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GIS Geodatabase Covers UCI Campus

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For several years OIT staff have been collaborating with staff in Environmental Planning and Sustainability, Space Management, Facilities Management, Environmental Health & Safety, and the UCI Police Department to develop detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data that represent the campus in its entirety.  The data can be used to develop custom GIS maps of the campus as a whole or for specific areas, to identify campus features (meaning things on the ground) and their associated attributes, and to extract information associated with individual features or groups of features.  Collectively these data products constitute a digital map base, specifically a geodatabase, for the campus.  OIT and other campus departments have been using the geodatabase for mapping purposes and for analyzing details of features.

Initial efforts focused on developing data for the greater campus infrastructure including campus buildings, streets, parking, fire lanes and walkways.  Subsequently, GIS data representing nearly every square foot of the entire campus have been acquired and added to the campus GIS.  Many new data themes now exist such as lawn, shrubbery, mixed landscape, open areas (native plants, water and exposed ground), athletic areas, points of interest, etc.  Within each data theme individual features are distinguished by their type and that information is stored in the geodatabase.  For example, for the buildings theme there are seven unique types and each type is identifiable on the map by its type color.  The detailed map below, covering a portion of Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences Quads, shows several of these data themes that are contained in the campus geodatabase.

Campus GIS

Several projects are currently employing the campus geodatabase.  In one project, 71 detailed maps covering the campus as a map grid have been made.  These maps were developed in conjunction with auxiliary emergency-related data, to support the UCI Police Department and Orange County Fire Authority for emergency response.

You can view the campus GIS map online using the following link:

http://gis.oit.uci.edu/uci/campus/

Campus employees who are interest in using the UCI geodatabase or who are interested in developing their own geodatabase for their research should contact Tony Soeller (tsoeller@uci.edu).

Online Geographic Information System Services

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Geographic Information System (GIS) software has traditionally been used on desktop computers to develop, display, and analyze spatial data.  Recent advances in web-based GIS software now allow researchers and instructors to upload their spatial data to online GIS services.  Colleagues and students can then view and query — and even edit — GIS data online via a web browser and without having GIS software installed on their desktop computers.

NACS uses ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to provide online GIS services.  Development of a new online GIS service is straightforward.  Once an ArcGIS Desktop document is developed, the document and associated GIS data files are uploaded to an ArcGIS Server. A GIS service is generated and custom data queries are assigned. The URL for this new GIS service can then be distributed for users to visit the new site.

NACS has been developing GIS services using ArcGIS Server for two years.  If you are interested in making your GIS data available online, we can develop a GIS service on our server using your data, or we can help you set up ArcGIS Server on your own or a departmental system.

Here are a few ArcGIS Server applications running on the NACS GIS server.  When viewing these GIS services, consider how your own spatial data might be displayed and explored using ArcGIS Server.

Recent Southern California fires (Freeway, Tea, and Sayre) using ESRI basemap data and fire perimeters collected by the Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination.

California No Child Left Behind, within the UCI Department of Education.

History of North American Indians used for instruction within the UCI Department of History.

GIS Technology in UCI Research

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Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a technology which is finding ever broader use in the UCI research community. NACS Research Computing Specialist Tony Soeller has been supporting GIS software, teaching workshops, and working directly with faculty and graduate students on research projects to exploit GIS tools. Here are some recent examples.

Professor Bradford Hawkins in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is tracking global species diversity in birds. GIS was used on a massive spatial data synthesis project on global bird ranges to georegister, digitize and rasterize bird range maps, then to summarize the number of bird species within discrete cells 27.5 to 220 km on a side. Numerous ArcGIS programs (ArcObjects and VBA) were written to help in the processing of the data.

Cristiane Surbeck completed her Ph.D. studies in Professor Stan Grant’s lab in Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi. Cris has been analyzing the Santa Ana River Watershed. Her research looked at the biological and sediment constituents of runoff into the Santa Ana River from three storm events within the watershed, and compared these data to rainfall volume and land use types which contributed to the runoff. GIS was used to synthesize land use data with rainfall data from the storm events, to delineate individual storm watersheds, and to determine the area of land within each land use type and the amount of precipitation within each of those land use types.

Satish Vutuku, a student in Professor Donald Dabdub’s lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is examining the impact on air quality of distributed power generation.

In one project, Satish assessed atmospheric impact of emissions from distributed power generation (DG) sources. DG refers to “on-site” generation of power using technologies such as fuel cells and micro turbines. Such DG installations emit pollutants in an urban area in a highly dispersed manner, in contrast to conventional huge power plants that emit pollutants as a concentrated plume far away from urban areas. In order to analyze effects of such DG emissions, Satish created a set of “DG scenarios” that would predict the adoption of DG technologies and corresponding emissions. The development of DG scenarios was based upon highly-detailed land-use data and population data. The land-use data were obtained as GIS files and were formatted to fit the model grid and resolution with help from Tony Soeller.
This is just a sampling of the many projects at UCI which are making use of GIS software and Tony’s expertise. Please contact NACS if you would be interested in exploring the relevance of GIS to your research project.

Research Computing Support

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The mission of NACS Research Computing Support (RCS) is to facilitate access to and promote the effective use of computational resources available to UCI researchers. The group provides consulting, training, and outreach in the use of hardware and software. Hardware resources promoted by RCS include: NACS administered Beowulf clusters, the Krein supercomputer, and other supercomputer systems and data storage arrays available at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Software resources include: ArcGIS, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, LabVIEW, SAS, SPSS, and LaserGene.

RCS staff members are trained in research disciplines and possess an awareness of methodologies and techniques used in research computing. Frank J. Wessel, Ph.D., manages RCS and remains active in fusion-energy research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Tony Soeller, M.S., is an expert in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Additionally, both team members are available to support faculty with their grant writing activities.

The latest RCS activities and general announcements are available to subscribers of the RCS mailing list. Interested researchers can subscribe athttp://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/research-computing/ .

Geographic Information Systems

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How many people between the ages of 18 and 24 with an income above $50,000 live within 4.5 miles of the Pacific Ocean between Oceanside and Redondo Beach? What is the proximity of children in a community, who have elevated concentrations of lead in their bodies, to older structures that might contain lead-based paint?

These questions, which require both spatial (i.e., geographic) data and tabular information to answer, are typical queries that can be posed to a Geographic Information System, or GIS. At its core, the GIS combines and employs two computer technologies: a graphical display of digital map features and a database that contains records which characterize each of those map features.

Simple queries can pull up data regarding a given geographic location or display all locations matching a criterion. More elaborate queries can be composed which allow researchers to detect new relationships (and derive new data) between things on the ground surface – or on any surface for that matter. GIS technology is used in support of such divergent applications as restoring ancient frescos and landing probes on Mars.

GIS use at UCI is relatively new, as is campus support for the growing interest in GIS. This year UCI purchased a campus-wide license for the use of ArcView and ArcGIS software (at no charge this year to researchers). ArcView and ArcGIS, the leading software in the GIS industry, are being installed on Windows-based computers in NACS’ laboratories and in various departmental laboratories around campus. GIS classes are in progress this year in Social Ecology, GSM and University Extension. Contact NACS for more information about GIS at UCI