2.4 What Is Geography?

Welcome to the geospatial revolution.

Capt. Arturo Derryberry, U.S. Marian Corps: In a world where everybody's texting, geospatial technology is critical to understanding what's happening at a particular location.

Mark Brender, VP Communications, GEOEYE: It's the speed of the Internet. It's the capability of remote sensing satellites. It's software like Google Earth. Taken all together, you have an explosion in the way we view the Earth.

Text on screen: It starts with MAPS that show where everything is...

Walter Scott, Founder, Digitalglobe: Everybody's somewhere, everything's someplace, and a map is a way of organizing all of that information.

Text on screen: Made by REMOTE SENSORS from everywhere...

David Cowen: Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina: It's information from aircraft, from satellites. It can be a collection of information from a tower that you've set up.

Text on screen: and GPS that tells you where you are now...

Kass Green, President, KGA Geospatial:We've been using maps for hundreds and hundreds of years to know where we are. Now, that nice lady tells me which way to turn.

GPS voice: Turn right, then turn left.

Text on screen: with INFORMATION that tells you what's there...

Adena Schutzberg, President, ABS Consulting Group: Virtually all of the information that you're sharing with anybody these days has some kind of geospatial tag on it.

Text on screen: from PEOPLE everywhere communicating with everyone...

Patrich Meier, Director, Crisis Mapping, Ushidi: It's really the human element. There's basically this entire information ecosystem that we have access to now.

Text on screen: inside MOBILE devices that put the world... in the palm of YOUR hand.

Joe Fancica, Editor-in-Cheif, Directions Media: I can receive information. I can transmit information. I can broadcast my location. And that is revolutionary.

Jan Van Sickle, Geomatic Engineer: It's amazing. It's cutting-edge. It's--well, changing the world.

How We Get There

GPS voice: In 1/10 mile, turn right at stop sign.

David DiBiase, Dept. of Geography, Penn State: Some people will call this a GPS. It's not. It's a GPS receiver. It is, I think it's fair to say, a miracle of science and technology. It's able to collect signals from global positioning satellites far up in space.

Adena Schutzberg: Each one of them is, every moment of every day, saying, "This is the location that I'm at in orbit around the Earth." If you know where you are with respect to three satellite points, you can use mathematics to determine where you must be on the face of the Earth.

David DiBiase: There are millions of coordinates encoded in this box.

GPS voice: Recalculating

David DiBiase: And it can take those coordinates and render a map on the screen for you.

GPS voice: Turn left on Whitehall Road. Then turn left in 0.3 miles.

David DiBiase: Where do all those coordinates come from? Where do those streets come from? Lots and lots of people driving special cars continuously up and down every single road and digitizing those roads into a database that then can be downloaded into this little box.

[electronic beep]

How We Got HERE

Michael Jones, Chief Technologist, Google Earth: There's nothing new about mapping. You can imagine without being able to talk, somebody showing where you're going, and draw a line showing where the river is, and an X where they are now, and an X where they're gonna go.

Mark Brender, VP Communications, Geoeye: Viewing the Earth has really been based on technology. The Babylonians etched the lay of the land on clay tablets in 2300 B.C. And then in the 15th century, with the advent of printing, they started making maps using wooden blocks.

David DiBiase: Surveyors would map by making measurements in front of them to a reference point and then back behind to the reference point they had just passed. That information had to be transcribed into a map.

David Cowen: From in the air, it's as if we sent out thousands of surveyors all at once. Remotely sensed data provides highly accurate measurements of the Earth and the features upon it.

[rocket rumbling]

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Commander, USAF Space Command: We rely on satellites for pictures of the Earth, for communications, for navigation, for weather. Geospatial technology has become woven throughout the fabric of how we live.

Jack Dangermond, President, ESRI: About 50 years ago, people came along and started building on big old mainframes geographic information systems which would integrate on a map information about culture, about population, about demographics, about physical environment. GIS allows us to bring it all together.

Jan Van Sickle: I used the first commercial GPS receiver. Took two men to carry it. Our antenna was a meter-square piece of aluminum. We had to have a generator for it. Massive batteries!

Tim Trainor, Cheif, Geograph Division, U.S. Census: The census bureau in the United States needed to capture all of the line work for roads, railroads, hydrography, and then boundaries. That formed the basis of the first TIGER files in the late 1980s in support of the 1990 census. Tiger was an impetus to technological developments like MapQuest, Yahoo, followed by Google.

Text on screen: TIGER.Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing

Matt O'Connell, CEO, Geoeye: Google Earth introduced people to the coolness of place. "I am here. Where's the nearest Starbucks?" Or, "Where's the nearest hospital?"

Chris Pendelton, Technical Evangelist, Bing Maps: Now we're all carrying around GPS. We've got really rich interfaces that allow us to do things that we would only imagine previously.

Michael Jones: On a mobile device, you are the center of the map, and the city is around you, not you see a city and then look for yourself on the map. It's putting you in the map.

[electronic tone]

[horn honks]

[phone rings]

Adena Schutzberg: Say you find yourself in a location that you don't know very well. You might want to find a place to have dinner. Well, what places are around? And which places have other people rated very highly? Maybe you want a particular kind of food within a 15-minute walk.

David Cowen: I've got not only a restaurant, but I've got the map. I can find the reviews of it. I can find out what the menu is.

Chris Pendelton: We're moving away from me having to actively search for something, to now search is telling me what I should check out that might be interesting to me. These are the things where location and search start to come together.

Why We Need It

Joe Fancica: We're becoming individual sensors. We're creating this huge sensor network of people holding these mobile devices. And that information is two-way.

[electronic beeping]

David Cowen: It's not just passive collection, listen to your GPS technology, tell you how to get to some place. You're gonna say, "Wait a minute. "I see a problem. "I want to report that problem." "I want to see that someone's going to respond to that."

Jean Philippe Frantz, Carrefour, Haiti: We were playing basketball. We see, like, the ground keep on moving. I see a lot of people, some of them dying, like the ceiling, like, killed them.

Jean-Robert Durocher, Entrepreneur, Cambridge, Massachusetts: I have both extended family members and close family members who live in Haiti. And the first reaction was more, like, surreal."Is this really happening?"

Capt. Arturo Derryberry: We needed to know where we could go in. And so, we used geospatial technology to prepare the area with information before we even got there.

Craig Clarke: Approximately 2/3 of the cell towers stayed active. And aid workers and Haitian nationals were posting information saying that they needed help.

Patrick Meier: I was watching CNN and immediately called our USHAHIDI tech lead in Atlanta. I told him that we really need to move and set up an USHAHIDI platform for Haiti.

Jaroslav Valuch, Field Representative, USHAHIDI: USHAHIDI is an open-source platform for crowd-sourcing crisis information. Basically, that means you are following local media, Twitter, Facebook, text messages, any sort of information you can get. Once you aggregate this information, you map it, you have a real-time picture of the actual situation on the ground. This information can be used by rescue workers or anyone.

Patrick Meier: With an USHAHIDI platform, you can decide what kind of map you want to use. OpenStreetMap uses crowd-sourcing to do street mapping. And within a few days, OpenStreetMap had the most detailed map of Haiti that was available.

Kate Chapman, President, Openstreetmap, USA: There were maps of Haiti before the earthquake, but they just weren't up-to-date anymore. So people started using donated satellite imagery to trace in OpenStreetMap collapsed buildings, clinics, hospitals.

Patrick Meier: Within a week or so, we had trained over 100 individuals at Tufts University to map the incidents and the alerts. And then a text number, 4636, was set up for reporting. But these text messages were all going to be in Creole. So we started getting as many Creole-speaking volunteers as possible.

Jean-Robert Durocher: I found out about the 4636 effort through a friend of mine. So I got online, started getting involved, basically staying up late after putting the kids to bed, try to translate as many text messages as I could.

Various unknown speakers within a group: Our top priority is Port-au-Prince. It's good. It's good, good translations.

Jean-Robert Durocher: There was this energy.

Unknown speakers: Today's SMS.

Jean-Robert Durocher: People from basically all over the world creating this sort of, like, support system over the internet.

Craig Clarke:  A soccer stadium was serving as a camp for displaced persons. But we didn't know it was there. Through USHAHIDI's mapping ability, we knew that that would be a location to take aid. We wouldn't have seen it without them.

Capt. Arturo Derryberry: USHAHIDI alerted the world that if you've got needs in Haiti, or you're trapped in a building, or you're out of food, or you're injured, and you need help, that you can alert us.

Text on screen: More than 2,000 volunteers and 20 organizations from 49 countries participated in the Haiti crisis mapping effort.

Craig Clarke:Whether you are that person in Des Moines, Iowa, who's reading Twitter or Facebook, or you're a Haitian on the ground, with mobile technology and open-sourcing of information, you're suddenly empowered.

Unknown speaker:I work from California.

Jean-Robert Durocher:Being able to stay online translating those text messages, and you know that that information will be forwarded directly to a specific aid organization. That made it feel like, almost, I was on the ground helping.

Jack Dangermond:A map is worth a million words. Maps communicate with everybody. That's powerful. You know, you can make a difference. You can look at relationships and patterns and processes and models, help save the world.

Joe Fancica: I don't think we can project 50 years out, but given what we're seeing today, it's just a fantastic explosion of location technology. And location-based data. And now we have the devices to read it and capture it and visualize it. And that's something that's really helping the geospatial revolution truly explode.

Walter Scott: Revolutions rarely end up the way they started. That's almost the definition of a revolution.

Mapping the Pandemic (somber music) (suspenseful music) Al Powered Early Warning (bell ringing) - [Peter Coyote] 1854, London. In the wake of a cholera epidemic, Dr. John Snow placed cholera deaths on a grid to confirm the source of the outbreak as water from a single pump. Geography is central to fighting disease. New Year's Eve 2019, 166 years later, a global infectious disease surveillance system detects an unidentified respiratory illness emerging in Central China. The threat was real. And the platform issued the warning nine days before the official WHO report. The system was built by an interdisciplinary team at BlueDot, a small startup out of Toronto; using artificial intelligence and machine learning to scour the internet for clues of emerging infectious disease. - When we're talking about the problem of infectious diseases, we need a diverse set of data. We can't just be tracking a microbe, we need to understand how people are moving across the planet, we need to understand in some situations climate conditions, animal populations, health systems. And so when we think about where geospatial technologies are going, there's this massive increase in production of data that are all associated with a place and time. And geospatial technologies now allow us to wield those data to integrate them and to make sense from massive amounts of data to derive an actionable insight and to do this in real time. - [Peter Coyote] In an unequal world where official reports of outbreaks are not always timely, epidemiology's pressing need is to develop surveillance capacity, to sift through the layers of data that can predict an outbreak. - So we've been using machine learning and natural language processing to stitch together a global panoramic view of infectious disease threats that are appearing around the world. And so our algorithms are scanning through vast amounts of online sources, open source data, in 65 different languages and looking for these early signals that maybe there's an unusual cluster of a disease happening. It might be a disease that we know of, or it might just be a syndrome in the way that we in fact picked up an early signal that there was an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in a city called Wuhan. [Peter Coyote] These global tracking systems, mine, process and filter myriad information sources to essentially create a living breathing map of risk information. And to build it takes a host of experts ranging from public health to data science to veterinary medicine. - This is inherently a complex problem, and it requires a diverse set of skills and perspectives. - [Peter Coyote] This emerging field of digital epidemiology and disease surveillance is a mashup of computer science, statistics and big data mapping. Algorithms are trained to understand disease terms and to process whether an alert is relevant. And while detection is the first concern, dispersion of the pathogen is the second. - [Kamran Khan] Human population, mobility and movements are critical to understanding how diseases spread. So humans in essence have become the vectors that are transporting diseases inadvertently across the planet. So within the span of about a second or two, we had automatically now assessed how Wuhan was connected to the rest of the planet and which places were in the path. If this thing were to spread out further, where should we be looking for it next? - [Peter Coyote] The only requirement for the spread of COVID-19 is proximity and movement. Transported undetected by their human hosts, the virus crossed borders worldwide. (suspenseful music) Tracking a Pandemic in Real Time At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a small team led by Dr. Lauren Gardner had been watching the outbreak with deepening concern. - [Lauren Gardner] I saw this as a really unique opportunity to start building out a dataset on an emerging infectious disease in real time. - Dr. Gardner and I, we had a very small group team meeting. She suggested to me why don't you create a dashboard for the coronavirus because she knew I was from China and very anxious to know what's the situation in China and know my relatives, my friends and how they were doing. - [Lauren Gardner] My student Ensheng Dong and I were basically the two that started this and he's a total wiz with dashboard development. - After I talk with Dr. Gardner, I went back to the office. I spent eight to nine hours and came up with the first version of the dashboard. - [Lauren Gardner] And so we built the dashboard that night and then the next day shared it publicly. - The dashboard went viral after that. - I don't know how many views the Hopkins dashboard got and continues get, but I'm sure it's off the charts. - They are in fact, the creators of the most viral map-based application in the history of the world. - Four or five billion maps are generated off that website every day. Sometimes it was as high as 10 and 12 billion on a day. That meant that people were looking at it and re-looking at it and seeing the trends. - [Gardner] We massively underestimated the interest of the general public in following the progression of this outbreak. [Nita Bharti] For a lot of people being able to see disease data in a spatial format meaning an interactive map was a really important way for them to understand what was happening and also for them to assess what their immediate risk was. - This was a huge day of awakening for the world because they began to see the power of geospatial visualization in their own lives. - [Peter Coyote] The Johns Hopkins dashboard quickly became the authoritative source and public health officials rushed to create their own. - It was within a week that we started to see similar dashboards coming out and Hong Kong had a dashboard and Thailand had a dashboard and Korea had a dashboard. - And I remember the first time I saw it thinking, I want that including the map and the visualization of all the countries and all the cases in the red dots, I want that on our website. - Anybody who felt comfortable going into GitHub, could go pull those data, could pull the actual tables and the numeric data and make their own maps or do their own analysis. It was very transparent, it was updated regularly and it was easy to use. - [Este Geraghty] Never before have we really had this opportunity to watch real time data update. And that is the ideal for disease surveillance. - And this is why visualization of that work and the work that we've been doing on the ground is so critical because we need to know where things are happening so we can address them. We can focus our attention, we can accentuate our efforts and ultimately we can drive resources to those very communities that are seeing the disproportionate impact of this horrific pandemic. (suspenseful music) - [Peter Coyote] Days before the WHO called the crisis a pandemic, the Johns Hopkins map showed it to be true. The small clusters of red dots had grown larger and crossed borders. But dark spaces on the map marked where public health data had been withheld. One of these was Iran. In late February 2020, Iran's Ministry of Health reported 12 deaths, but posts on social media painted a darker picture. A team at Maxar Technologies used their human geography dataset and crowdsourcing platform to investigate the rumors, then confirmed them with high resolution satellite imagery. - The largest cemetery in Iran in Qom, what we were seeing from space... mass graves being dug. And so we saw trenches that were upwards of a hundred yards long. We saw large piles of lime to counter the odor and the decay. - [Peter Coyote] The satellite pictures suggested the number of dead was significantly higher than the official figure. - That then allowed us to be able to support in this case The Washington Post, to be able to publish an article to bring transparency. And I think having that type of shared experience where we all were able to see the impact of that, I think it helps drive behavior. (lively instrumental music) The goal is to understand what is normal and when is there a variance. This proliferation of sensors, whether those sensors are on the ground, through social media or passive sensors that are collecting data. If we can derive patterns from that, that then can help inform how we apply assets in space to be able to collect imagery and then extract the insights from that imagery in short timelines to be able to drive decision-making. - [Peter Coyote] From space, the signs of COVID could be seen everywhere. Passenger planes grounded, new hospitals built within months, St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday empty. In Mecca, the crowds that visit the Kabaa, Islam's holiest shrine, told the story. - Going from densely populated cultural iconic location of interest to no one there and then the leaders at that location established mechanisms to create social distancing kind of a stark change in behavior. (suspenseful music) Mass Gathering Footprints - [Peter Coyote] On February 29th, 2020, the Trump administration announced new travel restrictions on Iran. The same day the US recorded its first death from COVID-19. Colleges canceled student travel programs, but many students had already boarded planes for spring break. - You see on news that spring breakers are still flocking to the beach in Fort Lauderdale. We thought, man, this is really reckless to have all of these people go from universities to one location, congregate who don't really feel the symptoms of COVID get together and then return back home and go back to their schools. We said, let's see if we can show that story in our mapping platform". - [Peter Coyote] To bring awareness to the situation, Tectonix, a data analytics and visualization company, planned to isolate and track cell phone users crowding onto a single beach using anonymized location data. - [Rob Gresham] As we zoom in towards the Fort Lauderdale Beach, we are saying "filter the geo-fence down to what you're actually seeing on the map". And then what you end up seeing next is an even more precise filter where we start drawing a lasso around devices on the beach. And you could just see the congregation of many many people. - [Peter Coyote] Once lassoed by the geo-fence, every beachgoer's cell phone location data could be tracked by Tectonix platform. [Rob Gresham] And then when we zoomed out in the days following, you could see these students returning to essentially all over the country. - [Peter Coyote] The team sent out a video on social media. - The next morning, checked Twitter and saw that we had millions of views. And we just said, "what the heck have we gotten ourselves into?" - [Peter Coyote] On March 15th all public beaches in Fort Lauderdale were closed. (lively instrumental music) By August, US COVID deaths had reached 160,000. Warnings about mass gatherings and social distancing largely went unheeded. And in South Dakota, the 2020 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally opened as scheduled, 250,000 attended. The Tectonix crew lassoed devices in all the hotspots and then tracked them back to their home states. - Sturgis was interesting because it happened to be a lot of middle-aged or older people. But when people flocked to South Dakota, it actually set off a series of events where South Dakota briefly was the epicenter for COVID spread globally for several weeks. - [Peter Coyote] In rural America, meat packing plants reached a crisis situation with COVID cases. Tectonix isolated an Indiana plant for a full month, the resulting footprint was huge. Devices traveled to 48 states and into Canada. - For whatever reason, the meat packing industry was very hard hit by COVID. And now I think we've seen a lot of the working conditions and how close people were on conveyor belts and that sort of thing. - [Peter Coyote] These demonstrations proved in case after case, how desperately interventions were needed. That responsibility fell to public health officials who found themselves facing an angry backlash against emergency measures as they prepared to roll out the largest vaccination campaign in American history. (suspenseful music) Engaging the Virus - Geospatial technology has been a huge asset for epidemiology... for understanding how outbreaks are moving through populations and understanding how we can get response to those populations. - Now you've got all this data, how are you then determining what you do there? How do you accentuate your communication messages? What are you pulling back? If it's a zero sum game you don't have enough resources, you can only do one or the other; you're gonna focus on where you have the most risk. The most proportion of tests that are coming back positive, the most hospitalizations, what's happening with deaths in that area. But then it's the next phase of it which is now about adding in the protective measures. Where are your PPEs? Where are the masks going? What are the data showing in terms of mobility? Are people wearing masks? Are they moving around? Are they not moving around? Are they staying close to their home? This is all geospatial technology and mapping that allows you to visualize. And then on top of that the last protective measure is on vaccines. - To monitor our vaccine inventory, to understand the population phases and how many people in each phase need to be vaccinated. To look at the vaccination venues. - Now you layer socioeconomic information, housing, transportation issues, challenges with social vulnerability index or what we call them SVI. Add in where you have increase in cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccine knowledge. And now you have a geospatial ecosystem that you can not just share internally, but share with your folks on the ground but also your policy makers, your elected officials, with the community who are looking at all this information and saying, "Gosh, I wanna protect my own family!" (suspenseful music) Wearable Technology Detection - [Peter Coyote] As vaccinations take hold across the United States, COVID-19 cases and deaths have dropped to their lowest levels in nearly a year. But even as the outlook improves, researchers are testing new methods to stop the next pandemic. A team at Scripps Research in San Diego has proposed using wearable technology to monitor a population for early signs of an outbreak. (heart beating) - So we're launching DETECT and we're really excited about this. Because this is a way to track from a smartwatch, a person's heart rate and to know well before people have fever and symptoms, whether there's a cluster of abnormalities that's happening. - [Peter Coyote] Roughly a hundred million Americans own a wearable health tracker. And this study only needs to gather physiological data from one or two percent of them to set up an effective public health surveillance system. [Eric Topol] We have a mobile app where people will be asked if they wanna join a research effort to track their health, their resting heart rate through their smartwatch. - [Peter Coyote] Once a person volunteers, readings from their device will be monitored continuously through the app. And they'll be asked to enter their vaccination dates and report symptoms. - [Eric Topol] In the setting of this COVID-19, it gives us a handle on things like heart rate, which we know is a great antecedent abnormality before people get sick. So by tracking people at scale, we'll be able to see an outbreak in a way that previously has not been obtainable. - [Peter Coyote] This new twist on telemedicine, the ability to perform medical interactions without face-to-face contact is especially important in the midst of a pandemic; when we simply can't test enough people in time to know what the virus is doing. - It's real time, it's continuous, it's scalable. And so we're really keen on this added ability to be able to detect an emerging problem in any part of the geography of the United States. (somber music) [Peter Coyote] The global pandemic has caused incredible pain and hardship. We have suffered great loss and isolation, and we have not seen the last of COVID-19. The reality is that the world has entered a pandemic era in which new pathogens continue to emerge and spread within populations. And more than ever, geography is central to fighting disease. - [Kamran Khan] COVID-19 I think has been an awakening and we can all agree none of us wanna be back here again soon. - We certainly have hope with the vaccine, but concern yet about the variants. We have a number of lessons learned, but it's unknown how well we'll do with applying those lessons. - I'm trying to think about it as an opportunity to make changes and to think about the world in different ways. What can we be doing? What kind of information can we be collecting? The limit to this technology and the limit to geography is really our imagination. - COVID-19... what it has done, it's allowed us to see a purpose that's bigger than ourselves and I think deep down, probably every one of us wants to feel like we're part of something that's just bigger than us. - Geospatial community stood up and I'm so proud of them. Their work has literally saved lives and made things understandable. It's a great day for the application of science and technology to this great challenge that's facing the whole world. (light instrumental music changing to somber music)