Latest Contributions by DavidMeek

Hello all, I am interested in calculating an index of agricultural land inequality for Brazil. I'm thinking that a GINI coefficient would be a good approach given traditional uses of GINI, but I'm open to other approaches. I have a data set for all municipalities in Brazil that consists of four columns for each municipality (rows): 1) number of family farms, 2) area occupied by small farm land use; 3) number of non-family farms; 4) area occupied by non-family farms. What's I'm really hoping to attain is a value that can represent the relations between percent area occupied by non-family farms in comparison with family farms. I can obtain the total area of the municipality from municipality shape file, but I don't think it makes sense to have a simple ratio of non-family farm area/municipality area as there will be various other forms of land use.   Any suggestions on how to calculate a spatial GINI using this data set, or a different statistic that makes more sense would be greatly appreciated ... View more

[LEFT][/LEFT] I'm working for the first time with ArcMap's relatively new image analysis window, and am using the "image difference" function to calculate change between two images which I have performed a supervised classification on. Each of the two images have only two types of land cover, forest and pasture; however, when I conduct the "image difference" analysis, I receive a raster with a ramp of 1 to -1. My question is how to interpret it? Swiping between the two images provides some clues as to what the ramp should mean, i.e. a large area that is forested in image 1 is deforested in image 2, but the other ramp colors are inconclusive I.e. I'm looking to be able to symbolize where forest remains forest, forest changes to pasture, pasture remains pasture, and pasture changes to forest. I know this should be easy, and is so in ERDAS, but can't figure it out in ArcMap. Thanks in advance for any suggestions, David ... View more

Hello all, I'm working on trying to use arcpy to automate the creation of a report, but I'm running into a problem.    >>> arcpy.mapping.ExportReport('2013pp',"C:\reports\2013_Graffiti.rlf","C:\reports\2013_Graffiti_report.pdf")     Runtime error     Traceback (most recent call last):       File "<string>", line 1, in <module>       File "c:\program files\arcgis\desktop10.1\arcpy\arcpy\utils.py", line 181, in fn_         return fn(*args, **kw)       File "c:\program files\arcgis\desktop10.1\arcpy\arcpy\mapping.py", line 506, in ExportReport         assert isinstance(report_source, (MapDocument, TableView, Layer)), str(type(report_source))     AssertionError: <type 'str'> I'm having trouble deciphering the traceback as it seems to reference a variety of internal python files. In trouble shooting so far, I thought the problem might be that the report_source needs to be a layer file and I was using a .shp so I converted to a .lyr but then I get the error:     Parsing error SyntaxError: invalid syntax (line 1) Any advice would be greatly appreciated, Best, David ... View more

I'm conducting an analysis of land cover change using landscape metric, where land cover type is classified into 4 main categories - patch, edge, perforated,and core - based on a specified edge width. I have multitemporal imagery (1986, 1992, 2000) in which I'm analyzing these landscape metrics for a community which is a part of a larger municipality. My question is if anyone knows of statistics for comparing a part to a whole (particularly in the context of landscape ecology), i.e. is landscape fragmentation in a community different than the larger municipality of which it is a part, and also statistics for comparing change over time between those two spatial units. ... View more

Hi all, I have a data set which is based on a survey where hundreds of individuals were asked to list sources of income. The first column is respondent # and the next four columns are the various categories of income, which are populated with binary values (i.e. 0=not a source of income, 1=yes is a source of income). Is it possible to calculate what the mean is across the four field? I'm only familiar with calculating mean within a single column. Thanks in advance, David ... View more

Reposting as wasn´t sure where to post this I am somewhat of a newbie to geostatistical analyses, but pretty familiar with GIS and remote sensing packages. I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on appropriate geostatistical analyses for a particular data set. The data set consists of a large-scale survey at the land plot level consisting of questions related to political participation (an ordinal scale), and raster data from a binary landcover classification of forest cover. The survey data I am envisioning joining to a .shp file of landplot boundaries. I had wondered about either converting the vector to raster and analyzing raster against raster, or converting the landsat landcover map into a vector and analyzing vector x vector. The research question is whether political participation (potentially plus other variables) affects the presence of forest cover. What I´m imagining is some sort of multivariate linear regression in terms of the survey data, but when it comes to adding in the values from the raster I´m somewhat stymied. In doing some background research on potential approaches, it seems like looking at discrete variation might be the way to go. Any general advice would be greatly appreciated, p.s. I´m using ArcGIS 10 and Erdas 2011 THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY SUGGESTIONS, david ... View more