In March of 2019, King County Emergency Management submitted a request to KCGIS Center Spatial Services for a tabletop 3D model of the county to be used for community outreach and education on the variety of physical topography throughout King County and its challenges for emergency management.
As the most-used GIS packages, ArcGIS and QGIS are amazing and powerful for analytical applications. Despite their analytical strengths, they sometimes don’t quite achieve the quality needed for high-level graphics. It’s common for cartographers to prepare maps or layers of maps in ArcGIS, then export them for use in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator where more sophisticated graphic techniques can be applied to create finished map products. The King County GIS Center recently came across another need to go beyond the graphic capabilities of ArcGIS.
GIS & You readers know that I have written several articles in the past about using GIS for issues related to Equity and Social Justice (ESJ). A new article in Directions Magazine Insights on Location by Chris Wayne provides an excellent overview of Communities Using Maps to Enact Environmental Justice. Chris Wayne’s article touches many…
When I used to work as GIS Mapping Supervisor for the East Bay Municipal Utility District in California, I would be surprised when a homeowner would pay thousands of dollars to have a fire hydrant installed close to their property. What they were doing was to ensure that their home could be better protected against…
A year or two back, the Washington Department of Natural Resources made some fascinating maps of braided river channels. These maps used lidar-derived imagery to show the twisting patterns of the riverbeds in a novel way — as bright, colorful images on a black background. They looked similar to x-rays, revealing the bones of the…
A King County policy priority is building equity and opportunity for all. King County’s pro-equity policy agenda has eight focus areas, one of which is environment and climate. Recently I worked with the King County Solid Waste Division to help develop an ArcGIS Online web application for the equity and social justice (ESJ) assessments of…
Potpourri, so says Wikipedia, ‘…is a mixture of dried, naturally fragrant plant materials, used to provide a gentle natural scent, commonly in residential settings.’ What’s that got to do with GIS? Potpourri is also a common Jeopardy category – a collection of incongruous things. Maybe that’s what’s intended by the June 2019 King County GIS…
There is a wide array of powerful free open-source tools for doing data analysis, and many of them can now handle spatial data. This post will focus on using R, specifically the tidyverse packages, as a data exploration tool for analyses that would otherwise be cumbersome in a traditional desktop GIS program. I am currently…
Some modern mapmaking tools don’t have direct antecedents. Yes, maps have long been composed of many layers of separate artwork just as we have digital map feature layers now, but in the during the time of Mylar overlays, pin registration, and photomechanical reproduction that resulted in static paper maps, there was nothing like the dynamic and highly interactive web maps that are second nature to us today.
The American Community Survey (ACS) from the US Census Bureau helps local officials, community leaders, and businesses understand the changes taking place in their communities. It is the premier source for detailed population and housing information about our nation. ACS data is updated each year, not just during the decennial census. Esri has just made…
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