Annual Report Year 2004 - Civil and Environmental Engineering

Making smarter decisionswith geospatial technologyRESEARCH NEWSThe location of housing developments, roads, andsewers can hurt a community’s quality of life.Likewise, the location of health, child-care, andfood-stamp services for low-income families canmake or break the success of social service efforts.The information is available to make smart civic and businessdecisions, but it is often not used because it is hard tofind and even harder to understand, according to CEE’s RandyDymond, an expert in geographic information systems (GIS)and land-use change impacts.Many decisions with overlapping parameters require location-based,geospatial analysis, he said. “A single location canhave 200 or more layers of data, such as voting, zoning, ownership,flood plain, demographic, political, and more,” he continued.“Moreover, there is a lot of specialty data that is directlypertinent to a particular issue and can involve experts fromfields as different as entomology, economics, or civil engineering,”he said. “This can make it hard for decision makersto find and use information that can help them make betterdecisions,” he said.Dymond is heading a university-wide research center thathelps decision makers find and understand the geospatialinformation they need. Established in 2003, the interdisciplinaryCenter for Geospatial Information Technology (CGIT)10“provides decision support system development which usesintelligent data to help answer complicated questions.”CGIT provides “a pool of expertise in a set of horizontaltechnologies,” Dymond said. “Databases, programming, globalpositioning systems (GPS), and geospatial analysis, forexample, can be applied to any vertical area, such as analyzinga harvest zone by types of trees, proximity to water andtransportation, and emergency response tactics.”“We can put layers upon layers of spatially correlatedinformation, then drill down and analyze a specific location orregion.” The analysis can often be depicted graphically. “Theanswers are not always ‘yes’ and ‘no,’” he cautioned, “butmight be a metric, such as ‘here is the result for a scenariowith eight new housing units and here is the result for three.’”The need for geospatial analysisTransportation, urban, and even social services planningbenefit from geospatial analysis, according to Dymond.“Urban planners must go beyond zonal statistics and considerdemographics, income, traffic, proximity to cultural features.What are the important factors in making a viable urban community?We can isolate the areas based on these parametersand determine a success range for different projects,” he said.He cited how GIS can help a social services agency determinethe cost-effectiveness of its programs. “We can help