Global Phosphorus Blooms

Three different ways of mapping some dissolved reactive phosphorus data are covered. Some of our recent work in pulling together a set of global datasets is beginning to bear fruit. Over the next few posts, I’ll go into excruciating detail on how the datasets were pulled together and the analysis results mapped. Along with nitrogen, […]

Lines on the Map

From space, one could hardly tell that what we see above is one of the most divisive, fraught areas on the planet. When we add the country boundaries, the familiar shapes of the Middle East serve as a reminder: I’m going to stray into some difficult territory in this post, and not without a healthy […]

Fire Lines

A quick and easy request is handled with Select by Location As we go to press, a fire rages on the Port Hills, reminding many of a similar event in 2017. Just today, I had a quick request from LU student services to get a quick idea of which roads were close to the fire […]

Analyst, know thy coordinates

Recognising different coordinate systems can be helpful in speeding up your work. It’s said that the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed with three key maxims for a good life, one of which was “Know Thyself”. This is, of course, very good advice. For the GIS analyst, knowing yourself helps to know when to […]

A Label Conscious Map

Label classes give us a bit more control over how features can be labelled on maps. We’ve been putting some figures together for a paper coming out of Christy Songola’s master’s thesis. He was looking at using Radon measurements from wells in a braided river plain to determine travel times of groundwater in different seasons. […]

The Heights of Folly

I won’t say I’m a great fan of clear cutting but I suppose some may find this image inspiring (from a recent walk to the Sign of the Packhorse). We start with this as it will later help to illustrate some of the analysis the GIS courses have been doing lately. We’ve been spending a […]

GIS for the Masses!

It’s been a very busy start to the semester here at the GIS Gizmoplex. In our quest for world domination, er, no, fame and fortune, nope, okay, better integration of GIS into courses, we’ve been working on ways for students to use GIS as part of their coursework. It’s been great working with some of […]

Putting Images in their Place

Ah, Monday morning… One message in the inbox this morning brought up a classic GIS workflow. How do I take potentially useful information in something like a PDF and add it to a map? This brings us to georeferencing and digitising. As an example of that, we’ve been working with Peter Almond to put together […]

Challenging Times – Challenging Patches

We dissect how to approach a challenging spatial problem by relying on some basic levels of analysis. We often get a lot of challenging problems of a spatial nature here in the GIS world. A common thread of these is that they often sound easy at the start but get much more complicated when you […]

Difficulties with Degrees

In this post we resolve the problem with our US data points In a previous post we looked in excruciating detail at some point data in the US. After first establishing that many, if not all, were in the wrong place, the next step was figuring out how to fix this, which meant getting to […]