Comprehensive Spatial Database Research Articles

MEDIS—A comprehensive spatial database on Mediterranean islands for biogeographical and evolutionary research

AbstractMotivationThe intrinsic characteristics of islands make them a unique study system for the investigation of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. The Mediterranean Basin, an island‐rich biodiversity hotspot, still lacks a comprehensive spatial database for these geographic features. This study presents the first comprehensive spatial database of all Mediterranean islands larger than 0.01 km2, aiding ecological investigations and interdisciplinary research.Main types of variable containedThe MEDIS spatial database offers detailed information on 39 geographic, climatic, ecological and land‐use variables, including island area, perimeter, isolation metrics, climatic space, terrain data, land cover, palaeogeography, road networks and geological information, providing a multifaceted view of each island's characteristics.Spatial location and grainThe study encompasses 2217 islands in the Mediterranean Basin larger than 0.01 km2. The spatial grain of the datasets on which the selected variables are based varies from 10 m (ESA WorldCover) to 1 km (CHELSA‐BIOCLIM+).Time period and grainThe spatial database incorporates data from various sources, each with its own timeframe, such as the Global Shoreline Vector from 2014 Landsat imagery and the WorldCover dataset from 2021. Historical data like the Paleocoastlines GIS dataset offer insights into island configurations during the Last Glacial Maximum.Major taxa and level of measurementWhile not focusing on specific taxa, the study lays the foundation for comprehensive research on Mediterranean islands, facilitating comparisons and investigations into the distribution of native, endemic or alien species. The level of measurement is extensive, encompassing a wide range of variables and providing polygonal features rather than centroids' coordinates.

Offshore energy structures in the North Sea: Past, present and future

Offshore man-made structures (MMS) such as oil and gas (O&G) platforms, pipelines and wind energy developments are present in shelf seas worldwide and can potentially influence ecosystem dynamics and services. The number, type and age of these structures is changing as the wind energy sector expands whilst O&G structures reach the end of economic viability and are decommissioned. The North Sea is an area which supports major offshore energy production and consequently has a particularly high density of MMS which, according to the OSPAR 98/3 decision, will need to be removed after cessation of operations. To inform effective policy decisions, a comprehensive understanding of the impact of MMS on North Sea ecosystem is required. A major challenge to this is the lack of a comprehensive MMS database with up-to-date and accurate metadata (e.g. structure type, installation date) and locations. We found that existing databases are spatially restricted and/or contain conflicting locational data and, when present, metadata. When used in scientific studies to support policy decisions, such gaps and errors limit inference and could lead to spurious results. Here we develop a comprehensive spatial database of MMS including O&G platforms, pipelines and wind turbines in the North Sea. This allowed examination of temporal trends in how North Sea MMS have changed in number, type and location. The generated database will be useful for a range of stakeholders ranging from ecologists, engineers, policymakers, industry advisors and geoscientists. Indeed, such a database is fundamental for robust research studies required to inform effective and sustainable policy decisions, including review of the OSPAR 98/3 regulation.

Mass wasting along the Cascadia subduction zone: Implications for abyssal turbidite sources and the earthquake record

The only submarine records of large (>Mw7) prehistoric earthquakes along the Cascadia subduction zone are derived from sequences of deep sea turbidites interpreted to represent synchronous, shaking-induced failures along the continental slope. However, the spatial correlation of these deposits along the margin is complicated and the chronological constraints involve significant uncertainties, raising questions about how these deposits were generated. Here we present the most comprehensive spatial database of seafloor failure scarps across the Cascadia margin to date, with more than 8700 features mapped. We observe pervasive mass wasting of the steep lower slope along the ∼800 km length of the margin. This portion of the margin is heavily deformed, uplifted and oversteepened, such that it may be optimally preconditioned to fail during intense shaking events. Our results suggest disintegration of the steep lower slope is likely the primary source of turbidity flows triggered by earthquake shaking in Cascadia. This more proximal source for seismoturbidite generation may be the principal process along subduction margins with steep lower slope topography and may explain why seismoturbidites are found in areas containing few submarine canyons. Furthermore, the extensive mass wasting present on the steep lower slope of central Cascadia, a critical 250 km long section where no records currently exist, suggests additional turbidite records may be found along this portion of the margin by selecting optimal sample sites based on failure patterns. The strong clustering of seafloor failures along the lower slope also suggests the most earthquake intense shaking may be spatially restricted to a narrow zone along the deformation front, which could have important implications for hazard predictions across the region.

An integrated approach to create a spatial database of parks for urban health research

The role of urban parks has gained interest in urban health research. However, there are currently no clear definitions of these urban assets as exposure variable across the literature, which do have implications for the analysis. In this study, we exhibit an approach to design a comprehensive spatial database of urban parks in cities, using the example of Madrid. This approach consisted of the combination of different spatial databases containing information about parks and green spaces in the city of Madrid, and then a spatial processing to keep only those that met the selected criteria for urban park definition: accessible for pedestrians (to have at least one path around or through the area) and with the minimum size suitable (bigger than 0.50ha) for physical activity. This approach can be helpful to design spatial databases that enable conducting epidemiological studies on the relationship between urban parks and population health.

Developing Geomorphologic Tourism in the Valleys of the Eastern Coast of the Dead Sea

The study aims to identify the pattern of geomorphologic tourism in the valleys of the eastern coast of the Dead Sea and the mechanisms for developing this type of tourism. An analysis of space visuals data and topographic maps were utilized to provide a holistic picture of the geomorphologic reality and the spatial relationships between tourism uses and the nature of this area. Relying on geographic information systems and remote sensing software, the study provides a holistic picture that contributes to the identification of the geomorphologic tourism pattern, and the future forecast in the form of spatial space within a holistic integrated approach based on scientific foundations. The study revealed the importance of the area with its great potentials represented in geomorphologic and biological diversity. It contributed to providing a comprehensive spatial database beneficial for decision-makers in adopting a comprehensive planning process for the study area.

Mapping a path towards equity: reflections on a co-creative community praxis

‘Community geography’ is a growing sub-field that leverages academic resources to facilitate spatial research in partnership with local communities. The Mapping Prejudice Project and the CREATE Initiative, two interdisciplinary projects at the University of Minnesota, demonstrate some of the opportunities and challenges associated with practicing community geography. Mapping Prejudice is leveraging community crowdsourcing to build the first comprehensive spatial database of racially restrictive housing covenants in the United States. CREATE is co-developing research on critical problems at the intersection of environment and equity through collaboration with community partners. These two projects incorporate a methodological commitment to place-based and historically grounded research that seeks to make knowledge in—and in relation to—a specific place. Incorporating earlier feminist and critical GIS theory, these projects have adopted an iterative research model that places under-resourced communities at the forefront of the research process. Their work produces a fluid, responsive, and co-creative approach that has the capacity to legitimate its knowledge claims through responsiveness to community needs and collective experience.

Creating a Map of the Social Functions of Urban Green Spaces in a City with Poor Availability of Spatial Data: A Sociotope for Lodz

Many cities lack complex spatial databases that can answer the question “What does a given green space offer?” This complicates the lives of inhabitants, planners, and local authorities. One of the ways to obtain a complex picture of urban green spaces is to link multiple data sources. This article presents such an attempt to link multiple data sources to obtain a map of the social functions of urban green spaces in a city without a comprehensive spatial database on urban green spaces. We do so by adapting a method of mapping the social functions of urban green spaces—sociotope mapping—to the Central-Eastern European city of Lodz (Poland). Our results feature a map of the main social functions of urban green spaces (divided into five categories: nature, physical activity, social, play, and aesthetics) and GIS databases, with spatially explicit information on the 48 attributes of 196 urban green spaces in Lodz. According to our results, the greatest effort in sociotope mapping involves collecting data from different sources as it requires collaborating with various stakeholders—the owners of the data. Our study fits into the general trend of linking official data from municipal records with additional data on inhabitants’ preferences for urban green space planning and management.

Effect of river size on Amazonian primate community structure: A biogeographic analysis using updated taxonomic assessments.

The mechanisms that underlie the diversification of Neotropical primates remain contested. One mechanism that has found support is the riverine barrier hypothesis (RBH), which postulates that large rivers impede gene flow between populations on opposite riverbanks and promote allopatric speciation. Ayres and Clutton-Brock (1992) demonstrated that larger Amazonian rivers acted as barriers, delineating the distribution limits of primate species. However, profound changes in taxonomy and species concepts have led to the proliferation of Neotropical primate taxa, which may have reduced support for their results. Using the most recent taxonomic assessments and distribution maps, we tested the effect of increasing river size on the similarity of opposite riverbank primate communities in the Amazon. First, we conducted a literature review of primate taxonomy and developed a comprehensive spatial database, then applied geographical information system to query mapped primate ranges against the riverine geography of the Amazon watershed to produce a similarity index for opposite riverbank communities. Finally, we ran models to test how measures of river size predicted levels of similarity. We found that, almost without exception, similarity scores were lower than scores from Ayres and Clutton-Brock (1992) for the same rivers. Our model showed a significant negative relationship between streamflow and similarity in all tests, and found river width significant for the segmented Amazon, but not for multiple Amazon watershed rivers. Our results support the RBH insofar as they provide evidence for the prediction that rivers with higher streamflow act as more substantial barriers to dispersal, and accordingly exhibit greater variation in community composition between riverbanks.

A Visual Analytics System for Route Planning and Emergency Crowd Evacuation

Emergency evacuation from crowded public spaces is of great importance to all authorities around the world. Many systems have been developed by researchers to address the optimization of emergency evacuation routing and planning. This paper presents a visual analytics system for route planning and emergency crowd evacuation; a web-based visualization and simulation system that allows stakeholders to develop and assess route planning and evacuation procedures for emergency scenar-ios. The system takes advantage of the available OpenStreetMap comprehensive spatial database to enable users to implement evacuation scenarios in almost anywhere OpenStreetMap dataset is available. Using multiple infrastructure-specific varying sce-narios, such as adjusting capacities of roads/pathways or their closure, the tool can identify bottleneck areas thus allowing the assessment of potential improvements to pedestrian and transportation network to relieve the bottleneck and improve evacuation time. As a case study, we use this system for the city of Makkah in Saudi Arabia and the city of Minnesota in the United States.

Debris flows in the Hrubý Jeseník Mountains, Bohemian Massif, Czech Republic

ABSTRACTDebris flows in mountainous areas have a deep geomorphic impact on slope dynamics. Their activity corresponds with heavy rainfall events. The estimation of these events depends not only on meteorological prediction but also on the knowledge of their spatial occurrence. As debris flows usually occur in the same paths with different frequencies during the Quaternary period, spatial data are needed to obtain more detailed information about debris flow phenomena. This was the reason for the creation of the presented map of debris flow features in the Hrubý Jeseník Mts. A total of 95 debris flow paths and 47 debris flow accumulations (including lobes or levees) have been mapped in the field. A comprehensive spatial database of debris flow features is shown in the map, which could be helpful for future research of Quaternary geomorphic evolution of the landscape and for forest management and state administrative authorities in future planning.

A geological model for the management of subsurface data in the urban environment of Barcelona and surrounding area

Abstract. The overdevelopment of cities since the industrial revolution has shown the need to incorporate a sound geological knowledge in the management of required subsurface infrastructures and in the assessment of increasingly needed groundwater resources. Additionally, the scarcity of outcrops and the technical difficulty to conduct underground exploration in urban areas highlights the importance of implementing efficient management plans that deal with the legacy of heterogeneous subsurface information. To deal with these difficulties, a methodology has been proposed to integrate all the available spatio-temporal data into a comprehensive spatial database and a set of tools that facilitates the analysis and processing of the existing and newly added data for the city of Barcelona (NE Spain). Here we present the resulting actual subsurface 3-D geological model that incorporates and articulates all the information stored in the database. The methodology applied to Barcelona benefited from a good collaboration between administrative bodies and researchers that enabled the realization of a comprehensive geological database despite logistic difficulties. Currently, the public administration and also private sectors both benefit from the geological understanding acquired in the city of Barcelona, for example, when preparing the hydrogeological models used in groundwater assessment plans. The methodology further facilitates the continuous incorporation of new data in the implementation and sustainable management of urban groundwater, and also contributes to significantly reducing the costs of new infrastructures.

Protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) in the Amazon

Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. Brazil, home to one-third of the world's tropical forests and 12% of its PAs, is a global leader in PA creation and management. Despite this leadership, evidence suggests that Brazil is scaling back elements of its PA network through a process known as PA downgrading, downsizing and degazettement (PADDD). To examine PADDD in Brazil, we created a comprehensive spatial database and documented all enacted and proposed PADDD events since 1900. We identified 67 enacted PADDD events, which affected 112,477km2 and eliminated 6% of Brazil's total potential terrestrial PA estate. Hydropower (39%) and rural human settlements (20%) were associated with most of these enacted PADDD events, which have increased in frequency since 2005. Another 27 active PADDD proposals currently threaten to eliminate 60,555km2 of protected lands. We then compared short-term deforestation rates in Brazilian Amazon forests that experienced PADDD to deforestation rates in corresponding still-protected and never-protected forests. Contrary to previous research, we did not find a significant causal effect of enacted PADDD events on short-term deforestation rates; rather, short-term deforestation rates in PADDDed forests appear correlated with broader patterns of deforestation. These findings suggest the need for national policies governing PADDD that are analogous to policies governing the initial establishment of PAs, including public consultation, technical studies, compensatory measures, and visual representation and explanation of the proposed changes.

Enhancing Disaster Management: Development of a Spatial Database of Day Care Centers in the USA

Children under the age of five constitute around 7% of the total U.S. population, and represent a segment of the population that is totally dependent on others for day-to-day activities. A significant proportion of this population spends time in some form of day care arrangement while their parents are away from home. Accounting for those children during emergencies is of high priority, which requires a broad understanding of the locations of such day care centers. As concentrations of at risk population, the spatial location of day care centers is critical for any type of emergency preparedness and response (EPR). However, until recently, the U.S. emergency preparedness and response community did not have access to a comprehensive spatial database of day care centers at the national scale. This paper describes an approach for the development of the first comprehensive spatial database of day care center locations throughout the U.S. utilizing a variety of data harvesting techniques to integrate information from widely disparate data sources followed by geolocating for spatial precision. In the context of disaster management, such spatially refined demographic databases hold tremendous potential for improving high-resolution population distribution and dynamics models and databases.

Geo-Archaeological endowments and the tourism development in Eritrea

Eritrea is one of the countries located in the horn of Africa. Geo-Archaeological sites of the country have been the main focus of the study area. This paper presents an overview of the research and includes a discussion of the tourism potential of Eritrea and potential benefits of Geo-Archaeological endowments in the development of its tourism industry. She is having diverse Geo-Archaeological endowments which are capable of attracting large number of tourists from all over the world. This country enjoys unique and exciting landmarks, such as breath-taking escarpments, mountains, depressions, open plains, plateaus, Sea with immense variety of marine life, islands, beautiful coastal lines etc. Furthermore, as Eritrea is situated in the region of the cradle of life, it owns rare archaeological and historical sites with unraveled cultural heritages. Though, Eritrea’s tourism industry is currently rated as one of the lowest foreign exchange earners in the country, the potential of tourism industry to become a leading source of foreign exchange earnings in Eritrea has not been far realized. It is evident that the country’s tourism potential has not been fully explored and marketed. Though several attempts have been made to enhance its rapid development, but these efforts have suffered some major drawbacks i.e. because the richness of the sites is not fully exploited to such an extent that it can revitalize the tourism sector and due to lack of a comprehensive spatial database of tourism facilities and destinations. In the present paper an attempt has been made to investigate the role of Geo-Archaeological Sites in the Development of Tourism with respect to tourism potentials in the country.

How GIS could be used as a tool to enhance the tourism sectors? A case study of Eritrea

The tourism phenomena have attracted not only Eritrea, but almost the entire world. Tourism is being recognized as a source of economic benefits to a country by a way of gaining foreign exchange and employment generation on a truly international scale. It also makes a tremendous contribution to the improvement of social and political understanding. Though, Eritrea’s tourism industry is currently rated as one of the lowest foreign exchange earners in the country, the potential of tourism industry to become a leading source of foreign exchange earnings in Eritrea has not been far realized. It is evident that the country’s tourism potential has not been fully explored and marketed. Though several attempts have been made to enhance its rapid development, but these efforts have suffered some major drawbacks due to lack of a comprehensive spatial database of tourism facilities and destinations. By using GIS, a common platform can be defined to provide a spatial databank with integrated multimedia features. This paper discusses the use of GIS as a tool for archiving, analyzing, and displaying of tourism information to enhance the tourism sectors in Eritrea.

Geospatial analysis of Tamil Nadu Eastern Ghats forest types at landscape level with reference to fragmentation and species diversity

The present study has generated spatial databases on the vegetation type with plant biodiversity, forest fragmentation and disturbance regimes in Tamilnadu parts of Eastern Ghats (EG), India. These databases have been analysed geospatially with landscape ecology approach. The study also includes ground inventory of plant species based on Remote Sensing (RS) data stratification. The vegetation type map was generated from the visual interpretation of two season IRS LISS III data. The spatial landscape analysis of the remotely sensed interpreted images was carried out using customized software, SPLAM. This is first such study in Tamilnadu Eastern Ghats that provides a comprehensive spatial database on vegetation types, disturbance regime and plant species diversity. The study has shown that the dry deciduous and thorn forests have shown better resistance to disturbance compared to the most disturbed evergreen and semievergreen forests. The study outputs are being utilized by forest department and biodiversity boards for conservation action planning and compliance to Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

A GIS-based modeling approach for implementation of sustainable farm management practices

Few agricultural producers utilize the true analytical power of GIS and computer simulation models, partly because the loose linkages developed to-date between GIS and most public-domain modeling software are extremely cumbersome to use. The integrated system (EPIC–View) developed in the study allows the integration of a comprehensive hydrologic–crop management model (EPIC) with a desktop GIS to function as a planning tool aimed at implementing sustainable farm management practices. The use of GIS makes possible the integration of diverse spatial data into a comprehensive spatial database. EPIC–View is applied to simulate nitrogen (N) dynamics under conventional and minimum tillage conditions of a field located in Caddo County, Oklahoma. In general, the overall N balance obtained under minimum tillage is better than the balance obtained under conventional tillage over a 5-year model run. Unexplained losses of N averaged 9.55% and 4.2% of the gain in N under conventional and minimum tillage respectively. The integrated modeling system holds immense potential as a farm management tool. Various components of a sustainable agricultural system including irrigation management, crop management, soil management, and pest management, can be efficiently managed. This approach could make farms more economically viable and ecologically sound.