Local GIS Tidbits
New York City just got LiDAR flown for about $450,000, funded in part by a federal Dept. of Energy grant of $205,000
The data will be used, among other things, to create up-to-date maps of the areas most prone to flooding, the buildings best suited for the installation of solar power and the neighborhoods most in need of trees. An advisory panel of experts formed by the mayor has warned that the city must prepare for more rain and an increased risk of coastal flooding in the coming decades as a result of global climate change.
It took two years and $500,000 but Spillman Technologies with input from Sidwell, has installed GPS receivers in 318 Fort Wayne police vehicles and put together aa mapping system integrated with Allen County’s existing mapping system.
The major stumbling point was integrating the county’s 1,154 different zones for police and fire dispatchers with the county’s electronic mapping software.
And, according to county GIS folks data conversion would have taken years in-house. The new system includes both crime mapping and vehicle tracking.
AmeriCorps summer associates will be inventorying street signs in Beardstown, IL. The project, led by AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer Aaron Tebrinke, will begin June 7 and run through August. Many of the town’s signs are damaged or missing and documenting what is there is the first step to replacing them.
Jonathan Folks, Weston Blake and Braxton Hoenes have volunteered their time and plan to use the knowledge they gain from this service for possible careers in engineering, information systems and GIS, according to Tebrinke.
Update: Per Newsday the crush of interest pushed the state to upgrade servers on launch day.
New York State’s Cancer Map went live on Monday. The map has had a difficult birth since the state health department and the American Cancer Society were both against the project because they feared the raw data would mislead the public. But the legislature insisted and the governor signed a bill to create it. The site does carry warnings about misinterpretations. Next step: to use it to find anomalies.
