that could have increased value. This talk presents work being done at the Southeast Climate Science Center to develop decision-relevant high resolution climate model simulations for the US Caribbean and new strategies for evaluating investments in downscaling in the context of real-world decisions.

The usual views of air traffic — a single plane in the sky, several planes on approach, even the route map in the back of the in-flight magazine — are deceptive. The truth is that air traffic (and its counterpart, maritime traffic) is a big, messy, complex, ever-evolving morass where this morning’s anomaly is this afternoon’s status quo. Naturally, understanding this mess is increasingly crucial to applications from airspace management to economic planning. I will illustrate some of the complexity that makes traffic analysis difficult and will discuss Tracktable, a suite of algorithms and tools under development at Sandia that has yielded insight into the lower- and higher-level patterns present within large traffic data sets.

Expert-based science is widely on the decline when it comes to computing- and data-based inference worldwide for land- and seascapes as well as the atmosphere. The status of associated biodiversity and its conservation is equally in a crisis-state. In this presentation I will show how open access to data -including citizen science – has provided a fundamentally different playing field for institutions, research, agencies and (global) governance. Secondly, I will show how ‘Big Data’ mining using machine learning algorithms, e.g. based on open source as well as high-performance commercial tools, provide a superior analytical platform for statistical analysis and real-world progress. I will present in-depth examples from the polar regions (Arctic, Antarctic and Hindu-Kush Himalaya) as well as from the tropics (Central America and Papua New Guinea), the oceans and the atmosphere for conservation applications. All of these examples experienced a profile of hindrance, lack of recognition, and constraints found in the century-old science model that is currently applied but still awaiting new ethics and concepts for unleashing the full power of computers in a good way for the wider public good.

Environmental justice and sustainability are two critical, but often separate initiatives undertaken by NGOs, planners, government agencies, and grassroots groups. This presentation includes three cases in which environmental justice concerns confuse conventional discourses of sustainability (soil lead and urban gardens, home foreclosure and vacant lot reuse, and legacy pollution and waterfront development). Collectively, these works reveal the need to develop better theories of change and highlight the opportunities and value of diverse geospatial approaches. To facilitate collaboration and mutual learning, I will end by presenting the as-yet untested ideas I have been developing since arriving at NC State last year and inviting the audience to think about how geospatial approaches might contribute to understanding the relationship between environmental justice and sustainability as it relates to hurricane recovery. Open minds, wild ideas and seemingly simple questions are highly encouraged.

The World Economic Forum contends that we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The revolution is characterized by “a ubiquitous and mobile internet, by smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors, and by artificial intelligence and machine learning.” It is manifest in an “Internet of Things” that’s expected to connect 50 billion devices, and to attract $30 trillion of spending, by 2020. My talk considers implications of this new economic world order for geographic information systems (GIS), and for educational institutions like NC State that prepare students for careers that involve GIS.

The large-scale introduction of water reuse into an existing water supply system is a complex socio-technical process. Consumers drive the success of water reuse programs through adoption, and infrastructure designs affect adoption patterns. This research develops a modeling framework to capture the feedbacks among consumer adoption and infrastructure expansion. Two theories are applied and compared to simulate the diffusion of water innovations. Theories are modeled as a neighborhood-based diffusion and a network-based diffusion. Models are applied to simulate and project adoption of water reuse for the Town of Cary, North Carolina.

Humanity has embarked on an age of rapid global changes across biophysical and social-economic conditions so great that it has been labeled the Anthropocene. As global climate changes and urban populations expand, society is increasingly reliant on smaller and more fragmented areas for ecosystem services. These services include carbon sequestration, the uptake of excess nutrient pollution, the provision of stable, clean water supplies and biodiversity support. This presentation focuses on how changes in climate and land use affect ecosystems and the services they provide and then, how management might enhance the resilience or adaptation to broad, global changes as well as disturbances including wildfire and pest insects.

The City of Raleigh leverages GIS data and technology to support a variety of services and solutions. These range from more efficient management of assets to real time status of parking spaces, and from coordinating capital construction projects to interactive scenario-based 3D urban environments. This presentation will focus on how Raleigh balances a robust, stable, usable, and reliable Enterprise GIS platform with research and development into emerging technology in the areas of citizen engagement, real-time data, mobility, and IOT.

The importance of freshwater ecosystems in the terrestrial carbon balance from watersheds to the globe has been increasingly recognized over the last two decades. While global-scale annual carbon exports from rivers to the oceans are reasonably well constrained, large uncertainties remain at other spatial and temporal scales for lateral transport and other fluxes. Measurements are sparse across much of the world, and flux calculations typically involve a mix of disparate observations. Detailed characterizations of fluxes necessarily involve a combination of observations and models of varying complexities, ideally grounded on consistent digital river networks, drainage boundaries, and watershed characteristics derived from spatial datasets. This presentation will illustrate some of the challenges — and missteps — based on recent modeling efforts and data compilations, and discuss paths forward for retaining the provenance of observations and constructing reusable, consistent community resources of observations, model outputs, and spatial frameworks. Speaker: Dr. Emilio Mayorga | Senior Oceanographer, Applied Physics Laboratory | University of Washington

Deciding upon an appropriate spatial frame of reference is an important component of any observational analysis. Geographically fixed frameworks are not always well suited to meteorology, which can be described as the study of patterns within a moving fluid. Data visualization also needs to navigate around human cognitive limitations such as motion-induced failure to detect visual changes. This talk will address some general concepts of frames of reference and perception. Examples drawn from analyses of clouds and storms will illustrate different spatial frameworks used to improve understanding of underlying physical processes. Speaker: Dr. Sandra Yuter | Professor, Department of Marine, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences | North Carolina State University

As home to more than 50% of the human population, urban areas are of growing importance as sources of airborne and water-borne pollutants and sinks for increasing amounts of energy and natural resources. Remote sensing has considerable potential to improve our understanding of these areas, but is challenged by the high diversity of urban materials and their small spatial extent. New passive and active sensors have considerable potential to improve our understanding. In this talk, I discuss the use of advanced imaging spectrometry analysis to map urban materials (roofs, roads, vegetation type including species), the use of thermal data to quantify the relationship between green cover, material type and land surface temperature, and the use of LIDAR to improve classification and retrieve vegetation structural information including Leaf Area Index. Examples are from the Santa Barbara area, drawing upon my own work and that of my graduate students. Speaker: Dr. Dar Roberts | Professor, Department of Geography | University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker: Makiko Shukunobe – Research Assistant, Center for Geospatial Analytics, NCSU

CyberGIS represents an interdisciplinary field combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, geographic information science and systems (GIS), spatial analysis and modeling, and a number of geospatial domains (e.g., emergency management, smart cities, and the nexus of food, energy, and water systems) to enable broad scientific and technological advances. It has also emerged as new-generation GIS based on holistic integration of high-performance and distributed computing, data-driven knowledge discovery, visualization and visual analytics, and collaborative problem-solving and decision-making capabilities. The growing importance of cyberGIS is reflected by increasing calls for solutions to bridge the significant digital divide between advanced cyberinfrastructure and geospatial communities in the big data era. This presentation discusses challenges and opportunities for synergistically advancing cyberGIS and geospatial data science to transform geospatial discovery and innovation through interdisciplinary approaches. Dr. Shaowen Wang | Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science and Department of Computer Science

Speaker: Robert Mickler – Adjunct Instructor, Forestry & Environmental Resources, NCSU, and President/CEO of Carolina Ecosystem Services

Assessing water quality along rivers is vital for watershed management. The Bayesian Maximum Entropy method of modern geostatistics provides a powerful framework to model the space/time variability of water quality and perform a statistical assessment of all river miles. This talk presents joint work with Prahlad Jat that describes how river distances and flow can be incorporated in the covariance models used to describe the variability of surface water quality. Two case studies are then used to demonstrate the use of these covariance models for the assessment of surface water chloride in Maryland and fecal coliform in North Carolina. Speaker: Dr. Marc Serre | Associate Professor | Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Forensic analyses are often concerned with identifying the spatial source of biological residue. Using recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, dust collected from nearly any object can be shown to harbor DNA fragments from thousands of bacteria and fungi species which may be informative of the source of the dust. We show that training collections of deep neural network classifiers on random Voronoi partitions of a spatial domain yields remarkably accurate geolocation predictions. When applied to the microbiomes of over 1,300 dust samples collected across the U.S., more than half of predictions produced by this model fall within 90 kilometers of their origin, a 60% reduction in error from competing geolocation methods. Speaker: Dr. Brian Reich | Associate Professor | Department of Statistics | NC State University

Kalman Filters are used in a wide variety of signal processing applications to fuse multiple noisy signals and forecast system states. Here, we investigate the potential of Kalman Filters to fuse multisource, multispectral satellite imagery. In particular: obtaining robustly gap-filled time series for mapping and predicting land surface phenology. The methodology is extended to incorporate biophysical understanding of how weather drives phenological variation. Speaker: Dr. Joshua Gray | Assistant Professor | Forestry & Environmental Resources | NC State University

With President Obama’s 2013 Executive Order, an estimated 20 million government-generated datasets could be eligible for release to the public. These data have massive potential to inform and support solutions to our nation’s most pressing challenges. At the 2016 Bayes Hack, participants used open data to tackle social issues relevant to seven Federal Agencies. The Department of Interior prompted hackers to help underserved populations overcome socioeconomic and geographic challenges to accessing public lands. In this talk, Stacy will explore the outcomes from the Bayes Hack as well as how she has leveraged open data for improving outdoor recreation management and visitation planning support. Speaker: Dr. Stacy Supak | Teaching Assistant Professor | Center for Geospatial Analytics | NC State University

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California is the largest estuary on the west coast of North and South America and is also one of the most modified estuaries in the world. We examined whether the extreme California drought of 2012-2015 favored the spread of non-native species, using NASA’s AVIRIS-next generation data at a ground resolution of 2.5m per pixel, combined with airborne hyperspectral HyMap imagery. We confirmed that the total area invaded by floating macrophytes in the Delta increased many-fold over this period and the composition of this functional group also changed. This study provides insight and understanding of the drought’s impact on invasive potential of an ecosystem. Speaker: Dr. Susan Ustin | Professor of Environmental and Resource Sciences in the Dept. of Land and Natural Resources | Director of the Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS) | University of California Davis

Increasing resolutions of geographic data provides a compelling motivation for spatiotemporal analysis of dynamic data streams. The challenge in processing large volumes of high resolution earth observation and simulation data by traditional GIS has been compounded by the drive towards real-time applications and decision support. Drawing from our experience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this presentation will highlight progress and challenges of some of the emerging data analysis and computational approaches, including high performance computing, illustrated with population and urban dynamics, sustainable energy and mobility, and climate change science. Speaker: Dr. Budhendra Bhaduri | Geographic Information Science and Technology Group | Oak Ridge National Laboratory

For a number of reasons, the relevance of GIS, as we know it, is waning. Geography, on the other hand, is alive and well. In fact, it’s so pervasive that you’d be hard-pressed to find a tech company whose portfolio doesn’t include it in one form or another. In this talk, Nate will dive into where GIS stands today, how it fits in with the larger “Neogeography” movement, and how it must evolve to stay relevant. He will specifically apply lessons learned while exploring ways to increase participation in geospatial projects within the federal government. Speaker: Nate Irwin | Lead Developer | Trailhead Labs, San Francisco, CA

Preserving and restoring the world’s forests is regarded as having a positive (cooling) effect on a warming climate. However, some have cautioned against reforestation and afforestation as a climate-warming-mitigation strategy outside of tropical regions, without considering the potentially counteracting biophysical effects (albedo, transpiration) in tandem with the beneficial biogeochemical effects (carbon sequestration). We use MODIS land surface temperature (LST) and albedo data in conjunction with the Landsat-based National Land Cover Database (NLCD) land cover data to show empirically that United States temperate forests are not a source of heat relative to surrounding herbaceous vegetation (croplands, grasslands). Speaker: Dr. James Wickham | Senior Research Biologist | US Environmental Protection Agency

Until 2008 Mercury was a poorly understood planet, with less than half of it imaged by visiting spacecraft. NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury returned global image and topographic data and – together with gravity, spectral, and compositional data – has dramatically increased our understanding of this enigmatic world. In this presentation, Paul Byrne will describe how these data, integrated in GIS environments, has enabled our study of the geological, geophysical, and geochemical character of Mercury. Speaker: Dr. Paul Byrne | Assistant Professor | Dept. of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences | NC State University

Finding our way has always been necessary, and we have always tried to make it easier. Yet today, wayfinding is changing so rapidly that it makes our heads spin. What have we lost? What might we gain? I will use a review of wayfinding past, present and future to raise such questions; arguing that the enjoyment we experience along the way is now just as important as the efficiency with which we find the way’s end. Speaker: Dr. Ben Watson | Associate Professor | Dept. of Computer Science | NC State University

Speaker: Dr. Siva Ravada – Senior Director of Development, Oracle Spatial & Graph and MapViewer, Server Technologies

Speaker: Dr. Peter Vogt – Scientific Officer, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability

Speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman – Associate Professor, Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources, University of Georgia

Speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman – Associate Professor, Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources, University of Georgia

Speaker: Dr. Conghe Song – Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Speaker: Dr. David Berrigan – Biologist & Program Director, Health Behaviors Research Branch, Behavioral Research Program, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health

Speaker: Dr. Larry Band – Voit Gilmore Distinguished Professor of Geography, Director – Institute for the Environment, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Speaker: Dr. Michael Emch – Professor and Chair, Department of Geography; Professor, Department of Epidemiology; Fellow, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Speaker: Dr. Robert Scheller – Associate Professor, Dept. of Environmental Sciences and Mgmt, School of the Environment, Portland State University

Speaker: Dr. Aaron Hipp – Associate Professor, Dept. of Parks, Recreation & Tourism Management, NC State

Speaker: Dan Colby – Senior Vice President / Product Development, ProStar Geocorp, Inc.

Speaker: Dr. Janet Franklin – Professor, School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning, Arizona State University

Speaker: Dr. Maggie Holland – Assistant Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland

Speaker: Dr. Eric Delmelle – Associate Professor, Dept. of Geography & Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Speaker: Dr. Tom Allen – Professor, Dept. of Geography, Planning, and Environment, East Carolina University

Speaker: Dr. Sidharth Thakur – Sr. Research Data Software Developer, RENCI, and Adjunct at Dept. of Computer Science, NC State

Speaker: Dr. Diana Sinton – Executive Director, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science

Speaker: Dr. William Hargrove – Senior Research Ecologist, Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station

Speaker: Dr. Kurt Riitters – Research Ecologist, US Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Research Triangle Park, NC