Forensic analyses are often concerned with identifying the spatial source of biological residue. Using recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, dust collected from nearly any object can be shown to harbor DNA fragments from thousands of bacteria and fungi species which may be informative of the source of the dust. We show that training collections…
Assessing water quality along rivers is vital for watershed management. The Bayesian Maximum Entropy method of modern geostatistics provides a powerful framework to model the space/time variability of water quality and perform a statistical assessment of all river miles. This talk presents joint work with Prahlad Jat that describes how river distances and flow can…
CyberGIS represents an interdisciplinary field combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, geographic information science and systems (GIS), spatial analysis and modeling, and a number of geospatial domains (e.g., emergency management, smart cities, and the nexus of food, energy, and water systems) to enable broad scientific and technological advances. It has also emerged as new-generation GIS based on holistic…
As home to more than 50% of the human population, urban areas are of growing importance as sources of airborne and water-borne pollutants and sinks for increasing amounts of energy and natural resources. Remote sensing has considerable potential to improve our understanding of these areas, but is challenged by the high diversity of urban materials…
Deciding upon an appropriate spatial frame of reference is an important component of any observational analysis. Geographically fixed frameworks are not always well suited to meteorology, which can be described as the study of patterns within a moving fluid. Data visualization also needs to navigate around human cognitive limitations such as motion-induced failure to detect…
The importance of freshwater ecosystems in the terrestrial carbon balance from watersheds to the globe has been increasingly recognized over the last two decades. While global-scale annual carbon exports from rivers to the oceans are reasonably well constrained, large uncertainties remain at other spatial and temporal scales for lateral transport and other fluxes. Measurements are…
The City of Raleigh leverages GIS data and technology to support a variety of services and solutions. These range from more efficient management of assets to real time status of parking spaces, and from coordinating capital construction projects to interactive scenario-based 3D urban environments. This presentation will focus on how Raleigh balances a robust, stable,…
Humanity has embarked on an age of rapid global changes across biophysical and social-economic conditions so great that it has been labeled the Anthropocene. As global climate changes and urban populations expand, society is increasingly reliant on smaller and more fragmented areas for ecosystem services. These services include carbon sequestration, the uptake of excess nutrient…
The large-scale introduction of water reuse into an existing water supply system is a complex socio-technical process. Consumers drive the success of water reuse programs through adoption, and infrastructure designs affect adoption patterns. This research develops a modeling framework to capture the feedbacks among consumer adoption and infrastructure expansion. Two theories are applied and compared…
The World Economic Forum contends that we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The revolution is characterized by “a ubiquitous and mobile internet, by smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors, and by artificial intelligence and machine learning.” It is manifest in an "Internet of Things” that's expected to connect 50 billion devices,…