Lee L.- Week 3

Chapter 5

• • Mapping what is occurring inside an area is significant for monitoring, so when something occurs out of the ordinary, they know to take action
  • Taking how many areas you have to look inside into consideration, is it a singular area or is it multiple? 
    • Singular areas such as library districts allow you to monitor activity on a smaller scale. 
  • What’s a buffer? I thought I escaped these, but chemistry always finds a way to invade every discipline I’m in
    • Wrong buffer, these ones define a distance around a specific feature, like a stream buffer which is off limits to logging. (Does this mean they can only get so close to it on a map?)
  • Administrative or natural boundary-> parcel or land, watershed
  • Several areas would be contiguous, a prime example of this would be zip codes. 
  • Disjunct-An example of these would be state parks
  • Discrete features: unique and identifiable. Can list and count them as well as summarize them
    • Locations
    • Linear features: roads, pipelines
    •  Discrete features: Parcels 
  • Continuous features represent more seamless and geographic phenomena. 
    • A summarization of features in each area 
      • Spatially continuous categories or classes like vegetative type or range of elevation (SOIL TYPES, I LOVE SOIL).
  • Three ways to find what’s inside

• Drawing areas or features

• • • • Visual approach is good for seeing whether one or more features are inside or outside of an area (In or out of bounds)
      • Need a dataset containing the boundary of an area or areas and a dataset containing the features necessary
      • Types: Locations, lines, areas, surfaces (The whole nine yards) 
      • Quick and easy, but visual based only so there is a slack of information from the inside

• Selecting the features inside an area

• • • • Getting a list or summary of features inside a single area, or group of areas you’re treating as one 
      • Also good at finding what’s within a given distance of a feature
      • Types: Locations, lines, and areas (No surfaces. One time a guy said a seal was an impervious surface, is this true?)
      • Good for scaling down on information in a singular area, but doesn’t really let you know information in other areas (Only all areas as a whole.) 

• Overlaying the areas and features

• • • Combines area and features to create a new layer with the attributes of both or compares the two layers to calculate summary statistics for each area on the fly. 
    • Finding which features are inside which area, and summarizing how many or how much by area
    • Types: Locations, lines, areas, surfaces (The whole nine yards again)
    • Good for finding and displaying what’s within each of the several areas, but requires more processing 
    • The color palettes for these maps were created by god himself, they’re aesthetically pleasing and honestly are a little reward for reading through this book

Chapter 6

• This is a thick mama chapter indeed
• Using GIS can help us find out what’s occurring within a set distance of a feature, and help us find what is within traveling range. 
• This makes me think of Apple or Google maps a bit, where you rely on the app to help you find things like restaurants, stores, etc. (Usually it tells you most places within a 20-40 mile radius rather than giving you a location to an ice cream place in Wisconsin, unless it is a business name within Wisconsin and that is the only one present in the GPS system.)
• Totally not a virus. Trust me…im a dolphin
• I never knew mapping.  I typed this thought out about 7 hours ago and I had no clue what I was going to say. 
• Wait, I remembered what I was going to say. I never knew that maps had a cost or budget really. I know that there’s a system budget that is more like a resource value rather than a currency oriented cost but this seems like an actual cost.
• Okay, so cost is more of an aspect like time and a more precise measure of what’s nearby. 
• Things are adding up in the little brain, does this explain why there are sometimes alternative routes? (other than obvious factors like road construction, etc.) Because sometimes the cost of time isn’t really as valuable to those who aren’t on a time crunch compared to others? (Ex. It takes 1 hour and 35 minutes for me to get home to Cambridge, OH from Delaware, OH. I hate taking the highway so I’m willing to give up that cost of time and take a 2 hour drive home if it means I don’t have to take the highway.) 
• Planar method: appropriate when area of interest is relatively small (cities, counties, states.) 
• Geodesic method: larger scale, revolving around the interest in bigger areas like countries, continents, the big momma Earth. 
• Lots of reiteration in these chapters, also that equation for distance was yucky. 1.5/10
• Cost layer?? 
  • Reclassify existing layer based on an attribute value. 
  • Creating multiple layers? Combine all the input layers. 

Chapter 7

• People typically map what’s changed in order to anticipate future conditions
  • Does this apply to climate change? Like those deforestation maps where we anticipate less treeage in an area? 
• It does, I think. (Flipped to the next page and was violently humbled. :o) ) 
• We can also look at features that move! Although I find that hard to calculate at the moment unless you’re a meteorologist or a person who monitors natural disasters frequently. 
  • Discrete features: tracked as they move through space. So we can map paths for things like hurricanes or animals. 
  • Linear can track things like the direction a stream is going or the boundary of a fire. 
  • A fun fact about me is I hate Smokey the Bear, if you read this post, ask me why. 
  • When it showed linear range, it made me think of my animal behavior class in the spring when we looked at turtles going to nest and then going to the opposite pole location because of the magnet things in their brains. (So it was technically the right area, but not. AKA, the turtle went to the other side of the island, but was in line with the location it was supposed to nest at. I don’t know how to explain this.) 
  • Natural disasters and crimes represent geographical phenomena that occur in different locations. They are tracked and mapped in a specific instant. 
  • How do we map things in real time? Does that fall under the realm of specific instant? 

The three time patterns

• A trend-change between two (or more) dates or times 
• Before and after-conditions preceding and following an event
• A cycle-change over a recurring time period, such as day, month, or year. 
• Moth 

Three more ways, but for mapping change

• Time series 
  • Good for showing changes in boundaries, values for discrete areas, or surfaces. 
  • Create a map for each time or date showing the location or characteristics of features. 
• Tracking map 
  • Good for showing movement in a discrete location, linear feature, or area boundary. 
  • Create a single map showing locations of the features at several dates and times. (Weather?) 
• Measuring change
  • Change to show the amount, percentage, or rate of change in a place. 
  • Calculated by difference of amount in a category or in the value of numeric attributes, and display the features based on said values. 

Good stuff John.