Latest Contributions by MichaelGould

Note: Although these articles take one author name by default, my colleague @JosephKerski co-authored this one. Thanks Joseph! Climate change and its effects increasingly are part of the general public discourse and is being taught at all levels of education.  Related effects are adaptation and resilience, or the capacity of a system to cope with a hazardous event or disturbance. But to understand and teach them in a rigorous way involves holistic thinking and connecting themes that are dynamic and complex.   You probably already know that GIS is ideal for connecting themes--for example, how drought affects the land (soil moisture, land cover) and its people (those directly and indirectly dependent upon the agricultural economy)-- using the common space (spatial coincidence) as a key. Where does drought affect agriculture and who is affected in that same space? Can we predict or at least hazard a solid guess where it will happen next? Esri has long believed that GIS plays a key role in climate education but given the mounting evidence of climate change-related impacts on supply chain, health, natural hazards, and other aspects of society,  Esri has been creating focused resources to empower policymakers, community groups, researchers, and educators.   One of Esri’s goals is to provide resources for educators and students at all levels and across the world so that they will be able to comprehend and communicate the patterns and implications of climate change and related sustainability.  This is coupled with huge improvements in online GIS and in access to open spatial data.    Like toy boats on a smaller and smaller bathtub... (Photo: Joseph Kerski)     Esri’s resources are at the intersection of GIS, Education, and Climate; all within the context of Sustainability.    Climate action requires critical thinking. We believe, and it is supported by the research, that spatial thinking, critical thinking, and problem-based learning are fostered by the use of GIS.  When working with ArcGIS, students use the same tools that climate researchers in nonprofit, government, and private industry are using every day on the job, such as this example from the European Commission.  Moreover, students are active and action-oriented learners when they use GIS, using a wide variety of data in different formats and at different scale, field tools to collect data, making choices on symbolizing, classifying, and projecting information, employing spatial analytical tools for deeper understanding of the relationships among variables, and deciding how to communicate their findings by sharing web maps and creating ArcGIS Instant Apps, ArcGIS dashboards, and StoryMaps. What are we planning to teach and to whom? The ArcGIS system is vast and includes not only traditional GIS software but also ready-made apps (and app development tools) to allow you to communicate scientific information.  There are opportunities for all levels of application of GIS to climate resilience. Three of these levels are: communicating examples of climate resilience, perhaps by viewing or creating StoryMaps,   creating and using web apps to study specific climate related topics, or using GIS tools for calculating climate resilience, for example a heat risk index for a particular city. The single best place to get started on any of these three levels, is the new GIS for Climate Resilience curriculum.  There you will find learning resources including standalone lessons and sequenced and scaffolded learning pathways.  Subtopics or profiles of possible users of these resources include community action, urban and community planning, and natural resource management.  These tutorial lessons can be taught as-is or can be used as examples to be emulated and localized.  While customization is possible, as is shown below, the landing page contains enough resources for teaching climate resilience with GIS in a few class periods, for an entire semester, and also across multi-year programs.  Furthermore, the curriculum resources are aligned with the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administrations’s 5 steps to resilience, which we believe can be applied to any location around the globe. These include Exploring Hazards, Accessing Vulnerability and Risk, Investigating Options, Prioritizing and Planning, and Taking Action. Part of the Climate GIS Education ArcGIS Hub Landing Page.   Within the curriculum, which was built using ArcGIS Hub, you will find a collection of StoryMaps, such as this one on coastal flooding, to include as classroom exercises, or you may choose to have students create and publish their own StoryMaps to learn the fine art of scientific dissemination. Think about how you might build a whole class discussion around a StoryMap: where are the data, what story is being told, how to integrate live maps into the story. The curriculum is also aligned with the  climate mapping for resilience and adaptation (CMRA, pronounced “camera”) web portal, which contains a collection of essays, data and online tools to explore in class.   The maps on this US Government resource are powered by Esri’s online GIS tools and open data portals. Another set of resources for an initiation to using GIS in climate and sustainability is this Climate ArcGIS Hub.  Analysis of urban heat using kriging, interpolating 3D oxygen measurements in the ocean, and using machine learning to examine a simulated global circulation model are just a few of the many activities here. Living Atlas Apps A secondary level of introducing the “whys of where” in climate and sustainability instruction is to use the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World apps.  Using web GIS through these apps allows us not only to study snapshots of our geography at present but also to look back in time and forward for modeling and planning. The Drought Aware app communicates in a compelling way where drought is occurring (or occurred, back as far as 20 years ago) and who, which populations --people and the agricultural economy—are affected. We can use GIS to ask and answer questions regarding where we live, farm, and create economic opportunity—reflect on some of the millions of dollars of value in crops and livestock, for example, in some counties in southwest Kansas, and how the economy could be affected by climate change there and elsewhere if agricultural activity moves and migrates as does the weather and do the people.    The Living Atlas Water Balance app allows students to compare 6 water-related variables such as precipitation and evapotranspiration and also how it has changed over time in specific areas of the world. Ask questions such as: Is the precipitation regime in the Amazon a summer and winter regime or a wet season and dry season?  Why?  What is the longest stretch of time you can find in the Sahara when no precipitation fell?  In how many months did zero precipitation fall, and in what country did it occur?  What was the cause of the large spikes in precipitation in southeast Texas USA during the months of August and September in many of the years that you can examine?    Study the changes via graphs and interactive maps in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice via the sea ice aware app.  In which years was the sea ice above the median? Below the median?  Zoom into specific locations and examine the glacial extent via the imagery and median ice extent.  Which is the month of annual maximum ice in the Arctic vs the Antarctic? Use the ArcGIS Wayback imagery to create swipe maps and short video animations showing change over space and time via high-resolution imagery of the entire planet.   How much is the coastline eroding west of Eastbourne, England?   What is the areal extent of Lake Mead USA in 2022 vs in 2014?  How many miles or kilometers did urban sprawl extend northward in Dallas Texas USA or in Rio de Janeiro over those 8 years?  How much did the Pedersen Glacier in Alaska retreat over that time period?  How many center pivot irrigation plots appeared in an area you are examining in central Saudi Arabia?  What changes have occurred on your campus and in the surrounding neighborhood, and why?  Use the Sentinel-2 Explorer to investigate land cover changes across space and time, using 10 meter resolution data.  How have built up areas, rangeland, and cropland changed in your region over the past few years? Why?  Use the Ecological Marine Unit explorer to examine how ocean temperature and chemistry changes across the world’s oceans at 10 kilometer spacing.  Which coast of the continental USA is warmer?  How does dissolved oxygen change across the length and depth of the Marianas Trench, and why?  How does salinity change from the continental shelf to deeper oceanic locations?  What is the relationship between nitrates, phosphates, and silicates across selected oceans, and why?  How have selected variables changed from 2013 to 2018, why did they change, and why should these changes concern us?      The Sea Ice Aware app, one of the apps from the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.   Using ArcGIS StoryMaps for Content Another body of content is the ArcGIS StoryMaps gallery.  Coastal flooding, the Age of the Anthropocene, and Farming for the Future are just three of the many compelling and information-rich multimedia StoryMaps that are in the collection, ready for your use.  Consider each of these an interactive e-book of content.  This StoryMap is anchored on why “where” matters in climate and resiliency research with a focus on education. Where Can I Find the Data? We need reliable data to build maps that enable teaching and learning about climate.  ArcGIS Online,   ArcGIS Hub sites and other data portals, and the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World are excellent starting points for data.  A good starting point for Living Atlas data is to search on climate, as shown here.  Or, under “environment”, select from such topics as land cover, fresh water, habitat, and species.  Many relevant layers are connected to live data feeds, on storms, air quality, and more; for example, in this list.  Or, start with the ArcGIS Climate Hub for data and maps.  Climate encompasses many themes, and no program or curriculum can teach them all.  Use this ArcGIS Hub site to aid in focusing on themes that are most relevant to your educational goals and institution, such as climate justice, and others, here. Digging Deeper You’ll see that by using the above web-based GIS tools, quite a few climate-related topics are within your reach. After that, the third level would be to teach about climate and sustainability is to investigate some of the workflows that climate scientists use, within a more traditional GIS environment.  One such resource and teaching tool is this template that contains an ArcGIS Pro project, a suitable basemap, a geoprocessing model, and NetCDF files in the World Climate Data Multimodel Ensemble. This workflow is part of this larger curricular unit.  In this lesson, you will map historical and projected climate data in ArcGIS Pro. You'll learn about climate at both local and global levels, as well as how climate might change in the future.  You will gain understanding of major climate concepts and familiarity with real climate data.  To learn more about multidimensional climate models, read our colleague Abigail Fitzgibbon’s essay.   Part of the Exploring Future Climate Projections Unit and Template.   Advantages of the ArcGIS Platform The resources we describe here make focused use of a significant part of the ArcGIS platform—field tools, mapping and visualization tools, communication tools, data portal tools, and spatial analysis tools.  The advantages of ArcGIS are several.  The tools are integrated as part of a platform:  Field data can be collected into a feature layer with Survey123, QuickCapture, or ArcGIS Field Maps.  A set of analysis results from ArcGIS Pro can be shared as a layer or map in ArcGIS Online. A dashboard or StoryMap can be created from an ArcGIS Online map.  Dozens more examples showing the advantage of this integrated platform exist, and many if the large environmental and climate agencies are exploiting this power on a daily basis.  Another advantage is that the platform offers educators the ability to use real data about real issues through open data portals and ArcGIS Hub sites that span multiple scales and places.  Many of these accessible data sets are in real-time or near-real time, including stream gauges, weather, wildfire perimeters, and many more.   Another advantage of ArcGIS is that it offers tools that are perfect for an introductory level university course, or for a primary or secondary school, as well as more advanced tools.    Our final words of advice in the use of GIS for teaching about climate and sustainability is to go beyond thinking about GIS as “just a mapping tool.” GIS does much more than map your data! Try to look for before/after trends, patterns, and to visualize and analyze change.  GIS is fundamental to all science.--from archaeology to zoology and everything in between.  Modern GIS is a platform, essential to all parts of scientific inquiry—from framing problems to gathering field data to analysis to communication.  We look forward to hearing your reactions, and how you use these or other resources to teach about climate and sustainability using GIS. --Mike and Joseph ... View more

  ArcGIS is being used in classroom instruction and in a wide spectrum of research projects at more than 10,000 universities around the world. Each year many Esri offices around the world hold national competitions for the best student project and each winner is given an Esri Young Scholar Award. Aside from a physical trophy and certificate, many YSA winners also are flown to San Diego, California, to attend the annual Esri User Conference. There they meet many of the thousands of attendees including Esri president Jack Dangermond. The Scholars are recognized on stage with Jack during the Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award ceremony, and they present their research work in poster format as part of the massive Map Gallery exhibition, this year on July 11. The Scholars also took part in a long list of social activities including interaction with the growing Esri Young Professionals Network (YPN).    Pedro: Portugal Karin: Germany Princella: Ghana Emma: UK Andres: Ecuador Apoorv: India The diversity and depth of the research projects is impressive. Alvin Sum analyzed 5 wheelchair accessibility variables in a part of Hong Kong. Mikihiku Takeuchi studied archeological sites near Kyoto and published them on ArcGIS Online. Linde Beekmans looked at the climate change related implications of sea level rise: will The Netherlands keep its head above water? Thulaganyo Ntlatleng studied optimal siting of wind generators as part of South Africa's renewable energy strategy. These are are just a few examples.  You can meet all the Scholars and their research posters by visiting this StoryMap.  A big congratulations to all the 2022 Esri Young Scholar Award winners. We look forward to meeting the 2023 winners next year.    ... View more

This post provides a summary of the workshop we presented at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting held online at the end of February 2022. My co-presenter, @KeithVanGraafeiland , a product engineer on Esri’s Living Atlas of the World team, and I crafted a clunky title that had all the right keywords. Esri offers a huge collection of resources for all ArcGIS users but here we are thinking of academic and other researchers and instructors. Most of these resources help us in mapping physical and social phenomena of interest. We are all hypersensitive these days about the global climate crisis and are concerned about resilience. Instead of focusing on problems we decided to try to focus on opportunities for climate action.   Our plan during 2022 is to publish a collection of learning/teaching resources to help non-climate-specialists at universities (primarily) to introduce climate action topics into their classroom or research activities. This also goes for students who are searching for topics for their capstone or other class projects: rather than inventing trivial problems to solve why not contribute to the climate resilience of their neighborhood, city, nation, or planet? Resource Categories The climate action resource collection is destined to find a home in Esri’s Climate Portal and be composed of packages many of which will include: Datasets, covering physical and social phenomena, ArcGIS Learn lesson(s), StoryMap that sets the stage and provide context to each topic, and in some cases, custom web applications to use when a full GIS implementation is not a requirement.  In order to maximize the general benefit of these resources we are working with collaborators from universities and partner organizations. Some collaborators provide use cases, others subject matter expertise, datasets, and/or frameworks that we can add value to via GIS workflows. One such framework is the collection of Climate Solutions from Project Drawdown. These include topics such as carpooling, bicycle infrastructure, and tree plantation. How can we use ArcGIS to make concrete and quantitative contributions towards those solutions? Esri has a long track record working on environmental and climate related projects, and a few years back we started hosting a huge collection –hundreds of themes or layers-- of curated geographic information: the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Many other Esri resources now draw on that rich data source, and we anticipate that your workflows, classroom exercises, and research projects will do likewise. Not only do you have access to Esri-created data but also to data contributed by collaborators around the world: agencies such as NASA, NOAA, Census, cities and local governments, and commercial partners. You can nominate your own datasets –research results for example-- for inclusion in the Living Atlas and the content will be automatically checked for metadata completeness and other measures, and then be human-checked and curated by Esri’s subject matter experts. Once included the dataset is hosted by Esri and made available to GIS users around the world. When we search the Atlas on the keyword “climate” and filter on data only from the past year, we find 391 (at the time of this writing) related resources. Try for yourself and experience the diversity of topics, geographical extents, and data contributors. Try other related keywords too, for example environment or drought. The latter points us to NOAA-provided data feeds for the USA, for example US Drought Intensity-- Current Conditions which is “live” data updated weekly.     This is just one of many examples of up-to-date, climate-oriented data that have been symbolized, pop-ups configured, and made available for your classroom or research projects to be combined with socioeconomic data sources in order to determine who is affected for example.  This live-feed feature layer can be used on its own, accessed from Pro or the Map Viewer, but in this case it was used as the basis of the Drought Aware web application that is also hosted on the Living Atlas. Aside from the drought data this app includes layers from the US Census ACS and from the US Department of Agriculture. In the image below, we selected a county in the Oklahoma panhandle and the application queried the drought and underlying census and agricultural data layers to show several indicators below in dashboard style. Texas County, Oklahoma is in a period of extreme drought and has only about 20,000 inhabitants however over $1 Billion of agricultural sales are affected, mostly livestock. Also at the bottom is a time series for that selected county, and we can click on the graph to see drought conditions at any period going back to 2000 (April 2018 selected in this image).   For more information about the contents and use of the Drought Aware application, one of several thematic “Aware” apps, see creator Dan Pisut’s blog post.   Sea Level Rise Another climate related workshop demonstration by my colleague Keith focused on sea level rise, starting with a High Tide Flooding Scenarios dataset also from NOAA. Again that data layer could be used alone, but was included in a web app that compares several flooding scenario predictions through the year 2100. We selected Oregon Inlet, North Carolina, and from the Intermediate flooding model (assuming 1 meter sea level rise) it shows that “sunny day” flooding events would go from 13 (2022) to 34 (2032) days per year. And that’s just in the coming decade and for the fairly conservative Intermediate model: it could be much worse. Try the app for yourself: have a look at the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans or Houston for example.   Now, just as with the drought dataset, we can repeat the process known as geo-enrichment to add sociodemographic layers and then drill into specific flooding areas to ask who is or would be affected. We could open the flooding scenarios layer in ArcGIS Pro, select Intermediate, experiment with the time slider, manipulate symbology, and then we can join the CDC Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) 2018 data. SVI data are composed of 15 social factors in 4 themes: Socioeconomic, Housing composition and disability, Minority status and language, and Housing and transportation.  The spatial join used the nearest feature and a 1 Km radius, to create a bivariate map showing percent change in flooding risk and SVI score (see the cube with cyan and magenta symbology) of each location. Colors tending toward purple in the cube indicate high vulnerability.   For more information on this flooding scenario, see this blog post by Keith VanGraafeiland. The javascript code for the High Tide app is available on github.     Create your Own These are just two examples of climate action workflows that help to help bring home the message of dangerous climate-related phenomena that affect certain populations in certain locations, now and in the future. We encourage you to join us in creating new exercises as part of the Climate Action resource collection, so that other instructors, learners, and researchers can analyze geographic data from their desktop GIS, Map Viewer, or web application. Let's show the world how GIS can make concrete contributions to climate resilience.    ... View more

Evolving GIS Architecture Many of us have grown up thinking about GIS as a desktop software on our PC. (Ok, some of us remember farther back, to minicomputers and mainframes.) But as Roger Tomlinson taught during so many years, GIS is best thought of not as software for you but rather as a project among many. GIS is quite often a team activity, and frequently these days most of the team members are not sitting in a GIS lab or department. Today it makes sense to think of what we might call “modern GIS”, which merges a powerful desktop system with mobile apps, web apps, enterprise server components, cloud mapping and data services, and developer tools to be able to provide the right functionality and the right user experience (UX) for experts to absolute novices. The proverbial GIS toolbox is distributed and now resides at many locations. The end user might be on fieldwork, collecting data and accessing the GIS via a mobile device; the data might be stored on a cloud server in another city or country; the processing routines might be running on another server; an external user might be watching the results on a dashboard in yet another location. This distributed system architecture has become a key part of the digital transformation of many organizations, the practical result of which is simply providing GIS-based analysis to many more employees or researchers.   Learning about –and teaching-- modern GIS, what thousands of government and commercial organizations are using or are migrating to, opens the door to new collaboration and career opportunities. Let me be clear: traditional GIS users are seeking young graduates to help them move to, and scale-up, modern GIS architecture.   To get an idea of how Esri views modern GIS take a look at this video (or most any recent Esri conference video) outlining the evolving ArcGIS architecture, including but not limited to traditional GIS. These modern GIS components were not built by a speculative start-up, rather by a 50-plus year old technology company aiming to satisfy the day-to-day needs of organizations around the world. Who are these users? Let’s get specific. Esri’s Industries website provides a glimpse of what each of these professional communities does with and needs from a modern GIS. Some instructors might think that this wider GIS architecture is too much to dominate, too much to keep up with. But no one person needs to be specialized in, nor teach, all of this. Each one of us chooses the tools and methods that are appropriate for the discipline, level and needs of user, and the tasks at hand. Are we interested in data collection? Then mobile apps are worth investing time in. Is data sharing a priority? Then online portals come into view. Do we need to extend the GIS to include external machine learning routines? Then developer tools come into play. Understanding the options available, and what each component might be used for, moves GIS instruction further toward the industry and government workflows that students will encounter after graduation. Many of these modern GIS components are available for free testing at the Learn.arcgis.org site. The Collector app is easily installed on mobile devices and allows field workers –from a utilities company or a science classroom—to collect and share geodata to an online, multiuser database. Survey123 is another mobile app, that allows users to create and run a geocoded survey in the field. You can watch in realtime as survey responses appear on the webmap: where do people feel unsafe, or want graffiti cleaned, or have seen a particular bird species? ArcGIS Online allows GIS users to create, analyze, visualize, organize, share, and discover geodata, from any web-connected device. StoryMaps and Dashboards provide many options for communicating GIS-based results to non-experts. Many students, non-expert GIS users, and also professional organizations can do most of their GIS work just with these web-enabled ArcGIS tools. The COVID-19 crisis has made it necessary for many people, including instructors and students, to brush up on these online solutions. In doing so they are discovering a whole new viewpoint on what is GIS is. ... View more