INTRODUCTION TO COURSE
GIS is mapping the real-life and world phenomenon, for example, how is urbanization affecting impacting biodiversity hotspot in the world
Whats is actually happening, a map speaks nothing but by providing information, we can get a strong sense of knowledge about what is going on around us. A good question to think about for geographic location.
Where is it?
Why is it here or there?
How much of it is here or there?
Questions about geographic distribution:
Is it distributed locally or globally?
Is it spatial clustered or dispersed?
Where are the boundaries?
We started a review to look at the fundamental of geography which focuses on patterns and processes, places, people, and perspectives. While these fundamentals are connected to themes which we will be studying that is landscape ecology, health geography, and crime analysis.
Landscape Ecology looks at the interaction between organism and their habitat/environment. This interaction will begin to shape those surrounding environments, but there are changes in the course of their interactions.
Health Geography is used to look/assess/predict the phenomena of health care and disease spread among geographically. We can look at the distribution of health to better understand that social distribution around that region and assess social movement to understand how to manage health care distribution. We map disease to track outbreaks and use geographic data to understand how to implement measures to prevent future outbreaks.
Crime Geography looks at crime incidents and implements measures to prevent/minimize crime rates. The base of crime analysis is that crimes do not happen randomly, and which is why we need to perform spatial analysis to protect the order of our society from potential harm by looking into crime patterns.
Why is geography important
In this week's lecture, we talked about a major issue in geography mapping that is scale. We consider this problem as the modifiable areal unit problem also known as MAUP. It occurs because the level in which we are mapping the data will appear to be different at a different scale. Imagine if we are mapping the number of herbivore animals in Africa by countries. The extent to which we collect data will differ if we mapped the number of herbivore animals will differ if we look by regions. Therefore we have to be careful when selecting our scale and formulating our analysis because the too large or too small scale will cause skewed results.
The second issue we need to consider in relation to statistics is spatial autocorrelation. Since statistics and correlation act on the base where x and y variables are independent of each other. But in geography, from Tobler's first law of geography is that closer things are more likely than farther things. Therefore, there is always a dependency between variables due to locations, but we consider spatial autocorrelation from -1 to 1. If spatial autocorrelation is non-random meaning there is a relationship between distance and variable then it is not 0. If it is a positive relationship where closer things tend to be similar then it is closer to 1. If it is a negative relationship where closer things tend to be different then it is closer to -1.
Understanding landscape metrics: patterns and processes
Landscape ecology concerns the interaction between spatial patterns and ecological processes that occur in landscapes. In among these processes, we can better understand how the landscape will change, and it is very crucial to understand how changes occur among our landscape so we can know if these processes are good or bad for our environment. We can also derive the processes that have occurred from looking at the pattern of changes in the landscape. It is crucial to consider the causes of landscape pattern, for example, forest fire not only reshapes forests and decrease available fuels, but forest fire are affected by topography itself. This is known as a feedback between process and form.
Landscape patterns occur on the basis where it is triggered by events and objects. Just as forest fire spread the heaviest within an extent of diameter, and decreases as it travels further radius. If the patterns develop as a result of a response to an environmental factor such as soil, water bodies, then it is known as a first-order process. If the patterns develop as a result of interactions between objects/events then it is known as a second-order process.
We learned about a few of the metrics that have been developed, and they are the number of classes or cover types, texture measure (fine or coarse patterns), the degree to which patches are compact or dissected, whether patches are linear or planar, and whether patch perimeters are complicated or simple in shape.
What is health geography?
There are three main themes in healthy geography that includes disease ecology, health care delivery, and environment and health. Disease ecology focuses on study of infectious disease including spatial distributions associated with the disease. The study of health care delivery involves looking at the spatial patterns of health care and consider social issues such as unequal access to health care. The study of environment and health is a newer focus that ties in geography's long tradition in environmental hazards together with healthy geography. It is mapping environmental risks and the health impacts of environmental contamination such as CO2 pollution.
We can use GIS to draw in a relationship and make inferences between geographic location and disease. For instance, we can find certain geographic locations more vulnerable to disease spread due to elevation, temperature, and surrounding environments.
GIS in health geography
We learned a few methods used in health geography, and it involves spatial epidemiology, environmental hazards, modeling health services, and identifying health inequalities.
When we are looking at the spatial pattern of disease and health, we usually try to perform geospatial analysis, store data, develop an application that will help us visualize data.
We can look at different levels of data that lie behind disease distribution to understand the underlying connection between space and health. For example, the MCE is used to take in multiple considerations when mapping the areas with highest risk associated with a certain disease.