Going Places with Spatial Analysis MOOC

Section 1
Geography Matters
Andrea Bell
[Andrea Bell] Where would we be without geography and maps? Without maps, we wouldn't
even know where we are. Geography matters. Geography matters in everything that we do. It
affects the schools we go to. It affects the first language we speak, who our neighbors are,
our daily commute to work or school. It affects our health and even the health of our planet.
Geography impacts on almost everything. We all use maps to find out where things are and
how we get to those things.

Maps are created from spatial data. Spatial data is data that has a locational component. It is
connected to some place on Earth. We use maps to find restaurants, roads, routes to new
places we're visiting, countries, population, and weather. Maps are everywhere you look.
Maps help us learn about our world.

But what if you go beyond just reading a map and start to analyze the spatial data? You can
discover so much more. You can make the data work for you and give you information and
answers to questions. You get to go beyond where things are and start to ask questions, such
as why are things where they are, and where should they be?

This is spatial analysis. Spatial analysis can be used to answer so many questions, global
questions, like who's at risk from flooding or examining the spatial distribution of a nation's
population and their natural resources.

Or you could look at more local scales. Find out where are the best evacuation routes, best
places to build businesses or housing, and see who's at risk for avalanches or see how much
green space there is within a city.

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 Going Places with Spatial Analysis MOOC

There is an entire science that deals with spatial data and spatial issues called Geographic
Information Science or GI Science for short. GI science is based on the basic geographic
concept that many environmental and human processes are determined by spatial
interaction.

Spatial interaction is the movement or flow of goods, people, or information from place to
place. Spatial analysis allows you to problem-solve issues and better understand what's
occurring in our world. Analysis is the systematic examination of a complex entity to provide
new information from things that are already known.

For example, we can use land use data, topography, and transport data to help us choose the
optimal locations to site businesses. We can analyze the distribution of demographics of the
population to find out where those businesses will be most successful.

Using spatial data, you know both what is present and where it is. So spatial analysis is both
the analysis of locations and the characteristic of those locations. Using spatial data, you can
model real-world systems and interactions. Now, our world is inherently complex, but by
modeling and analyzing the fundamental things that you're interested in, in your analysis, you
can learn something about the whole system.

Spatial analysis can be simple or it can be complex, but the advantages that analysis brings
are enormous. You can take multiple datasets gathered from many different sources and you
can analyze them all together. You can better understand what's happening, where it's
happening, and maybe even why it's happening. There are so many things we don't already
know about our world.

For example, we're still learning how climate influences our health and how we as a people
affect the climate. Using spatial analysis, we can explore, model, and visualize our world.

A Geographic Information System, or GIS, is the tool that we use to capture, store, process,
analyze, and visualize spatial information. A GIS implements many of the concepts of GI
Science.

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 Going Places with Spatial Analysis MOOC

In a GIS, each type of geographic data is stored as a separate layer. That could be houses,
roads, or population layers. A GIS allows you to explore different questions and hypotheses
using different layers working together. We use spatial data to represent the real world. In
doing so, we're actually creating a conceptual model, and therefore spatial analysts have to
decide how to best model reality.

What are the phenomenon of the data that you're looking at in your analysis? What questions
are you asking of the data? Of course, the nature of the data that you're modeling will slightly
influence how that's best represented.

There are two basic types of spatial data - vector data and raster data.

In raster data, the real-world entities are regular grids, just like we see in digital photographs.
The natural environment is often represented as continuous data using raster.

Vector data is primarily composed of three basic shapes -points, lines, and areas, often called
polygons. The built human environment and administrative data tends to be modeled using
vector data.

Information that describes what's known at a location is called attribute data. It can simply
describe the features, such as road names or the name of an administrative area, like
Darlington County. Attribute data can be classified into groups or categories, such as road
type or land cover type. It may also represent counts, such as populations or numbers of
vehicles. Or it might be information on intensity, like average income or slope. But
remember, all spatial data has a location, and in using GIS, all spatial data can be mapped
and analyzed.

By learning some of the GI science concepts and using GIS tools, you'll be well on your way
to simplifying real-world complexity and better understand and solve geospatial problems.

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