Ric Skinner of The Stoneybrook Group, LLC is a Certified GIS Professional with over 30 years of professional experience in hospital & healthcare preparedness, health geographics and environmental management. While The Stoneybrook Group is based in Massachusetts it is available to provides services and grant collaboration regionally and nationally. Ric is the book editor and a chapter author of GIS in Hospital and Healthcare Emergency Management. He is an active member of the International Assn. of Emergency Managers (IAEM), Urban & Regional Information Systems Assn. (URISA), and other professional organizations and their listservs. Following the old adage “if I give you a fish you will eat for one meal; if I teach you to fish you will never go hungry,” Ric’s consulting objective is to teach others how to use GIS to meet their needs for assuring that the right people, have the right information, at the right time and in the right format. While he has used ESRI GIS software since the late 1980s, he recognizes that many small organizations and budget-strapped municipalities cannot afford the investment of money and people for a GIS that has many features and functions they really don’t need. That’s why he now focuses on the “leaner and less costly” GIS capabilities that Depiction provides.

I have had the pleasure of working with Ric both virtually and in person. I appreciate his knowledge of GIS, healthcare and policy affecting both, and his desire to foster collaboration and effective use of Depiction. Ric is very enthusiastic about GIS (he has been called a “GIS evangelist”) and about Depiction, both in its current functionality and its potential. We have featured him in two Depiction Perspectives interviews (June 2010 and June 2011), and several blog posts.

For the past year or so, Ric has been working with Chris Floyd of Disaster Resistant Communities Group, to put on the Formidable Footprint online tabletop exercise series. He uses Depiction to produce interactive and static maps that illustrate the location and effects of the disaster for each innovative, free monthly event.

Please contact Ric Skinner via email with any questions and visit The Stoneybrook Group, LLC to learn more about his company.

Brisband Flooding and Supermarkets, by Silvia Estrada Flores, using ASTER-GDEM elevation data, OpenStreetMap imagery, Depiction, and information from many sources.

Silvia Estrada-Flores is a Depiction user and an expert in the food industry supply chain who lives in Australia. Naturally, she has been very concerned about the major flooding occurring in the state of Queensland–and, specifically, about the way the flooding is affecting grocery stores in the area.

Silvia used Depiction to first run rough simulations of the flooding and potential flooding in and around Brisbane, Queensland, using ASTER-GDEM elevation data (because she was unable to get access to the higher quality data generated by the government), and then to depict the situation facing the grocery stores in the area. She also used Depiction’s geoaligning capability to show the official flooding predictions in relation to grocery stores.

Silvia writes, “Today, I can just reassure consumers in Brisbane that there will be stores open around you. I am hoping that this map shows the areas where consumers can purchase supplies in these confusing times.” She will be writing more in the near future on the challenges of maintaining the supply chain in this situation, so pay attention to her blog, Chain of Events, if this information is important to you.

Even if you are not specifically concerned with the response of the food industry supply chain to disasters (though if you eat any food yourself, you may want to think on it at least a little!), I think Silva’s work illustrates a couple broader points. First, this is exactly the kind of thing Depiction was built for–giving powerful tools to subject-matter experts like Silvia, who may not have any experience with or access to GIS technology, but who have a need to depict the world around them in rapidly changing situations. Very few people have both the skills and resources to use high-end GIS and modelling software and the expert-level knowledge and experience in something like food industry supply chain management. And yet that field, and many others like it, have a real and abiding need for location-based knowledge, situational awareness, and the ability to ask “what if” about their community. We are very proud that Silvia was able to use Depiction to gain insights into the situation in Brisbane, and that Depiction users across the world are doing similar things within their own fields of expertise, without having to be mapping technology experts.

Second, the situation reminds us of the need for collaboration across boundaries. In her first blog post, Sylvia mentions her frustration with the unavailability of good quality elevation data:

It was difficult to find freely available information on elevation data. This can create difficulties for those planners dealing with emergency preparations that are not necessarily acting on behalf of the Government. I am aware of the National Elevation Data Framework portal, but I could not find elevation data for Queensland that is readily accessible. The process for downloading information (even in those cases where data happens to be free) is slow, due to the requirements of data licensing and so on. Not really useful when you are in a hurry to see flood damages and impact…

Here in the States, we are fortunate to have the USGS, which provides a relatively user-friendly method of obtaining good quality elevation data at multiple resolution levels through the Seamless Data Warehouse. This has allowed us to make US elevation data available as a Quickstart data set in Depiction. However, that is not the case in most parts of the world, and even here in the USA, many other crucial datasets are out of reach, depending on the locality. As Silvia notes, this presents major problems for people who are attempting to prepare for or respond to a disaster, among other things. Governments who are looking for an easy way to bolster the assistance that can be provided by the private sector during a disaster might think about making their GIS data easily accessible by the public.

Thanks for sharing, Russell, and a fine use for Depiction!

The article: Staunton0001

ACCESSING STAUNTON STATE PARK

STAUNTON STATE PARK VERSUS METRO DENVER

“YMCA facilities and programs are resources we utilize to strengthen the very core of community foundations within our county. Depiction, with its ease of use and affordable price point, enabled YMCA staff and volunteers to assimilate a variety of data sources both efficiently and effectively and aided in executing strategic decisions that will yield positive impact on our communities for years to come.”

You can view the depiction they used online, and read our press release about it.

The challenge was to get the shape file data loaded and  then geo-code the address data.

The first challenge was to get the shape file loaded.  The main issue here was because of the shape of the fire district in order to get the entire district in one story also meant getting non-district territory included.  This wouldn’t have been a problem but the file from the county was of the entire county and not just the district, so when the shape file was loaded it included the shapes for the non-district territory as well.  Unfortunately this added about 2000 more shapes to the file which of course would have had an performance impact.  So I ended up cutting the district in half and having two files.  I still had non-district shapes but an acceptable number.

So at this point I had the parcel boundaries loaded and went to load the data files.  I extracted the district parcels from an Access data file to an excel spreadsheet.  The situs address on each record was broken into several fields; street no, direction, name; city, state, zip.  I used the concatenate command in excel to join the fields together in a field called “Location” which is one of the field names that Depiction recognizes for geo-coding and I had to make sure that none of the other field headers included one of the valid fields such as “address”.  After doing this and reviewing the file I realized that many parcels didn’t have addresses.  In addition to that this district is in a rural area with a combination of small lots and multi-acre parcels.  The geo-coding algorithm works pretty in good in urban areas but not so good in rural areas.  It gets you in the neighborhood but that is about it.

So my quandary was how to deal with the parcels with no addresses and how to figure out where the ones with addresses actually went on the map.  In looking at the tax account # I realized it was made up of Township, Range, Section and then an “XY” coordinate.  I remembered that the assessor parcel maps usually had the XY coordinate on the lot and the TRS info was also on the map.  So I went to the assessor’s online site and found the maps.  I took a screen shot of each one and then cropped it down to the area I wanted and then converted the BMP files to JPG to save space.  Then I loaded each map into my Depiction and geo-aligned it with the parcel shapes. (Update: after further review I discovered the quality of image from the screen shots wasn’t that good and many of the numbers were illegible. Instead I downloaded the native PDF files from the assessor and then used a program to convert them to jpegs.)

Next I separated my data file into North and South sections to match my Depiction Map files which I could do by the Section Township Range info in each record.  Then I sorted each file by address.  The parcels with a “0” address sorted to the top.  I then created a new worksheet in excel and cut and pasted the “0” address parcel info to the new worksheet.

Next I took a known valid address in my map area and inputted it in to the “Location” field of the first record in my spreadsheet. I then copied that cell across the other records.  This incremented the address number by one.  So now I had a file with valid addresses.  I did this because I wasn’t sure what depiction would do with an invalid address.  Next I saved the file as a CSV file and then resaved the original file as an XLS file so I wouldn’t mess up my data.

Then I went into my depiction.  I was going to use the “HOME” element for my parcels with houses on them but I wanted a different icon for vacant land.  So I created a “HOME” element then I right clicked on it and edited it.  I changed the name to Vacant Land and I changed the icon to the shape file icon because I didn’t have anything better. Then I saved it to my library and at which time I had a new element called vacant land.

Then I chose the add menu item and File underneath that and then browsed to my CSV file and chose it and the selected vacant land as the element type and pressed the add button and a few minutes later my vacant land icons appeared in a row.

Next I created a CSV file of the worksheet of the parcels with addresses and loaded them. As I mentioned earlier the icons appeared in the general area but not in the exact location.

In both cases above when the program finished loading it came up with the edit screen for that element type.  Before I closed it I did the following:

1.    Changed the property to allow dragging
2.    Set the hover text to the fields I wanted to display.
3.    Changed the ICON size to Tiny because there will be a lot of icons on the screen.

So now I was ready to manually place each icon in the right location.  In the hover text this included the tax account number which I had reformatted to make it easier to read. So using a revealer I displayed the assessor map for the area I was working on moused over an ICON saw the account # and then looked for that XY coordinate on the assessor map and when I found it I moved the icon to that parcel.  I am still working on this process to move each icon.

So when I checked in with the Chief to discuss this we realized some of the drawbacks of this process.  One was that it would be easy for someone to accidentally or on purpose move an icon. Also it wouldn’t be easy to make a bunch of changes in the data base and reload it because you would have to relocate all of the icons which a fairly time consuming.  So what we are thinking about doing is once we have located all of the parcels to mouse over each one and transfer the Lat Long info back to the spreadsheet.  Once we have done that then we could delete all of the parcel data and reload anytime.  Now the Chief says once we have located all the parcels it would be nice to locate all of the propane tanks on each parcel.  Another project for another day.  I will keep you all posted with how we are progressing.

Another update. A new requirement came up and that was to identify properties that paid DNR tax for forest fire protection. A new file was received from the Assessor with this info. Since I was redoing things decided to start over. Broke the district into 3 sections to eliminate extra shape files. When I broke up the district I did it on Section boundaries so that it would be easier to group the assessor records for each section. Broke the assessor data into 4 parts for each of the 3 areas. Improved W FF, Improved WO FF, Vacant W FF and Vacant WO FF. Made 4 new icons. I basically took two existing icons and changed their colors to represent homes and vacant land with and without FF.