Geospatial Analysis

Python Geospatial Data and Mapping: Parts 1-2

February 15, 2023, 10:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The Python programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Raster Data

April 12, 2022, 2:00pm
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping raster data, which typically represents geographic information in a grid of regular sized cells.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data, Parts 1-2

November 7, 2023, 9:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data: Parts 1-2

October 29, 2021, 12:00pm
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data, Parts 1-2

February 16, 2023, 10:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

Geospatial Data and Mapping in Python: Parts 1-3

March 1, 2022, 2:00pm
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The Python programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research.

Tracking Urban Expansion Through Satellite Imagery

December 12, 2023
Leïla Njee Bugha
by Leïla Njee Bugha. Among its many uses, remote sensing can prove especially useful to document changes and trends from eras or settings, where traditional sources are either inexistent or infrequently collected. This is the case when one wants to study urban expansion in sub-Saharan countries over the past 20 years. To further remedy the lack of data on land cover uses from earlier time periods, classification methods can be used as well. Using easily accessible satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine, I provide here an example combining remote sensing with classification to detect changes in the land cover in Nigeria since 2000 due to urban expansion.

From paper to vector: converting maps into GIS shapefiles

April 11, 2023
Madeleine Parker
by Madeleine Parker. GIS is incredibly powerful: you can transform, overlay, and analyze data with a few clicks. But sometimes the challenge is getting your data into a form to be able to use with GIS. Have you ever found a PDF or even paper map of what you needed? Or googled your topic with “shapefile” after it to no avail? The process of transforming a PDF, paper, or even hand-drawn map with boundaries into a shapefile for analysis is straightforward but involves a few steps. I walk through the stages of digitization, georeferencing, and drawing, from an image to a vector shapefile ready to be used for visualization and spatial analysis.

Mapping Time-Series Satellite Images with Google Earth Engine API

July 17, 2023
Meiqing Li
by Meiqing Li. Remote sensing imagery has the potential to reveal land use patterns and human activities at a planetary scale. For example, nighttime light intensity extracted from can shed light on spatial patterns of human activities and settlements, especially in places where traditional data are scarce. This blog post introduces Google Earth Engine (GEE) as a general purpose tool to extract time-series remote sensing data from GEE data catalog. I walk through using GEE to obtain data, filter by time and geographic region, and visualize it on static and interactive maps.

The Geography of Cannabis: Does California’s dual licensing program (de)criminalize cannabis and drive unnecessary anthropogenic activity in remote rural environments?

August 29, 2023
Chevon Holmes
by Chevon Holmes. When California voters (de)criminalized cannabis production, the state’s dual licensure requirement forced local jurisdictions to create permitting programs or uphold prohibition. Many Counties developed ersatz zoning ordinances to regulate cannabis activities and hired staff to administer local permits. As an inspector, administrator, and project planner for Mendocino County from 2017-2021, I visited hundreds of cultivation sites and production facilities where I learned first-hand how two legal pathways impacted the ways in which operators could transition their businesses. This post details a dataset created to track, aggregate, and analyze the relationship between cannabis infrastructure and licensing.