As we begin the course, it is important to delve into the unique aspects or distinctive characteristics of employing geospatial technology in the context of environmental challenges. The term 'environmental' can encompass varied interpretations for different individuals, and even within the realm of GIS, there exist diverse perspectives and various ways to frame it. Within this lesson, we will strive to clarify this area of application by introducing environmental concepts, exploring three instances of environmental challenges, and contemplating the role played by GIS and other geospatial technology in addressing these challenges.
At the successful completion of Lesson 1, you will have:
If you have questions now or at any point during this lesson, please feel free to post them in the Lesson 1 Discussion.
This lesson is one week in length and is worth a total of 100 points. Please refer to the Course Calendar for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page first so that you can follow along with the directions. Simply click the arrow to navigate through the lesson and complete the activities in the order that they are displayed.
SDG image retrieved from the United Nations [1]
Environmental geospatial technology applications typically manage a physical system involving its land, water, air, and biota. An interesting question to ask is, “for whom are we managing this environment?” We can divide environmental applications of geospatial technology and data into two broad categories within this line of inquiry: 1) managing the environment to protect ecosystem services that humans rely on, and 2) managing the environment for its own sake and protecting the wildlife that lives there.
One way to distinguish these two scenarios is by using the labels conservation and preservation. Conservation is the management of natural resources that we, humans, use so that they are available today and will be available to us in the future. These ecosystem services include managing the environment to protect sources of clean drinking water, vegetation that prevents erosion and filters the air, landscapes that have healthy soil that will continue to support agriculture and food production, and bolstering insect populations, like bees, which are required to sustain plants and food we eat. On the other hand, preservation is the management of habitats and natural areas so that they are unmolested by human activity and allowed to operate according to their natural processes and support wildlife for its own sake. In many cases, it may appear that we are protecting the environment for its own sake when, in fact, we are protecting the ecosystem services that benefit humans. This begs the question of whether all of our management activities target ecosystem services.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) [2] defines ecosystem services this way and illustrates the four categories in Figure 1:
Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling. The human species, while buffered against environmental changes by culture and technology, is fundamentally dependent on the flow of ecosystem services.
There is some overlap between the conservation and preservation approaches to environmental management, but it’s useful to be cognizant of this distinction when performing analyses so we have a clear understanding of our end goal and what our results are intended to inform.
Let’s narrow our focus on environmental management from the broad concepts of conservation and preservation and contemplate some specific themes to which GIS and geospatial technology could be applied. Some that come to mind are:
I see these application areas as likely use cases for geospatial technology within an environmental context. These themes overlap with many disciplines like medicine, engineering, biology, and chemistry, which makes defining “environmental” challenging. There are environmental aspects to all of these themes, and geospatial technology is well-suited to many of them. So, what is it about these themes that make them well-suited to use geospatial technology? How are we using geospatial technology in these contexts that are unique relative to other geospatial applications? Ultimately, how can we evaluate environmental challenges in spatial data science?”
To help answer these questions, this course presents environmental challenges and engages analysis and evaluation methods with projects that are more representative of what you might encounter in the field as an environmental analyst of some sort. As I think about the question of what 'environmental' is, I break it down into a few categories that can be useful in defining it. Consider the characteristics of each of the following prompts in the context of environmental applications:
I can imagine instances where environmental applications of geospatial technology stand apart from other projects in each of these categories. An outcome of Lesson 1 is to identify how environmental geospatial applications are unique by digesting some background material and having a discussion about it. In the next section, we will investigate three particular use cases of environmental geospatial applications to help frame our discussion.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis [3]. Island Press, Washington, DC.
UN Environment (2019). Global Environment Outlook – GEO-6: Healthy Planet, Healthy People. Nairobi, Kenya. University Printing House [4], Cambridge, United Kingdom.
The deliverable for this week is a discussion about the role of geospatial technology and spatial data in environmental management. To facilitate that discussion, I present three well-suited applications for geospatial technology utilization. Take a look at the resources provided here, and feel free to extend your search beyond these links to get an idea of what these use cases entail and how geospatial technology and spatial data fit into the process. I've chosen these three applications to try to represent different types of environmental work: a large construction project, municipal waste management, and wildfire and resource management. They are each what we would consider "environmental challenges." Still, each has a different purpose and context that range from broad-scale government regulation to local-scale engineering to applied science. Think about any similarities or differences among these examples as you explore them.
In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act [5] and the Environmental Protection Agency [6] were created to formalize attention on the environmental impacts of other decisions and projects. Browse their websites and any other resources you discover to research what NEPA and the EPA are all about. Specifically, look at what their missions are.
A key component of NEPA is the requirement for certain projects to develop an Environmental Impact statement (EIS) that details the potential consequences of the project's implementation on the physical environment. EISs, therefore, are essentially thorough analyses of large construction projects and how they might interact with all sorts of physical and biological systems. These statements have tremendous potential for geospatial technology application due to the spatially-explicit nature of the large projects that require an EIS. The official specification for Environmental Impact Statements [7] can be found in the Federal Code of Regulations. Check out sections 1502.1, 1502.15, and 1502.16, which provide some insights into why EISs are required and what they should include.
To view a completed EIS, all of which are public records, you can search for one on the EPA website [8]. To help you see a final EIS, I've downloaded one for a couple of wind farm projects:
Other related documents that you might find interesting are: the GPWF Record of Decision [11], which details how or if the project will proceed, and a video that describes the completed Grand Praire Wind Farm project [12] and a video that describes
The University Area Joint Authority (UAJA) [13] manages the wastewater treatment for the municipalities of State College and the surrounding region. It is a traditional municipal sewage treatment facility that is responsible for the transport of sewage into the facility and the disposal of residual waste and water. Some of the facility's output enters local waterways directly, and other outputs are reused in agricultural settings, an initiative they call "beneficial reuse alternatives." Additionally, the UAJA has addressed other environmental impacts, such as an issue with odors in the nearby neighborhoods.
These two activities, beneficial reuse and odor control, provide opportunities for geospatial analysis. UAJA produced a report describing their plans for alternative uses of treated wastewater [14]. You will see sections about different options, including urban reuse, agricultural irrigation, and direct injection, and the potential impacts of these plans on drinking water quality and water temperature. UAJA also shared findings from an odor study [15] performed in response to complaints from residents living near the treatment facility. The study sampled odor levels in various locations surrounding the facility and identified possible sources of the nuisance smells. Efforts to control the odors require spatial data showing where issues currently occur, where they originate, and how they are transported via wind, etc. Much of the sample data was collected using "human sensory testing" via an observation form [16]. The form is interesting both for the fun of seeing how odors are classified and, more importantly, how the location of each observation was recorded, which has implications for how the spatial data must be processed for use in a GIS. This is a form [17] that citizens can submit to record an odor observation.
Wildfires stand as one of the most catastrophic natural disasters, impacting millions of acres burned and countless ecosystems globally each year. Their consequences extend to endangering human well-being, biodiversity, climate stability, and socio-economic progress. In order to avert, control, and alleviate the ramifications of these fast-moving fires, dependable and prompt data regarding fire frequency, behavior, and repercussions are imperative for researchers and decision-makers. In this context, geospatial technology and spatial data emerge as potent instruments capable of furnishing vital insights.
NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System [18], or FIRMS [18], is a tool that provides data about active fires and thermal anomalies or hot spots. As outlined on the website, the focus and objectives of FIRMS include "providing quality resources for fire data on demand, working with end users to enhance critical applications, assisting global organizations in fire analysis efforts, delivering effective data presentation and management." The University of Maryland originally developed the system using funding from NASA's Applied Sciences Program and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). FIRMS migrated to NASA's LANCE (Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS) in 2012.
Real-time fire detections in the U.S. and Canada are viewable online at FIRMS US/Canada Fire Map [19], and global fire detections are viewable online at FIRMS Global [20] within 3 hours of satellite observation. The active fire data is also downloadable [21] in various formats, including shapefiles and KML files. FIRMS uses satellite observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instruments to detect, verify, and track active fires and thermal anomalies or hot spots. The information is considered to be delivered in near real-time (NRT) to decision-makers through alerts, analysis-ready data, online maps, and web services.
For additional information, check out the AGO StoryMap: FIRMS: Fire Information for Resource Management System Managing Wildfires with Satellite Data [22]. Also, data about air quality during wildfires can be found at AirNow [23]. The Fire and Smoke Map [23] reports information about wildfire smoke and air quality information using the official U.S. Air Quality Index (AQI) for more than 500 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Try viewing the full extent of North America as well as zooming in on your city or region.
Answering the question, "What are environmental applications of geospatial technology?" is perhaps more complicated than it first seems. This is due in part to the diversity of application areas, purposes, and audiences for geospatial analysis projects that deal with spatial data and the physical environment. This discussion activity is our opportunity to start engaging in environmental geospatial technology by talking about what it is before we get into the nuts and bolts of how we commonly implement it in later lessons.
First, read through the three scenarios on the previous page and think about how each of them represents an environmental application of geospatial technology.
In Lesson 1, we explored the definition of what environmental applications of geospatial technology are. In Lesson 2, we will start investigating available spatial data and ways to share maps with our audience.
Lesson 1 is worth a total of 100 points.
If you have anything you'd like to comment on or add to the lesson materials, feel free to post your thoughts in the Lesson 1 Discussion. For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson? Was there anything useful here that you'd like to try in your own workplace?
Links
[1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/#FAQ
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/MillenniumEcosysAssess2005.pdf
[3] https://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.aspx.pdf
[4] https://www.grida.no/publications/503
[5] https://ceq.doe.gov/
[6] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
[7] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=49d4e1271eb649bbbbefc2c9b076688d&mc=true&node=pt40.37.1502&rgn=div5
[8] https://cdxnodengn.epa.gov/cdx-enepa-II/public/action/eis/search
[9] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/activities/lesson01/FEIS_Grande%20Prairie_2014-12-29.pdf
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/FEIS%20Cover%20Abstract%20Acronyms%20Abbreviations%20ES%20TOC%20Text%20Tables%20Diagrams.pdf
[11] https://www.wapa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Rail-Tie-Wind-ROD-Final.pdf
[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0wsEZ71Rs
[13] http://www.uaja.com/
[14] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/BeneficialReuseReport.pdf
[15] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/OdorControlReport.pdf
[16] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog487/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog487/files/OdorForm.pdf
[17] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvwaFdE3nwov64reojORQIAtFHMhs0GFC2IDLQemioH_cJfA/viewform
[18] http://firms2.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/
[19] https://firms2.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map
[20] https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/
[21] https://firms2.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/active_fire/
[22] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9c011e1e569845c092eba5c377259202
[23] https://www.airnow.gov/fires/using-airnow-during-wildfires/