1000 GIS Applications & Uses – How GIS Is Changing the World (2)

Ecology GIS Applications

278. Telemetry – Collecting GPS locations from collared mammals for the purpose of storing, displaying and analyzing their coordinates.
279. Habitat Suitability – Factoring in all the variables to understand the habitat that animals select and avoid using linear regression.
280. Land Facet Corridor Analysis – Identifying linkages between wildlife and landscapes. (Land Facet Corridor Analysis)
281. Landscape Fragmentation Tools (LFT) – Classifying land cover types into forest fragmentation categories – patch, edge, perforated, and core. (Landscape Fragmentation Tools LFT)
282. Migration Patterns – Simulating the East African wildebeest migration patterns for the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem in East Africa.
283. Path Metrics – Calculates turn angles, step lengths, bearings, time intervals for a point time series dataset using GME. (Geospatial Modelling Environment – GME)
284. DNA Traits – Mapping the richness, distribution and diversity of organisms on the landscape based on molecular marker (DNA).
285. Surui Tribe – Equipping the Surui tribe with geo-tagging equipment to put an end to the deforestation and cultural devastation in their section of the Brazilian rain forest. (Surui Tribe)
286. Species Biodiversity – Gauging over time a decrease in biodiversity or an abundance of species (invasive or disturbance-increasing) using temporal GIS. (Refractions Biodiversity BC)
287. Honey Bees – Stimulating spatial thinking processes by analyzing relationships between environmental characteristics and honey bee health and abundance (GIS Honey Bee Research)
288. Elk Ranges – Estimating an average home range for an entire herd of mammals using the Minimum Convex Polygon in Hawth’s Tools.
289. Anthropogenic Disturbances – Understanding the effects of transmission line construction by monitoring mammals with helicopter surveys. Get to the choppa!
290. Migratory Birds – Cross-referencing telemetry GPS migratory (Osprey) bird locations with Langley Air Force Base flying operations in an effort to reduce an aircraft strike. (NASA Langley Research – Bird/Wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard)
291. Shannon’s H Diversity Index – Measuring mathematically species diversity and richness in a community.
292. Microclimates – Analyzing exposure to sunlight with aspect data as an indication of microclimates and species occurrence.
293. Topographic Ruggedness Index – Estimating terrain heterogeneity which is useful for predicting which habitats are used by species
294. De-Extinction – Bringing extinct species back to life and marking their previous habitats – like the passenger pigeon from 5 billion birds to zero in a couple of decades. (De-extinction)
295. Sky View – Maximizing the portion of visible sky and understanding potential forest habitat.
296. FragStats – Computing a wide variety of landscape metrics for categorical map patterns. (FragStats)
297. Topographic Position Index – Classifying the landscape into slope position and land-form category
298. Global Ecology Land Units – Characterizing distinct physical environments and associated land cover of global ecosystems (USGS). (Global Ecology Land Units)
299. Biogeography – Studying ecosystems in geographic space and through (geological) time along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area.
300. Species Modelling – Running the Maximum Entropy Model (MAXENT). (QGIS Species Distribution Modelling (QSDM) plugin)
301. Flocking Birds – Mimicking flocking birds in a system of interactive parts using Agent Based Modeling. (NetLogo Flocking Birds)
302. Risk of Extinction – Describing existing conditions of habitat and predicting risk of extinctions, chance of recovery and mitigation measures – such as prohibiting hunting.
303. Habitat Priority Planner – Prioritizing conservation, restoration, and planning through NOAA’s Habitat Priority Planner. (Habitat Priority Planner)
304. DNA Barcoding – Attaching a specific location when barcoding life. Smithsonian Institution national Museum of Natural History – (DNA Barcoding – Natural History)
305. Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) – Assisting conservationists worldwide through community involvement and for the conservation of natural resources and cultural heritage. (SCGIS)
306. Sanctuary Ecologically Significant Areas – Delineating remarkable, representative and/or sensitive marine habitats, communities and ecological processes as SESAs. (Sanctuary Ecological Significant Areas)
307. Mammal Magnetic Alignment – Discovering how deer can sense magnetism through satellite image analysis and field observations of body alignments of deer beds in snow. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2008)
308. Sustainable Populations Counts – Counting polar bears and their geographic distribution analyzing two satellite images over time.
309. Crocodile Eggs – Monitoring in real-time factors like temperature and humidity for crocodile eggs. (Crocodile Eggs Real-Time Monitoring)
310. Into the Okavango – Trekking the Okavango in a journal style map – the world’s last great wetland wildernesses and UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Into the Okavango)
311. World Animal Protection – Becoming more resilient from future disasters. (World Animal Protection)
312. Linear Directional Mean – Determining the trend for the movement of elk and moose in a stream valley could calculate the directional trend of migration routes for the two species.
313. Wa-Tor Predator-Prey Simulation – Simulating ecological predator-prey populations with randomness and rule-based responses.
314. Golden Eagle Tracking – Tracking Golden eagle populations using a Biodiversity Tracking System in Manifold GIS.
315. Earth Trends Modeler – Assessing long term climate trends, measuring seasonal trends in phenology, and decomposing image time series to seek recurrent patterns in space and time in IDRISI TerraSet.
316. Ecological Barrier – Marking physically isolated barriers between species.
317. Geotagging Photos – Specifying wildlife photo locations through geotagging and streamlining the importing process with ArcPhoto.
17 Economics GIS Applications

Economics GIS Applications

318. Spatial Econometrics – Intersecting spatial analysis with economics. (GeoDa)
319. World Economic Outlook – Projecting the future economy and key macroeconomic indicators with the World Economic Outlook – IMF (World Economic Outlook)
320. Goods Flow – Illustrating the flow of people or goods from point to point based on values with desire lines. (Maptitude Flow Lines)
321. Globalization – Measuring the degree and extent of economic globalization using international trade data through time.
322. The Thünen Model – Distributing the production themselves in space incorporating costs of transport and factor mobility.
323. Economic Freedom – Mapping economic freedom throughout the world – an annual guide published by The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation (Economic Freedom Heat Map)
324. Geographic Portfolio – Diversifying your stock portfolio geographically for different countries and stock markets of the world.
325. Global Trade – Exporting goods start at a location and ends up in another.
326. Geographic Innovation Index – Investigating the relations between geographic proximity to innovation resources and stock returns. (Geographic Innovation Index)
327. Economic Base Indicator – Viewing economic indicators for business, industry and demography based on radial, drive and proximity.
328. Thematic Mapping – Portraying economic data like unemployment and labor information in time-series thematic maps because maps speak to people
329. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – Carving out boundaries for sovereign rights regarding the exploration of marine resources below the surface of the sea
330. Gross Domestic Product – Creating continuous area cartograms. (Cartogram QGIS Plugin)
331. Global Transition to a New Economy – Prioritizing human well-being through a crowd-sourced sustainable projects map. (Global Transition to a New Economy)
332. Trade Area – Delineating the geographic area where a certain percentage of a store’s customers live.
333. Economic Costs of Pollution – Assessing greener growth options and the costs of pollution in India by understanding the current state of environment degradation.
18 Education GIS Applications

Education GIS Applications

334. Campus Navigation – Navigate through a university campus with online mapping applications.
335. Neogeography – Opening the floodgates for individuals to create their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset
336. Projection Art – Investigating our Earth by understanding map projections. (National Geographic – Projection Art)
337. Macroscope – Seeing through the macroscope – our earth as a whole rather than be taken apart In their constituents. (Macroscope)
338. Bus Services – Assessing which addresses in proximity to a school are eligible for busing.
339. Safe Routes to School Mapping Toolkit – Deciding the safest route to school.
340. Geospatial Revolution – Captivating audiences with the Penn State Geospatial Revolution
341. Cartographic Modelling – Using map algebra to depict the relationships of transportation and geography on access to adult literacy centers in Philadelphia.
19 Energy GIS Applications

Energy GIS Applications

342. Nuclear Power Risk – Conceptualizing nuclear power plant radioactive release with evacuation time and population exposed.
343. Marine Renewable Energy – Seeing the ocean of information with wave heights and wind for electric dam selection.
344. Concession – Putting concession licenses that give a company the right to drill for oil or gas and exploratory drilling boreholes on a map.
345. World Power Types – Seeing how much of the world is being powered by fossil fuels, nuclear and renewable sources. (What Powers the World?)
346. Nuclear Waste Site Selection – Safeguarding people with proper nuclear waste disposal
347. Water Yields and Scarcity – Estimating water yields and scarcity at a sub-watershed level to calculate hydroelectric potential to the year 2100. Water Scarcity with Ecosystem Services Modeler IDRISI – The Ecosystem Services Modeler (ESM)
348. Access Limitation – Calculating access limitations for building like slope being a major factor for getting wagons up the hill to the site.
349. Coal Stockpiles – Capturing satellite imagery of frequent shots of open pit mines and resource stockpiles to better understand how much coal has been mined each month. (Coal Stockpiles)
350. Shale Gas Plays – Depicting current and prospective shale gas resource areas in shale basins from the Energy Information Association.
351. Dam Sites Selection – Comparing hypothetical dam sites by potential water storage to understand how land use/land cover is impacted.
352. Energy Consumption – Drawing out energy capacity and consumption on a map. (World Energy Consumption Map)
353. Wind Farm Site Selection – Selecting suitable wind farm by understanding wind power, transmission capacity, road access and developable land. (Fugro Site Selection)
354. Turbine Visibility – Discerning visibility of wind for potential changes on a landscape, such as the effect of adding wind farms, or the addition of a new building to an urban area.
355. Radar Interference – Calculating potential radar interference and conflicts between turbines and airport approach/landing surfaces with 3D analysis.
20 Engineering GIS Applications

Engineering GIS Applications

356. Asset Management – Managing infrastructure data maintenance along with their lifecycle (GeoMedia Asset Management)
357. Building Permits – Helping the user determine whether or not a requested permit is in an historic district, an aquifer protection district, wetland, or floodplain.
358. CAD Interoperability – Integrating CAD data (DWG, DXF) into GIS and vice versa.
359. Construction Environmental Management Plan – Mitigating the potential negative impacts of engineering projects by identifying environmentally sensitive sites and mitigation measures.
360. COGO – Constructing points, spirals, curves and arcs with coordinate geometry.
361. Real-time Sensors – Monitoring carbon monoxide in real-time with GeoEvent Extension with set thresholds and alerts (Valarm Monitoring Company)
362. Augmented Reality – Pulling up engineering diagrams and real-time sensor networks to view water pressure or amperage. (Augmented Reality)
363. Cut & Fill – Carving out 3D cut and fills for major civil engineering projects such as major road constructions.
364. Department of Interior – Constructing dams, power plants, and canals for protecting water and water-related resources in the United States. (Bureau of Reclamation)
365. Facility Management – Optimizing energy efficiency with building automation services for a more comprehensive view of a building.
366. Artificial Dam – Damming a site artificially by raising the elevations along a dam site using a Euclidean distance grid and map algebra.
367. Development Area – Getting the big picture by tapping into GIS data like gentle slopes, and closeness to roads.
21 Environment GIS Applications

Environment GIS Applications

368. Environmental Impact Assessment – Measuring anticipated effects on the environment of a proposed development project
369. Site Remediation – Removing contamination from a plot of land detailing risk exposure and an overview with maps.
370. Fire Growth Simulation – Extinguishing fires faster by understand how they grow in discrete steps bringing together wind, weather and fuel for the fire. (FireScience BehavePlus)
371. Surface Water Flow – Characterizing water flow to be identified as high consequence for oil spill mitigation.
372. Dead Zones – Mapping out dead zones where marine life is unable to be supported.
373. Canadian Land Inventory – Charting out land capability to sustain agriculture, forestry and recreation.
374. Non-point Source Pollution – Modelling non-point source pollution like soil erosion and sedimentation which are often controlled by variables such as land use/cover, topography, soils and rainfall.
375. Wetland Inventory – Delineating wetlands by types and function. (National Wetlands Inventory)
376. Invasive Species Modular Dispersal – Modelling the spread of a species’ population distribution through time occupancy maps (GRASS GIS Species Dispersal)
377. Storm Water Runoff – Conserving nearby resources such as water and flora by better managing runoff.
378. Brownfield and Greenfield Sites – Digging up the background information (Phase 1) and conducting the necessary geo-technical analyses to explore economic opportunities at brownfield and greenfield sites.
379. Ozone – Motivating the world to do their part by mapping the spatial distribution of ozone concentrations.
380. SWAT Model – Testing the effectiveness of agriculture and environmental policies for pollution control systems in a given watershed. (mwSWAT Plugin in MapWindow – United Nations University)
381. Karst – Identifying known cave and karst resources into a sinkhole digitization database for best interstate alignment selection. (Karst Database)
382. Permafrost – Interpreting permafrost probability in the Yukon. (Yukon Permafrost Probability Map)
383. Traffic Sign Deterioration – Assessing the effects of air pollutants on traffic sign deterioration. (Traffic Sign Deterioration)
384. Impoundment Index Tool for Wetlands – Unearthing wetlands with Impoundment Index Tool to site potential wetland restoration projects, monitor wetland drainage and model beaver habitat. (Whitebox GAT Impoundment Index Tool)
22 Forestry GIS Applications

Forestry GIS Applications

385. Forest Inventory – Prioritizing timber harvesting units by referring to age class and forest type to better measure timber acreage and average estimates.
386. Forest Fires – Plotting out forest fires with MODIS. (University of Maryland Forest Fires)
387. Deforestation – Gauging deforestation using land cover change in time.
388. Reforestation – Recharging forests through tree planting planning on a map.
389. Forest Heights – Measuring tree heights with altimetry and noticing how trees generally differ 20m with taller ones at the equator. (GLAS Satellite)
390. Vertical Point Profile – Viewing vertical profile of 3D LiDAR points to better understand tree structure and height. (TNT LiDAR)
391. Cut Lines – Finding cut lines in ortho imagery to find easy access.
392. Tree Lines – Drawing tree lines in the Canadian Arctic.
393. Illegal Logging – Identify potential illegal activity with satellite data. (Global Forest Watch)
394. Forest Carbon Reserves – Sequestering carbon through forest reserves and carbon observed in atmosphere.
395. Agent-Based Simulation – Simulating the spread of an agent (like a fire) triggered by random events (such as lightning) on a raster landscape in discrete time. (GME Cellular Automata Model)
396. Global Forest Watch – Putting all the pieces together with an integrated forest watch online platform.
397. Drones for Indonesia Indigenous – Promoting sustainable forests using drones in Setulang village, Indonesia. (Drones for Indonesia)
398. Wildfire Rescue – Saving lives through real-time wildfire satellite monitoring.
399. Vegetation Potential – Analyzing tree growth & distribution of vegetation with west/east-facing and aspect data.
400. Leaf Area Index – Summing the total area of leaves per ground unit.
401. Amazon Rain Forest – Maximizing satellite potential viewing soil erosion, watershed destabilization, climate degradation, and species extinction in Brazil.
402. Remnant Rain Forest – Studying aspect data to find how remnants of rainforest are almost always found on east-facing slopes (with aspect) which are protected from dry westerly wind.
403. 4D GIS – Getting to know the XYZ’s with time of timber harvesting and subsequent vegetation growth.
404. Age of Trees – Inventorying the XY position and rings of trees in a database to understand its age.
405. Forest Disease – Mapping the impact of how forest infestations like the mountain pine beetle has on forests and the economy. (Google Fusion Tables – Disease Map)
406. Wildfire Simulation – Automating the spread of wildfire in time using the 3D virtual workspace of Capaware.
23 Gaming GIS Applications

Gaming GIS Applications

407. Oculus Rift – Building realistic 3D environments with Esri CityEngine because virtual reality is all about location and a sense of place. (Esri CityEngine and Oculus Rift)
408. Building Virtual Environments – Designing future buildings, roads, cities, and parks with video game contributions. (GIS and Gaming – Matt Artz)
409. Geoguessr – Embarking on an educational journey that takes you all over the world (Geoguessr)
410. Mercator Projection Game – Learning about shape, size, and conformity of the Earth with map projections.
411. Spatial Data Integration – Intersecting the gaming world with rich, real-world, spatial data integration.
412. Planet Hunters – Finding undiscovered planets with crowd-source style online games. (Planet Hunters)
24 Gardening GIS Applications

Gardening GIS Applications

413. Living Plant Collection – Managing garden collections and plant records with the ArcGIS Public Garden Data Model like the UC Davis Arboretum, Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University and Smithsonian Garden. (Public Gardens GIS)
414. Gardening Microclimates – Studying microclimates (temperature from large bodies of water, topography, urban areas trapping heat) to carefully choose and position their plants and make them thrive.
415. Information Delivery – Inspire and educate your visitors with intelligent web maps of your park or garden.
416. Weeds – Storing weeds and herbicide dosage in a database to manage effectiveness and control measures.
417. Roof Gardening – Assessing average temperatures by zoning, water availability and position sheltering to identify buildings with the greatest potential for rooftop gardens.
418. Garden Reporting – Creating data-driven reports and mapbooks on collections of plants about conditions and hazards.
25 Geology GIS Applications

Geology GIS Applications

419. Drill Hole Planner – Drilling with 3D planning tools including depth, azimuth and positions. (MapInfo Discover 3D)
420. Aquifer Recharge – Determining potential aquifer recharge using steepness of slope and soil permeability
421. Well & Volumetric Data Visualization – Creating powerful, fast, customized 3D models with a fusion of geologic data, GIS data, well/borehole data, and point cloud data. (Voxler Golden Software)
422. Plate Wizard Project – Reconstructing converging and diverging plates through geologic time.
423. Geological Interpretation – Digitizing surficial geology (surface sediments, their morphology and properties) with air photo interpretation and field validation.
424. qgSurf – Interpreting geomorphological analyses based on their surface and orientation.
425. Marine Geology – Inventorying marine geology. (NOAA Marine Geology)
426. Geomorphology Features – Studying the nature and origin of landforms, including relationships to underlying structures and processes of formation.
427. Dip and Strike – Plotting dip and strike readings and their geological orientation with rotational symbols.
428. Digital Rock Engineering – Tunneling underground with attention to existing topography and its surrounding which includes above-ground and underground structures
429. Aeromagnetic Anomalies – Correlating aeromagnetic anomalies with surface geology in tectonically active region.
430. Continental Drift – Measuring tectonics plate movement with GPS
431. EnterVol Geology – Creating full 3D, volumetric models of geology direct from collected data integrating lithology data with surfaces. (EnterVol Geology)
432. Subsurface Mapping – Mapping the subsurface through well-log data by drillers with standard lithological terms and classification system
433. Landform Classification – Classifying landforms with qualitative analysis of the surface like summits, passes, convex/concave break lines, crests and more with gvSIG geomorphology tools.
434. Geologic Structure – Using photogrammetry in inaccessible regions in 2D and 3D cross-sections for geologic structure mapping. (Hexagon Geospatial Photogrammetry)
26 Geostatistics

Geostatistics GIS Applications

435. Spatial Autocorrelation – Testing whether the observed value of a variable at one locality is independent of the values of the variable at neighboring localities. (GeoDa Spatial Autocorrelation)
436. Data Mining – Automating the search for hidden patterns in large databases
437. Spatial Regression – Building spatial regression to models for estimating the relationship between spatial variables. (GeoDa Spatial Regression)
438. Zonal Statistics – Summing, averaging or finding the range, minimum or maximum in a given range.
439. Hexagon Tesselation – Defining sampling locations, helping to ensure that all regions within the study area are represented by the sampling results. (Hexagon Tesselation)
440. First Law of Geography – Using Tobbler’s First Law of Geography in analysis- “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”
441. Semi-variogram – Graphing the variance in measure with distance between sampled paired locations.
442. Space-Time Cube – Binning data (netCDF) into a cube input and running statistics, trends and hot spot analyses over time. (ArcGIS Space-Time Cube)
443. Map-ematics – Making math operations in maps like adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, exponentiation, root, log, cosine and differentiation (Map-ematics – Joseph Berry)
444. Kriging – Interpolating unknown measurements using kriging and other techniques.
445. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) – Combining input layers and a table with a number of factors comparing their comparative weights to calculate a new layer as a linear combination of the input layers.
446. Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) – Calculating the weighted average of a group of layers based on the order of values. (OWA – gvSIG)
447. Fishnet – Creating a fishnet to correlate coefficient between boating accidents and dams using a fishnet.
448. Geospatial Modelling Environment – Leveraging open source software R as the statistical engine to drive powerful analysis tools in ArcGIS.
449. Principal Components Analysis – Reducing dimensions with Principal Components Analysis. (Principal Component Analysis)
450. Data Visualization in R – Writing each line of code to programmatically create maps (R Data Visualization – Robin Lovelace)
451. Fuzzy Logic – Applying fuzzy logic with degrees of truth because often do not have clearly defined boundaries.
452. Pivot Tables – Generate dynamic pivot tables in QGIS. (QGIS Group Stats Plugin)
453. Monte Carlo Simulation – Modeling spatial phenomena in with simulation models.
454. Minkowski Generalization – Determining how complicated object are with Minkowski fractal dimension (Minkowski–Bouligand dimension QGIS plugin)
455. Map Algebra – Applying local, focal and zonal functions techniques. (“GIS and Cartographic Modeling” by Dana Tomlin)
27 Groundwater GIS Applications

Groundwater GIS Applications

456. Darcy Flow – Examining the movement of groundwater flow through coarse materials like sand.
457. MODFLOW – Modelling groundwater demand and predicting impact of groundwater demand in basins. (Aquaveo Water Modeling)
458. Groundwater Availability – Analyzing land use practices with water availability and quality.
459. Aquifer Recharge – Measuring permeability recharge and quantifying growth over time.
460. Groundwater Plume – Delineating groundwater contamination and its change.
461. Hydrostratigraphy – Identifying mappable units on the basis of aquifer hydraulic properties.
462. DRASTIC – Evaluating the vulnerability of pollution of groundwater resources based on hydrogeological parameters.
463. 3D Borehole – Symbolizing sub-surface data like bore holes magnitude with inverted depths.
464. Groundwater Volume – Determining to drill a new well by examining existing groundwater and surface water.
465. Stratigraphy – Plotting boreholes, cross section and well logs. (Golden Software Strata)
466. Contamination – Evaluating the risk of impact for the construction and situating industrial plants, landfills, agricultural activities and other potential groundwater contamination sources
467. Porous Puff – Calculating mass per volume of a solute at a discrete point into a vertically mixed aquifer with the ArcGIS Groundwater Tools.
468. Shallow Slope Stability (SHALSTAB) – Computing grid cells that are critical shallow groundwater recharge values.
28 Healthy Mapping

Health GIS Applications

469. HealthMap – Delivering real-time, global disease monitoring (HealthMap)
470. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) – Serving county-level maps of heart disease and stroke by race/ethnicity, gender, and age group, along with maps of social and economic factors and health services for the entire United States or for a chosen state or territory. (Interactive Atlas of Heart and Stroke)
471. Leukemia Research – Investigating leukemia clusters with proximity to transmission lines.
472. John Snow – Forging a whole new field of study (epidemiology) by studying the spatial distribution of cholera cases and identifying the source of the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street.
473. Ebola – Mapping the change of confirmed and probable cases of Ebola over time. (World Health Organization)
474. Distance to Health Care – Finding the closest doctor is a spatial problem
475. Vital Records – Recording of events, such as births and deaths that are maintained by public health agencies.
476. Lead Concentrations – Correlating how children with lead poisoning were found to be closer to an old lead refinery.
477. Cluster Analysis – Identifying built environmental patterns using cluster analysis and GIS: relationships with walking, cycling and body mass index. (Cluster Analysis)
478. Euclidean Distance – Finding the distance to disposal sites during an avian flu outbreak.
479. Disease Surveillance – Monitoring West Nile Virus with GIS on handheld devices.
480. Asthma – Connecting the dots of asthma and air pollution.
481. Epidemiology – Tracking disease and epidemiological information in a spatial database. (CDC Epi-Info)
482. UV Exposure – Exposing the risks of harmful UV rays with birth rates.
483. Mobile Flu Shots – Determining an optimal site location for mobile flu shot vehicles to service where demand is needed most with location-allocation.
484. Geomedicine –Tracking patient’s location history to determine if environmental and industrial hazards put them at risk for certain types of diseases
485. Madrid’s Air – Visualization Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc) with the aim to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents. (Madrid’s Air Map)
486. Ambulance Response – Responding to emergencies faster with the quickest geographic route.
487. Infant Mortality – Track child immunizations with mortality rates.
488. Food Trust – Overlapping factors like poverty and obesity, fresh supermarkets, diet-related disease – space to target for policy-makers
489. Public Health Informatics – Ensuring patients get the care they need with public health care informatics.
490. Walgreens Prescription Mapping – Mapping and analyzing influenza based on the prescriptions customers are making to respond to the need of users more efficiently. (Walgreens Weekly Flu Index Webmap)
491. Disease Spread Patterns – Plotting ellipses for a disease outbreak over time to model its spread.
492. Walkability – Piecing together walkable neighborhoods with health diseases like heart disease, hypertension, obesity and even breast cancer.
493. Anti-Smoking Campaigns – Targeting Anti-smoking campaigns where it’s needed most and most visible to target audience.
494. Cancer Research – Researching cancer from the sky with the Landsat satellite. (Landsat Cancer Research)
495. Mosquitoes-borne Illness – Identifying areas with high indices of mosquito infestation and interpreting the spatial relationship of these areas with potential larval development sites such as garbage piles and large pools of standing water.
496. HIV AIDS Database – Making the distribution of HIV/AIDS to manage treatment.
497. Tele-medicine – Quantifying populations and health care availability when distance separates patients and health care providers.

History GIS Applications

498. Shipwrecks – Documenting the remains of shipwrecks, aircraft, hulks, lost anchors and any other objects on the seabed through the SHIPS Project. (SHIPS Project – Shipwrecks Mapping)
499. American Museum of Natural History – Apply biodiversity information to collect, organize and analyze biological and environmental data with the aim to provide new insights in conservation, ecology and evolution. (American Museum of Natural History)
500. Topoview Slider Publishing maps with a slider style map to see how an area looked before development and how it changes over time. (USGS Topoview)
501. Micronesian Navigational Chart – Navigating by canoe using stick charts as ocean swell patterns.
502. Historical Photos – Geo-locating historical photos in augmented reality. (WhatWasThere application)
503. Babylonians – Etching the lay of the land on clay.
504. Old Weather – Tracking past ship movements and telling the stories of the people on board by studying weather patterns. (Old Weather)
505. Pilgrimages – Setting foot on a pilgrimage and mapping the distances traveled.
506. Boundary Changes – Carving out how boundaries change in time such as after World War II.
507. Spy Glass – Time-travelling back to 1836 in New York powered by Esri. (Smithsonian Institution)
508. Industrial Revolution Radioactivity – Putting radioactivity on the map since the industrial revolution.
509. 3D Historical Fly-through – Soaring through historical imagery with ArcScene.
510. Smoke Signals – Using viewsheds to put yourself in Native Americans shoes when smoke signals were used.
511. Ancestry – Surveying through ancestry with geophylogeny – the evolution and geographic spread of common ancestry and geographic connectedness.
512. ArcGIS Online Historical Maps – Exploring the old USGS historic maps. (USGS Historic Maps)
513. Manhattan Immigration Patterns – Showing how immigrants in Manhattan varied not only through space, but also time. (Past Time, Past Place: GIS For History)
514. Aztec vs Mexican Last Names – Aligning current place-names to historical place-names to understand the ancient geography of Aztec culture. (Aztec and Mexican Last Names)
515. Witchcraft Accusers – Gathering the geographic location of the accusers and accused during the Salem witch trials to show inter-family feuds were a strong case for the trials instead of hysteria among young girls.
516. Cultural Preservation – Preserving historic properties whose documentation must still be located and entered into this GIS.
517. Pangea – Drawing the different stages of the continental evolution from Pangea to the Earth we see today.
518. Napolean’s March to Moscow in 3D – Visualizing troop movement, cities, basemaps, temperature in time slices using Esri’s CityEngine Napolean’s March to Moscow. (Napolean March in 3D)
519. Georeferencing Historical Imagery – Straightening historical imagery using georeferencing.
520. Human Activity Patterns – Engraving activity on maps showing human movement patterns with time-enabled GIS.
521. Land Bridges – Agreeing on an acceptable term for “land bridge” – which was an area available due to the water tied up in ice sheets.
522. Lewis and Clark – Charting out the Lewis and Clark expedition.
30 Hydrology GIS Applications


Hydrology GIS Applications


523. Braided Rivers – Managing braided rivers with their complex geometry and state in flux.
524. Sedimentation Rate – Characterizing erosion and sedimentation with the Sediment Transport Index.
525. Catchment Areas – Delineating watershed catchment areas, where rainfall flows into a river. (Mapping Watersheds in Whitebox GAT)
526. Topographic Wetness Index – Combining slope and upstream area to give you relative measure of wetness as the first places where the ground saturates, begins to pool, and generates runoff.
527. Flow Direction – Coding the direction of flow with eight valid directions. (Flo 2D)
528. Flow Estimator – Estimating flow rates with a series of spatially-located gauging stations.
529. Height Above River – Generating predictive surfaces for plant species distribution modeling using high resolution DEM data. (LiDAR Height Above River)
530. Sinuosity – Measuring the degree of channelization and meandering for a given watercourse.
531. Stream Feature Extractor – Extracting stream features (wells, sinks, confluences etc.) from a stream network. (Stream Feature Extractor QGIS Plugin)
532. Hydrologic Volume – Measuring volumes for the Hydrologic Budget Equation and amount of precipitation in a given watershed.
533. HEC-HMS – Simulating the complete hydrologic processes of dendritic watershed systems with the HEC-HMS GIS-based methodology.
534. Flow Accumulation – Answering the question “where did water come from” by picking a point (a single cell in the DEM) and tracing backwards showing all the contributing cells. (TauDEM)
535. Scalgo – Understanding Earth’s hydrology as a function of topography using the SRTM DEM. (SCALGO)
536. GHydraulics – Analyzing water supply networks using EPANET. (Ghydraulics QGIS Plugin)
537. Aqueduct – Mining, Modeling and analyzing water risk with the current and future stresses. (Aqueduct Atlas)
538. Contour Lines – Delineating contour lines because floods follow contour lines.
539. Flood Extents – Digitizing flood extents worth satellite data like synthetic aperture radar.
540. BASINS (Better Assessment Science Integrating point & Non-point Source) – Running water quality assessments with land use, point source discharges, and water supply withdrawals.
541. Crayfish QGIS Plugin – Animating flood model outputs and flood propagation. (TUFLOW)
542. ArcHydro – Operating ArcHydro in ArcMap to delineate and characterize watersheds.
543. Drainage Channel Builder – Cutting a simple, trapezoidal channel in a DEM and calculate cut volumes. (Drainage Channel Builder QGIS Plugin)
544. HEC-RAS Flow Model – Predicting where the water will go (flooding) to prevent inundated roads and inaccessibility. (RiverGIS QGIS Plugin)
545. Horton Statistics – Calculating the number of streams, the average stream length, the average area of catchments for Strahler stream orders (ILWIS)
546. Flow Stations – Marking flow stations on a map.
547. Water Shortage – Modelling water shortage California
548. Upstream/Downstream – Finding the origin of water from a specific point. (Hydro Hierarchy)
549. MIKE21 – Simulating physical, chemical or biological processes in coastal or marine areas. (MIKE21)
550. Oxbows – Mapping the evolving process of how rivers change in time and become oxbows
31 Humanitarian GIS Applications


Humanitarian GIS Applications


551. Election Violence – Reporting issues like outbreaks of violence, intimidation, or vote fraud during Tanzania’s election. (Restless Development – What3Words)
552. Ushahidi Haiti Project – Plotting out crisis reports during the Haiti earthquake for humanitarian/tech workers aid with crowdsourcing. (Ushahidi Haiti Project)
553. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap – Responding to humanitarian issues and economic development through open data sharing. (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap)
554. Community Engagement – Harnessing human potential by leveraging open data and civic technology. (Kathmandu’s Living Labs)
555. Kibera Slum – Mapping sites of rape and crime by the people themselves to solve where a police station should be located (and more). (Kibera Slum)
556. Crisis Mapping – Using drones to aid Nepalese in a time of crisis.
557. Food Security – Delivering assistance with expected outputs to those in need most.
558. Humanitarian Assistance – Plotting the spatial distribution of humanitarian assistance for planning purposes.
559. Food Insecurity Drivers – Pinpointing the underlying drivers to food insecurity such as farming practices, climate change and changing demographics.
32 Insurance GIS Applications


Insurance GIS Applications


560. Insurance Risk – Charging higher insurance premiums in flood-prone areas using radar
561. Monitoring Driving Habits – Fastening seat belts and monitoring people’s usage to charge car insurance.
562. Insurance Fraud – Doing the detective work for fraudulent crop insurance claims
563. Floodplain – Minimizing losses by flooding through FEMA flood maps.
564. Real-time Hazard – Using location intelligence to Identify areas of hazard in real-time.
565. Climate Change Risk – Adjusting to climate change with better future risk prediction.
566. Social Media Integrating – Finding all Flickr posts within 100 meters of a property during incidents.
567. Sinkholes – Preventing risk by understanding landscape characteristics – such as resulting depressions in a karst landscape.
568. Underwriting – Accelerating underwriting by sharing enterprise geographic data with risk factors, customer interaction and economic conditions.
569. Swimming Pools – Crowd sourcing the search for swimming pools from sponsored campaigns who compile public and private sector data for a variety of markets including education, public safety, and insurance. (Mapping Swimming Pools)
33 Internet GIS Applications


Internet GIS Applications


570. Geoblocking – Limiting your access to the internet, based on your geographic location.
571. Hyperlinking – Embedding hyperlinks with access actual photos, video, audio, text and data associated with map locations.
572. Mapzen Search – Searching geographically with a spatial search engine for places based entirely on open-source tools and powered by entirely open data. (Mapzen Search)
573. Geosocial Tools – Searching twitter geographically for tweets with the gvSIG Geosocial Toolbox.
574. GIS-Based Search Engine – Correlating products and services to a GIS database record that corresponds to a unique geographic location – to geographically target advertising over the Internet (GIS-Based Search Engine)
34 Land Use Planning


Landuse GIS Applications


575. Urban Model Development Feasibility – Evaluating multiple land use scenarios; testing and refining transportation plans; producing small-area concept plans, and modeling complex regional issues with Envision Tomorrow (Envision Tomorrow)
576. Land-use Conflict Identification (LUCIS) Model – Making smart land-use decisions with a model-builder framework land-use conflict identification strategy. (Smart Land-Use Analysis: The LUCIS Model)
577. Beijing Building Footprints – Crowd-sourcing digital mapping of Beijing building footprints. (Identifying Beijing Building)
578. Food Deserts – Accessing grocery stores in low income areas by incorporating information such as sidewalks, bicycle lanes, and public transit.
579. Service Areas – Measuring how far paramedics and firefighters can service an area.
580. Agent-Based Models – Exploring cities using Agent-Based Models and GIS. (GIS Agents)
581. Cloud Computing-Based Land Base Mapping – Bringing land use planning to the cloud for Smart Cities like the City of Portland. (Cloud Computing)
582. OpenStreetMap – Harnessing the power of the OpenStreetMap by download the physical data for free (OSM Download)
583. Landfill Site Selection – Analyzing and eliminating sites within a buffer distance of sensitive populations (elderly, schools, hospitals, etc) and other overlay information like groundwater, transportation networks and surface water.
584. TerraClip – Clipping data like you’ve never clipped before – extracting land cover, climate and agriculture data easily to the extent of your chosen country. (TerraClip)
585. Green Roofs – Greening roofs in metropolitan areas with a focus on lighting and shadow analysis.
586. Stamen Maps – Orienting yourself with Stamen’s terrain maps with hill shading and natural vegetation colors.
587. Cellular Automata – Stimulating urban growth expansion simulation. (IDRISI Cellular Automata)
588. Tax Parcel Viewer – Assembling tax parcels, zoning information with color schemes on a web viewer.
589. Economic Viability – Making decisions of parcels of prime agricultural land using Analytic Hierarchy Process.
590. Water Distribution – Tracking flow, pressure and chemical concentrations for nodes, valves, pipes and tanks in a water distribution modelling software. (EPANET)
591. Commercial Space Availability – Checking zoning data for any city such as commercial space availability.
592. Land Use Policy – Reproducing individual behavior with agent-based modeling to simulate their behaviors and outcomes having a direct impact of the surrounding landscape. (Agent-Based Modeling)
593. City Heating – Addressing the GIS requirements of municipal hot water heating networks in Tatuk GIS (Tatuk GIS- City Heating)
594. Commuter Shed – Finding where the commuter sheds are.
595. Recycling Centres/Drop-offs – Allocating recycling drop-offs centers with data integration and quantification and assigning alternatives for vehicle routing.
596. Walkshed – Calculating walking times using Tobbler’s hiking function based on slope (QGIS Walking Time Plugin) Walkshed Web GIS
597. 3D Viewshed – Showing what is visible with distance, direction and pitch with viewable areas in green and hidden areas in red. (3D Viewshed – Geomedia 3D)
598. Anaglyph 3D – Viewing anaglyph 3D images with the SAGA GIS Anaglyph Tool.
599. Land Use Change – Summarizing statistics, graphs and tables in spatial units
600. Tax Collection – Increasing tax revenue by updated land and building property records, new construction records, and integrated departmental data into a single cadastral information system using Bentley Map.
601. COAST COastal Adaptation to Sea level Rise Tool – Adapting to climate change decisions (building sea walls, proactive building ordinance, levees, zoning change, relocation with COAST. (COAST – Global Mapper)
602. Space Syntax Models – Gaining a better understanding of human behavior and connectivity through graphic representation of space configuration in urban structures.
603. Philadelphia Redevelopment – Developing urban planning scenarios using a 3D swipe view. (Philadelphia CityEngine)
604. Future Development Patterns – Locating future growth and evaluating scenarios such as loss of prime agricultural land. (Tale of Two Cities)
605. Land Use – Generating polygons and classification with the multi-resolution segmentation algorithm. (Trimble ECognition)
606. Building Constraints – Prohibiting construction where the overall stability of a bluff using aspect to understand how- south-facing slopes undergo more extensive freeze/thaw cycles.

http://gisgeography.com/gis-applications-uses/