Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS
How Cool
Los Angeles uses GIS technologies to help residents find respite during heat waves In late August 2022, a vicious heat dome sat over Los Angeles just when summer would typically fade into fall. For a week, temperatures climbed as high as 115 degrees in parts of Southern California—and didn’t cool off much at night. The extreme...
How Green Is Your City?
As tree-planting efforts take root in cities around the world, urban managers turn to geospatial tools to map and monitor their community’s canopy cover. New Yorkers are fast walkers. But there are those who prefer to take it slow, like the group of well-trained volunteers who purposely roamed around the streets of the Big Apple,...
Surveying for Safety at Waipio Valley
Lush vegetation, beautiful ocean vistas, and a historic Hawaiian valley provide the setting for a complex engineering project that addresses technical and cultural concerns. The Waipio Valley on the island of Hawaii has great historical significance within Hawaiian culture. Known as the Valley of Kings, it was home to many generations of the royal family...
Teaching the Ethics of Geo
Maps have always been powerful means of communication, whether etched in cave walls, stone, wood, silver of centuries past, or, in the 20th Century, copper plates and, later, film. In our own century, maps are everywhere—on our phones, computers, fitness apps, and news media, communicating in a myriad of ways about changes over space and...
The Cahokia Mounds
The largest single-instrument geophysical survey ever in America hopes to uncover some of the mysteries of the Cahokia Mounds Long, long before any of our great Mississippi River cities, and long before Europeans landed on New World shores and pushed westward, Native Americans were thriving in an urban center so big and so complex it...