GIS Day 2019 Abstracts
Session 1 - New Data and Technologies
State of Michigan MiSAIL and GIS Update - Everett Root (DTMB, State of Michigan)
This presentation will include an update about the technological advances happening with the State of Michigan Office of Technology Partnerships and Geospatial Services programs. Details about the evolving Michigan Authoritative Imagery and LiDAR program (MiSAIL) and the new Michigan Geographic Framework (MGF) Data Hub will be highlighted.
What's new in GIS at U-M? - Peter Knoop (U-M GIS Community of Practice)
GIS and spatial thinking have become an integral part of teaching and research across the University of Michigan. We will provide a brief overview of some of the new features and capabilities of GIS applications introduced over the last year, available to the U-M community, with a focus on evolving workflows for academic instruction and research in a collaborative setting.
GIS Community Driven Solutions for Safer Drone Operations - Michael Healander (Airspacelink)
Commercial enterprises and public entities have come to recognize the power drones have to make a variety of tasks faster, cheaper or safer. The regulatory hurdles and practical logistics around getting a UAV into the air can be difficult, but these are the exact sorts of challenges that Airspace Link has spent the past year working through. Their efforts to collaborate with three different stakeholders have allowed them to build one centralized and standardized platform that will more easily enable drone integration into the national airspace.
Airspace Link is a unified airspace regulatory SaaS platform that works directly with the FAA, state & local governments and the drone industry itself. As a supplier of the FAA’s Low Altitude Authorization & Notification Capability (LAANC), pilots using Airspace Link can receive their authorization in near real-time. Additionally, data provided by state & local governments is integrated into this system to allow pilots to make informed decisions about local governance, scheduled events, or active emergency situations. Come learn more about what is happening in Michigan and your community.
Fusing Satellite and Drone Data with GIS to Create New Analytical Decision Support Tools for Varying Farm Types - Shannon Brines (SEAS, UM - Ann Arbor)
We seek to provide methods for the integration of low cost and freely available GIS and remote sensing data with drone-acquired fine resolution imagery, LiDAR, and meteorological data. These data will be integrated to produce a variety of fine resolution maps that can be analyzed to identify what tools, inputs, and management strategies most effectively contribute to an increase in the productivity, agroecological system health, and resiliency or restoration (typically in response to a weather or climatic disturbance) of a given farming operation and site. Our test geography for this initial work are farms with multiple cropping systems in the central region of Puerto Rico.
Session 2 - Urban Assets and Development
Mapping the Assets that are Seen and Unseen - Dennis Faustich and Casey Hanson (Oakland County)
When you think of mapping utilities it’s easy to envision things we can see, such as, manholes or fire hydrants but have you considered how we use GIS for underground utilities and assets? The Oakland County GIS team is host to a collaborative asset management system with a GIS focus that allows our county departments and local communities to manage work activities and the maintenance of GIS assets both above and below ground. Come and learn how this program began, how our asset data was converted to GIS, and how the system is used to provide valuable reporting.
Gathering, Creating, and Utilizing GIS data to help the State Land Bank Authority recycle land to productive use - Brian Woodin, Ryan McNeil, and Jennifer Quinlivan (Michigan Land Bank Fast Track Authority)
In its ongoing effort to create positive economic impact to Michigan communities by recycling land to productive use, the State Land Bank Authority gathers, creates, and utilizes many forms of location intelligence. Ranging from publicly-available land ownership records to GIS parcel layers from local governments to imagery gathered by our own Unmanned Aerial System, the SLBA relies on timely and accurate GIS information on a daily basis. Whether a parcel is hundreds of acres in size or just hundreds of square feet, location intelligence is a key component in our mission of returning land back to local tax rolls.
Using GIS to Promote Transparency - Marty Denicolo (City of Detroit)
The Civil Rights, Inclusion, and Opportunity Department (CRIO) is authorized via Executive Order 2016-1 and the Community Benefits Ordinance to monitor the employment of Detroiters on major construction projects receiving public funding. Using the StoryMaps and Operations Dashboard applications through ArcGIS Online, I've created interactive, regularly updated, and publicly available maps tracking project compliance in order to keep the public up to date on projects in their neighborhoods. In this presentation, I will describe the process for creating and updating these applications as well as the impetus for improving public transparency in City governance.
The Eviction Machine - Josh Akers (Urban Praxis Workshop)
Bulk buyers and speculators are at the center of neighborhood instability and blight in Detroit. In a recent study for the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, Akers and Seymour find that the City of Detroit has spent nearly $34 million over the past five years demolishing properties that speculators purchased from public auctions. In addition, bulk purchasers in Wayne County tax auction were at the center of the city’s rising rates of eviction in the same period. This research was made possible through a multi-year project examining changes in property ownership in Detroit since the financial crisis. The work lies heavily on geospatial data to understand the ways in which particular neighborhoods in the city are shaped by these practices.
Session 3 - Public Health
Livingston County Sheriff's Office Public Crime Map - Sandon Lettieri and Mark Klein (Livingston Co)
This presentation will ldiscuss reasoning behind the Livingston County Sheriff's Office launching the public crime map and the benefits of having this data more available in a GIS environment. We will also discuss the application's development process as well as methods for creating and updating the application, including the use of ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise, and Python Scripting. Finally, an overview of the public crime map's interface and features will conclude the presentation.
Using GIS to Evaluate the Health of your Water System - Jim Miller (Hubbell, Roth, & Clark)
This presentation will look at the new requirements from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) regarding the identification and removal of lead in our water service lines. We will look at how a community water supplier can use GIS to track the location and information available about the type of material being used in the water lines servicing our homes and businesses. The presentation will have examples of communities tracking their water service lines, performing analysis on how best to replace them, and GIS applications that can be used moving forward to document the information being gathered.
State of Michigan New Interactive Map App for Licensed Health Care Facilities - Ulrika Zay (DTMB, State of Michigan)
This presentation will include a live demo of the new Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) Licensed Providers Interactive Map. The interactive map includes regularly updated locations and contact information for the following licensed facilities: adult foster care, child care, health care, and substance use disorder care facilities (SUDs). The Licensed Providers Interactive Map and associated data was made public through the State of Michigan GIS Open Data Portal in October of 2018 during the Governor’s Opioid Awareness Week. Having accurate SUDs information readily accessible and regularly updated is a part of the State’s effort to combat the opioid addiction and overdose crisis that is happening in Michigan and throughout the nation.
Mapping for a Healthier Dearborn - Claudia Walters and Kaitlyn Tatro (UM-Dearborn)
This presentation introduces two Storymaps about health in Dearborn. Dearborn offers many opportunities for residents to be active and offers a variety of healthy food options. With its diverse population and impacts of heavy industry in parts of the city, however, it also faces unique challenges because of unequal environmental conditions and access to healthcare. In one example, we draw on secondary data that is important to Healthy Dearborn, a partnership between Beaumont Health, City of Dearborn, Dearborn Public Schools and more than 500 other community members working together to create a culture of health by ensuring access to healthy eating and active living opportunities for everyone in Dearborn. In a second example, we show the results of participatory mapping to build capacity through a youth academy, Environmental Health Research-to-Action. These examples visualize complex patterns of protective and risk factors for health that can be used by residents and decison-makers to facilitate dialogue towards improved public health.
Session 4 - GIS Applications in Field and Classroom
Inquiry Based Learning Using GIS to Assess Renewable Energy Infrastructure - Adam Simon (UM - Ann Arbor)
Energy resources and their consumption by our global society are major themes of EARTH 380, Natural Resources, Economics and the Environment, taught annually on the Ann Arbor campus to ~150 students, with about 25% from the natural sciences, and the rest drawn equally from majors in the humanities and social sciences. We developed a semester-long project where students with no previous GIS experience, beyond what students already possess from their use of maps on smartphones and the web, are taught to use the Web app GeoPlanner, a GIS tool that is site licensed and accessed via a U-M Weblogin and integrated into Canvas, to develop their own renewable energy infrastructures for southeast Michigan that rely entirely on grid-scale wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage. Students learn how GIS is used to assess the many federal, state and local ordinances that govern land use, as well as the concept of social license and its role in the debate over renewable energy. After the students design several different renewable energy scenarios, they learn about life-cycle emissions and levelized costs of electricity, and compare their hypothetical scenarios with the current and proposed energy fuel mix of our local utility. Students submit their results via Canvas 24 hours prior to each weekly Discussion section, which allows us to aggregate all results and evaluate them for similarities and differences. Each Discussion section is capped at 15 students. The instructors work with GSIs to moderate each Discussion section during which the results of all students are anonymously presented. The universal outcome is that all the students recognize that their own solutions are often similar to those of their colleagues, no matter their academic home or lived experience. Moderated discussion blended with think-pair-share activities allows their solutions to become the starting point for real conversations inside and outside the classroom. Importantly, the students take pride in their results because they own the scenarios. As a final exercise at the end of the term, students incorporate all of their work, including their GeoPlanner scenarios, into a StoryMap targeted at convincing a theoretical audience of stakeholders to adopt the student's plan for a renewable energy infrastructure for southeast Michigan. This project is easily scalable to other courses and we would happy to discuss our work with anyone interested in using GIS to your class.
Mapping Glacial Changes in the Peruvian Andes using Aerial Repeat Photography and Satellite Imagery - Ulrich Kamp (UM-Dearborn)
Terrestrial and aerial image analysis has proven to be a valuable survey method for documenting terrestrial landscape change related to, for example, biodiversity, urbanization, and environmental services such as land vegetation or forest cover and use, glacier extent, and water resources. Historical oblique aerial photographs offer exceptional opportunities to extend the observational record beyond the period covered by traditional nadir aerial surveys and satellite imagery. Here we apply these methods in the Cordillera Vilcanota of Southern Peru, home to Earth’s second largest tropical ice mass (Quelccaya) and the largest high alpine lake in the Andes (Sibinacocha)—a primary source of the Amazon River. The Shippee-Johnson aerial photography expedition of 1931 produced oblique photographs of glaciated peaks of the Cordillera Vilcanota. To determine the extent of glacial loss, we compared the 1931 glacier extents with more recent ones derived from topographic maps and satellite imagery using Agisoft Metashape software. The identification of the flight camera positions from 1931 proved to be challenging, since the original photographs come with only rudimentary information. For out three test glaciers, the analysis showed between a 50% and 95% decrease in glacier area from 1931 to 2018, with the strongest recession in the late 1990s/early 2000s. We are currently in the process of mapping glacier extents using the original 1931 photos and repeated ones from 2005 and 2019. Future studies will include repeating the photographs across the Vilcanota and other Andean mountain ranges, and also include ground truth and UAS imagery analysis.
Evaluation of the 2018 "Father's Day Flood" using Technology-based Tools - Mike Cousins (OHM Advisors)
On August 2nd, President Trump made a “Major Disaster Declaration” for the regions effected by the Father’s Day Flood; a storm that dropped nearly 7 inches of rain in under 9 hours across Northern Michigan on June 17th 2018. In this session, participants will learn how the use of GIS software, aided the remediation efforts along the Copper Range and Calumet Hecla Trails between M-26 and Normand Rd. just north of Lake Linden, MI.
Along the 9.5 mile section of trail inspected for this project, there are over 160 culverts. 44 of these culverts were washed out by the storm on June 17th, and an additional 40 were found to be either completely blocked by debris or collapsed. The use of ArcGIS allowed engineers to define specific parameters for condition assessment and geo-locate that data in real time. As the engineers collected the condition assessment data, their reports were uploaded to a shared platform so that the assessment team could monitor progress and coordinate with other relief personnel to help maximize resources.
This session further outlines how the collected data was used to determine risk of future failure at channel banks and how that data was used to assess immediate threats to the surrounding community, while also allowing the engineers to perform a data driven cost comparison for repair and stabilization of the trails.
Mapping Injustice through the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab - Matthew Lassiter (UM - Ann Arbor)
The Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab is a curricular and extracurricular project that involves undergraduate students in research collaborations designed around digital humanities and public engagement. The pilot projects of the HistoryLab have focused on the history of policing in the city of Detroit from the 1940s-1990s, including the investigation of police homicides of civilians and interactive mapping of hundreds of police-civilian encounters. The presentation will discuss how student research teams have utilized ArcGIS StoryMaps and Omeka as the main and intertwined exhibit platforms and consider the advantages and challenges of presenting archival research, building interactive maps, and reaching public audiences through these digital humanities methods.