Interesting Problems

GIS Blog

…And Standing Up Straight

In this post we cover New Zealand’s new gravity-based vertical datum, NZVD2016. Along the way we’ll get familiar with the weirdly wonderful geoid and WGS84. This post follows on from Keeping Our Heads Above Water, hence the title, and has benefited greatly from comments by LINZ’s Geodetic team – thanks! In a previous post we…

LiDAR Data – Thousands of Tiny Luminous Spheres

This post covers the basics of LiDAR data and how very high resolution DEMs can be derived from LiDAR data. With an appropriate nod to The Bats, we’ll cover LiDAR data, which, while sort of luminous but not spherical, are certainly tiny and numerous. Thousands is a HUGE underestimate. LiDAR is a form of remote…

Trekking the High Himalaya for Data

This post covers how a range of different remotely sense data sets can be acquired from around the world with a focus on Nepal In a recent post, we looked at how Open Street Map can be used to acquire some basic geospatial data for many parts of the world. When we left off, we…

The Spatial Smoking Gun (part 2)

This is the second of two posts about some spatial analysis aimed at reducing adolescent smoking rates. The first talked about the analysis itself while this one discusses how the results were shared with colleagues and end users. In part 1 of this post, the analysis issues were covered and we ended up with a…

The Spatial Smoking Gun (part 1)

This is the first of two posts about a spatial analysis project related to adolescent smoking rates. In this one, I’ll talk about the problem and the analysis and in the second we’ll cover various ways that the results were shared. Teen smoking…there can’t be anything good about it, can there? I’ve got a friend,…

Getting Started with the GIS Blog

This post provides an overview of all the (hopefully) useful things you can read about on the blog. In its short and happy life the GIS Blog has certainly done a lot for me. It’s made it a lot easier to respond to many common questions (like mapping to the J: drive – see how easy…

Canterburymaps.govt.nz and Web Services

The Canterbury councils recently got together (gasp!) to produce a map portal for the whole region. This post covers that as well as brings up how web services can be used to access publicly available data. Canterburymaps.govt.nz It may sound hard to believe, but the district, city and regional councils got together recently and decided…

GIS and Precision Agriculture

This post is about how GIS fits in with precision agriculture, something that’s likely to be an important topic here over the next few years. Someone recently asked me if GIS could be used for precision ag. The definitive answer is: Yes! Another answer is: How could you not? Precision ag strikes me as an…

Mapping the Census

In this post I’ll take about how we can make the most of the recent (and previous) census data and how to add spreadsheet data to a map. So did you fill in your census form on Tuesday night? In the course of filling in the forms, you no doubt entered a lot of personal…

My data aren’t lining up!

In this post I’ll talk about using the Spatial Adjustment toolbar to shift vector data from where it is to where it should be. A key underlying idea of GIS is that data layers overlay because they all live in the same geographic space. If this doesn’t happen then there’s not much value in the…