10th Anniversary of GIS Day

Since its beginning in 1999, more than 10,000 organizations in more than 80 countries have participated in this worldwide event.  Events have included everything from map drawing contests to treasure hunts, all with the same goal, to increase global awareness of GIS.

For more information on GIS Day, which is November 19^th this year, please check out this website.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Global Warming and the Shrinking Gangotri Glacier

Tracing the retreat of the Gangotri Glacier (1780-2001)

In the Himalayas, the Gangotri Glacier, the largest of the glaciers, is the source of the holy River Ganges.  Its headwaters pour from an ice cave on the glacier and flow for more than 1,500 miles to the Bay of Bengal.

A recent United Nations climate report indicates that the Himalayan glaciers are melting more quickly each year and could disappear within only a few decades.  Rivers in the region, including the Ganges may become seasonal rivers, which has serious ramifications for poverty and the economies in the region, warns the report issued by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Locate hospitals in UP

India

In Lucknow, India, the World-bank funded UP Health System Development Project (UPHSDP), in collaboration with Remote Sensing Applications Centre (RSAC), will develop an online map of the state’s health facilities. The online map will feature all listed government and private health facilities, hospitals, and healthcare related NGOs. People can also get information of the hospital like infrastructure, doctors, staff and other associated data. The project is primarily intended to aid the rural population and the online map is also expected to be a comprehensive portal into the healthcare infrastructure. The tool will be developed by integrating the demographic data with locations of health facilities using Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Mapping Garbage?

Brooke Mitchelmore and Ryan Manuel, both environmental technology students at the College of the North Atlantic, show the mapped location of an abandoned truck in the Deer Lake area.

Two environmental technology students at the College of the North Atlantic have been busy since early July identifying large, solid waste items that are making both private and public land throughout the region unsightly for the group of municipal councils stretching from the Bay of Islands to White Bay South and Bonne Bay. Each item they’ve found — whether it’s an abandoned car, major household appliance or furniture — has had its co-ordinates recorded with a global positioning system and will be plotted onto a map using geographic information systems (GIS).

After identifying all the objects, the next step will be for a committee to map out a strategy to safely and effectively removing those identified items and bring them to proper disposal areas.

For more information on the efforts of these college students, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Annual symposium brings researchers together to share ideas

Patrick Yau, manager of the University Health Network in Toronto and Miroslava Caperlovic-Culf of the National Research Council in Moncton, are shown high-tech medical equipment by Mona Prasad, a genomics product specialist.

Although organized by the cancer institute, the symposium brings together researchers who study a wide range of topics in fields like genomics and proteomics .The Maine Institute, for instance, researched cancer incidence rates in the state and found Maine’s age-adjusted cancer rate was higher than anywhere else in the country. They further noted that for some cancers, rates were highest in the more rural, less populated counties. They are aided in this task by GIS (geographic information system) management technology. Using GIS technology, researchers can pinpoint where the highest cancer rates are, then begin to lay other information over the top of it.

The ultimate goal in the end is to figure out some way to provide help to the public health system to reduce the cancer rates; whether it is improvements to treatment or access to treatment, or even to develop community education programs to do something better.

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Mapping Campus Tress

UMKC was awarded a $10,000 grant from the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Urban Forestry division to put the coordinates of the 1,882 trees on campus into a GPS system that will identify and monitor potentially hazardous trees that could encroach upon roofs, power lines and garages. They mapped out the trees with Computer Aided Design, or CAD, a visual and symbol based computer program used to design or draft buildings, a sister program to a Geographic Information System (GIS), which is used for locating and managing specific points of an area.

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

The City of Bryan Utilizes GIS technology for West Nile Virus

In cooperation with the Brazos County Health Department, the City of Bryan’s Geographic Information System (GIS) began to display the approximate location of birds, mosquitoes, and the general areas of human cases that have tested positive for West Nile Virus. Preventing mosquito bites is the best way to avoid getting West Nile virus so this website will service the community to prevent future cases.

For more information on the West Nile Positive locations, please visit the City of Bryan’s GIS website here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Spatial and demographic patterns of Cholera in Ashanti Region-Ghana

Cholera has continues to be a global threat, especially in countries in Africa. In one of the affected regions in Ghana, Ashanti region, massive outbreaks and high incidences of cholera have predominated in urban and overcrowded communities. A GIS based spatial analysis and statistical analysis, carried out to determine clustering of cholera, showed that high cholera rates are clustered around Kumasi Metropolis. The results suggest that high urbanization, high overcrowding, and neighborhood with Kumasi Metropolis are the most important predictors of cholera in Ashanti region.

For more information on Cholera in Ghana, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Reverse 911

Siskiyou towns and cities

The Siskiyou County Office of Emergency Services (OES) was recently awarded a grant in the amount of $60,280 for the purchase, installation and maintenance of a “Reverse 911” system by Homeland Security. The system allows for making high volume outbound phone calls for the purpose of disseminating emergency information. The system has the ability to make up to 2500 calls per hour based on Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping.

For more information on this system, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

NovAtel(R) Inc. Collaboratives with Brilliant Telecommunications Inc. for improved GIS Technology

NovAtel Inc.,that includes producing such applications as surveying, Geographical Information System mapping, precision agriculture machine guidance, port automation, mining, marine and defense industries, along with Brilliant Telecommunications Inc. announced they have signed a technology partnership agreement to develop and deliver innovative timing, synchronization and positioning solutions. The combination of the companies technologies will enable both companies to deliver a powerful set of new timing and synchronization solutions to customers worldwide. GPS and GNSS precise positioning technology is a key element to meet the growing demands placed on Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2) server technology, as the end-to-end transmission and synchronization of voice, data and video across packet-based networks becomes more sophisticated.

For more information on this story, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC