Adding spreadsheet data to a map and displaying house price index data They say that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location. I always trot that one out at the beginning of a semester and extend it to most everything we do at Lincoln, but in this post we’ll look at this in its natural habitat – house prices. CoreLogic released their monthly House Price Index report on Thursday so I took this as an opportunity to see how easy it would be to grab their data and map it. A quick Google search on “zealand house price index” took me to a download page for the ..read more

From space, one could hardly tell that what we see above is one of the most divisive, fraught areas on the planet. When we add the country boundaries, the familiar shapes of the Middle East serve as a reminder: I’m going to stray into some difficult territory in this post, and not without a healthy measure of trepidation. As we go to press, the Middle East is in crisis (again) with war threatening to escalate (again). It’s very easy to watch the news and feel like it will never end. In some ways, it is never-ending, but there are reasons behind that, reasons that easily go back over 100 year ..read more

A quick and easy request is handled with Select by Location As we go to press, a fire rages on the Port Hills, reminding many of a similar event in 2017. Image courtesy of CCC Just today, I had a quick request from LU student services to get a quick idea of which roads were close to the fire area so they could identify any students potentially affected (and good on them too). While getting this fire under control has proved challenging, this was a pretty easy thing to handle with GIS. I started out with a basemap of the area. Searching through various news outlets, I hadn’t come across any ma ..read more

We dissect how to approach a challenging spatial problem by relying on some basic levels of analysis. We often get a lot of challenging problems of a spatial nature here in the GIS world. A common thread of these is that they often sound easy at the start but get much more complicated when you try and come up with a solution. In this post I go over one posed to me recently which ended up being a particularly challenging but satisfying one to solve. Warning to you, oh gentle reader – this is a long post with some code snippets but I do promise some pretty pictures. Over the past few months I’ve ..read more

It’s been a very busy start to the semester here at the GIS Gizmoplex. In our quest for world domination, er, no, fame and fortune, nope, okay, better integration of GIS into courses, we’ve been working on ways for students to use GIS as part of their coursework. It’s been great working with some of the ERST607 students and colleagues to make these happen. Special thanks, too, to Claire from Eagle Technology, who came through with a nice behind-the-scenes data solution. Here’s a brief overview of what’s happening. SOCI314/ERST624 Femi is running a planning course where students need to create ..read more

Avoid losing precious data by practicing some Zen calm Image by wirestock on Freepik Here are GIS Central we’ve been fielding a lot of calls from frustrated users, along the lines of: “I finished my project last night but when I opened it up this morning, everything was gone!” -Frustrated in Whangarei “That layer I spent hours on doesn’t work any more – when I open up the table I get an error” –Losing it in Lyttelton “I HATE GIS!!!!!” –Most everyone from Manganui Sadly, we’ve been getting a lot of that this year – and I feel your pain, believe me. Hopefully this post will prevent any future is ..read more

Recognising different coordinate systems can be helpful in speeding up your work. https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucker/24897100810 It’s said that the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed with three key maxims for a good life, one of which was “Know Thyself”. This is, of course, very good advice. For the GIS analyst, knowing yourself helps to know when to walk away from the computer and get a breath of fresh air rather than smashing the screen in frustration. For that same GIS analyst, it’s also good advice to know about the coordinate system of your data. In this post we’ll look at sha ..read more

To work through a mapping project a bit of detective work was needed to get data in the right place. GIS Central has recently been involved with some global mapping as part of an Our Land and Water project. This has involved collating a wide range of environmental data covering soils, hydrology, vegetation, terrain and a range of others (20 variables in all) on a global scale. I’ll admit that this hasn’t been easy in many respects – there are lots of data available but they’re not always in an easy format to work with, or are difficult and time-consuming to get on to a map (Ed. Oh no – does th ..read more

Label classes give us a bit more control over how features can be labelled on maps. We’ve been putting some figures together for a paper coming out of Christy Songola’s master’s thesis. He was looking at using Radon measurements from wells in a braided river plain to determine travel times of groundwater in different seasons. Lots of field work here and some really interesting stuff coming out of this reach of the Selwyn River. As part of his research, Christy compared differences between levels of radon in winter and summer and tied those to groundwater flow velocities. For the paper, we nee ..read more

I won’t say I’m a great fan of clear cutting but I suppose some may find this image inspiring (from a recent walk to the Sign of the Packhorse). We start with this as it will later help to illustrate some of the analysis the GIS courses have been doing lately. We’ve been spending a bit of time with LiDAR data; more specifically, we’ve been looking at how to use data like these to determine the amount of tree cover within a given area, along the lines of what the Auckland Council did a few years ago with mapping the urban forest in the Waitemata Local Board area, an example of which is shown b ..read more