Why is geographical information systems important

Furthermore, the technology could also assist in the optimal spatial organisation of health care delivery including home-based care. Surprisingly, there were few published examples of the use of GIS in health systems research in Africa but there is an encouraging amount of work in progress.

One group used GIS to study inequalities in population per bed ratios and the implications of open access to the private and the formerly white hospital services in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa [ 72 ]. One study used GIS to equitably distribute fieldworker workload in a large health survey. The methodology predicted average inter-homestead walking time and divided the heterogeneous study area into units of equal workload [ 73 ].

The author suggests that an extension of the same methodology can be used to optimally distribute community health workers and tuberculosis DOT supervisors, for example. Another study analysed modal patterns of fixed and mobile clinic attendance across an integrated rural health district [ 74 ] and developed indices to analyse the relative attraction and repulsion by the various clinics in the district.

The most important outcome of the research was the development of a composite measure of clinic usage and inter-clinic interaction based on the ratio of total actual versus predicted distance travelled to attend clinic. The same data set has been used to validate a model of travel time to the various clinics based on a network analysis of a road network. Relative clinic attraction and inter-clinic interaction were again studied using travel time as the denominator in the index F.

Herbst, In prep. A study using a similar methodology is underway in the Rufiji district of Tanzania to investigate the relationship of wealth quintiles and health outcomes to travel time to nearest health facility D. Tsoka et al. Noor et al. Limited physical access to primary health care is a major factor contributing to the poor health of populations in developing countries[ 75 ]. The world health report of [ 18 ] was dedicated to improving the performance of health systems.

Health systems performance make a profound difference to the quality, as well as the length of the lives of the billions of people they serve. However, an important omission from the report was the spatial aspect of health systems research. GIS can be used to effectively spatially analyse health systems coverage and identify deficiencies.

The potential exists for GIS to play a key role in rational and more cost-effective health service planning and resource allocation in Africa. GIS is largely technologically as opposed to research driven. Some of these global technological trends are irrelevant to health research in Africa at the present time. However, some global trends both technological and non-technological are of significant relevance to Africa's health crisis. It is becoming clear that although GIS started out as a technological tool, it is rapidly evolving into a science in its own right[ 76 ], albeit in embryonic form.

At present it lies somewhere along the continuum between the two. As software becomes increasingly powerful and new datasets become available and GIS is increasingly used to understand and forecast the dynamics of particularly environmental disease, this evolution is likely to continue.

A parallel exists between GIS and epidemiology. In the same way that epidemiology evolved into a science in its own right in the s [ 77 ], GIS is beginning to be recognised as a science. Like epidemiology its tenets have been established piecemeal [ 77 ] with contributions coming from a number of different disciplines, in particular the earth sciences. It is now time to draw the different facets of GIS together under the umbrella of geographic information science. Computer hardware is becoming increasingly cheaper and more powerful, so that even complex analyses of GIS and image data can be carried out on a desktop computer.

At the same time, commercial software has been developed into stand-alone solutions capable of performing increasingly complex tasks through increasingly user-friendly interfaces. Whilst there is an increasing amount of free software, the commercially available comprehensive packages remain expensive [ 11 ]. Since the 1 st May the accuracy of off-the-shelf global positioning systems GPS has improved by an order of magnitude.

Low cost units can now perform tasks that they previously weren't suitable for. This development is likely to result in a sharp increase in the number of geo-referenced health projects making use of GPS technology in the near future.

The paucity of qualified staff, which has prevented many GIS projects from surviving the donor involvement phase, is a major problem in Africa [ 78 ]. GIS applications in Africa are often found to be initiatives funded or supported by international aid agencies and many are pilot or research projects as opposed to operational systems.

They also tend to be controlled by outsiders, not by African scientists[ 79 ]. If GIS are to be useful and effective, then they must be introduced by local scientists who understand both the technological and the socio-economic context in which the systems are to operate. Training creates capacity and leads to an increase in terms of data needs.

It however also provides the capacity to fulfil these needs and the new products that result are often of value to many other sectors.

Capacity development of African staff should therefore be prioritised. The access to spatial data which are fundamental to any GIS application continues to be difficult and expensive[ 10 ]. This is not specific to health but to all sectors that utilise GIS. There are similarities in the field requirements for using GIS between forestry, ecology, archaeology and epidemiology that could provide substantial benefits by the sharing of experiences and the pooling of resources[ 11 ].

However, much of the spatial data collection efforts within Africa have been conducted in a decentralised and uncoordinated manner. Inter-sectoral collaboration initiatives should therefore be encouraged and receive funding priority. Africa could usefully build projects such as the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure[ 80 ] embedded within which is the SDI — Africa project and the EIS — Africa [ 81 ] projects which aim to support ready access to geographic information to support decision making at all scales for multiple purposes.

Geographic datasets are being developed for some countries in Africa through these initiatives, but a systematic programme is required to make geographic data readily available for the continent as a whole. A major programme funded by an international body is needed to take up this challenge. Priorities include, for example, the digitalisation of and 1: 50 cartographic maps for countries that have them. Similarly, national geo-referenced health facility databases should be established. Inexpensive African data sets include the African data sampler topographic, boundary and place data [ 82 ], long-term rainfall and temperature data [ 83 ] and raster population data [ 84 ].

Development of such data sets are of paramount importance to ensure the growth of all sectors of GIS in Africa. The most cost-effective answer to the data deficit and poor vital registration and health statistics problem in Africa is the establishment of sentinel geo-referenced demographic and health surveillance systems[ 85 ]. This will enable the elucidation of small-scale disease patterns e.

The sites follow up a designated population intensively over time collecting highly accurate demographic, vital event e. So far only a small proportion of the sites are fully geo-referenced but this is likely increase with the increase in GPS accuracy, falling prices and the obvious operational and research advantages of fully geo-referenced data. These sites can especially contribute and have already contributed to our understanding diseases with ill-defined relationships to the environment due to the detailed longitudinal collection of disease covariates.

A recent spatial initiative in health is the West African Spatial Analysis Prototype WASAP that used geo-coded demographic and health survey DHS data to study the effects of climate on children's nutritional status, and the relationship between economic diversity and reproductive behaviour, as well as study the subnational geographic variation in health indicators at a regional level[ 87 , 88 ]. The increasing availability of regional geo-referenced DHS data will facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the patterns and processes of demographic and health changes and will lead to an increasing amount of GIS-based analyses of this important data in the near future.

In addition to the geo-coded household datasets outlined above, a large number of remotely sensed data sets, which have been already used extensively in health are available free of charge or at nominal cost. With the emergence of new technologies and techniques within remote sensing, there is likely to be a great improvement in the quality of such data sets and parallel improvement of GIS and related research products[ 89 ].

Nevertheless, it is also true to say that so far, our ability to extract meaning and make useful decisions from remotely-sensed data has not kept pace with the developments in this field.

The issue of scale is one that is poorly understood in the disease arena. Disease patterns and processes evident at one scale are not necessarily evident at another. Moreover, correlations between explanatory variables and outcomes may even be seemingly reversed at different scales. This has led to a significant amount of confusion when hypotheses are rejected at one scale and not at another. Sometimes it is advisable to use coarser resolution data to mask out small scale heterogeneity.

For example, the malaria modelling at a continental level used climatic data at a resolution of 0. Higher resolution satellite data sub kilometre may obscure continental malaria patterns by exposing unnecessary small area variation. Ideally the resolution of the data should be driven by the application. However, given Africa's geographic data deficits, future research is needed to establish how applicable coarse resolution data sets are to modelling high resolution disease-specific dynamics and vice-versa.

The above issues are as applicable to temporal resolution as they are to spatial resolution. Another obstacle remaining to the growth of GIS in health in Africa is to convince role players often from cash-strapped organisations of the proven cost-effectiveness of GIS in the health arena[ 90 ].

Even amongst the international scientific community, significant scepticism still exists surrounding the use of GIS technology in health.

This problem will diminish in size as GIS continues to evolve. The parallel with epidemiology again warrants mentioning: In the same way that scepticism greeted epidemiologists who hypothesised that a relationship existed between smoking and lung cancer in the s [ 77 ], so to will scepticism continue to plague GIS until it is firmly established as a science.

It is encouraging to note that several of the issues cited as obstacles to the growth of GIS in Africa a decade ago [ 91 ] have been overcome to some degree.

Other obstacles such as the prohibitive costs of hardware have also become less of an issue. Perhaps a review in a decade's time will describe the increasing availability of inexpensive spatial data sets for Africa? The collaboration has been highly successful in collating malaria data from around the continent, and producing a large number of scientific publications on a limited budget. The outputs of the research were then disseminated to countries throughout Africa in the form of digital via the stand-alone MARA lite software and hard copy maps.

The collaboration overcame significant data deficits by creating its own base data sets and created a significant amount of GIS capacity in its five regional centres throughout the continent. During the setting up of the collaboration, significant scepticism was expressed by influential malaria scientists as to the ultimate value of a GIS approach, its logistical feasibility and cost-effectiveness[ 33 ].

The collaboration is a testament to the fact that successful GIS initiatives can be undertaken in Africa. The current software and hardware trends in combination with the realities faced in Africa have given rise to essentially, two broad categories of long-term feasible GIS health applications in Africa.

The outputs of the categories will inform one another and are not mutually exclusive and may overlap. The first category involves the use of GIS as a research tool.

These applications should seek to provide new insights into the spatial dimensions of disease and new methodologies to more cost-effectively allocate resources to health services. These types of applications will normally use high-end systems with significant analytical functionality and will usually involve a significant amount of additional data collection. The second category of long-term viable GIS application concerns the use of GIS as a health planning and management tool and for exploratory data analysis.

Generally speaking this kind of system will involve a low-end GIS. The primary goal of such a system will be to simply display and overlay basic health data concerning both health care facilities and disease patterns. These systems normally vector-based permit rapid manipulations of spatial data and display of the results so that the decision makers can use them for policy decisions.

A further step could involve limited spatial queries and analysis such as buffering. The outputs of the different categories of application will inform one another. As the data is geographically displayed using a management GIS and research questions are derived, collaborations can be initiated with institutions undertaking GIS research to test hypotheses and model disease distributions. Similarly, research GIS applications will inform GIS management applications to plan optimal resource allocation and intervention strategies, for example.

The MARA collaboration is a successful example of this type of approach and is embedding several of its research outputs in the freely available GIS software HealthMapper developed by WHO for intervention planning in Africa at a district level.

A review of the health literature in Africa reveals the GIS bias towards so called 'environmental' diseases. In certain diseases, such as the vector-borne diseases e. In other diseases, especially in the non-communicable category e.

Some infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis have moderately strong links to the environment. Many retail businesses use GIS to help them determine where to locate a new store. Marketing companies use GIS to decide to whom to market stores and restaurants, and where that marketing should be. Scientists use GIS to compare population statistics to resources such as drinking water.

Biologists use GIS to track animal- migration patterns. City, state, or federal officials use GIS to help plan their response in the case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane.

GIS maps can show these officials what neighborhoods are most in danger, where to locate emergency shelters, and what routes people should take to reach safety. Engineers use GIS technology to support the design, implementation, and management of communication networks for the phones we use, as well as the infrastructure necessary for internet connectivity. Other engineers may use GIS to develop road networks and transportation infrastructure. Illustration courtesy U. Government Accountability Office.

Staff from the US Geological Survey USGS answer questions about aerial photographs, maps, satellite imagery, computer programs, data formats, data standards, and digital cartographic data. Hurricanes are the same thing as typhoons, but usually located in the Atlantic Ocean region. In GIS, a closed shape on a map defined by a connected sequence of x, y coordinate pairs. Also called an electrical grid.

Also called a transmission line. Also called natural resource management. Storm drains flow into local creeks, rivers, or seas. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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Search through these resources to discover more about unique landforms and landscapes around the world. Landforms are natural and distinctive features. Explore how they show up in various landscapes.

These resources can be used to teach middle schoolers more about the natural world, its distinctive features, and landscapes. They help us understand Earth and how its physical processes and features can shape human activity and vice versa. When data is organized by its locations, we can see geographic patterns that allow us to develop a better understanding of how systems work and interact with one another.

Use this collection to provide learners with a deeper understanding of the nature and importance of maps, which have been illustrating places and people for thousands of years. One of the oldest tenets of geography is the concept of place. Location is the position of a particular point on the surface of the Earth. Locale is the physical setting for relationships between people, such as the South of France or the Smoky Mountains.

Finally, a sense of place is the emotions someone attaches to an area based on their experiences. Place can be applied at any scale and does not necessarily have to be fixed in either time or space.

Additionally, due to globalization, place can change over time as its physical setting and cultures are influenced by new ideas or technologies. Learn more about the physical and human characteristics of place with this curated resource collection. Demography is the study of demographics, the social characteristics and statistics of a human population. This study of the size, age structures, and economics of different populations can be used for a variety of purposes.

Political candidates use the information to inform targeted campaigns. Scientists employ the data to answer research questions, and marketing teams use it for advertising purposes. Government and business policymakers use it to craft ideas and plan for the future. Here are some examples below. For example, conservationists use GIS for climate change, groundwater studies, and impact assessments.

They use it for location intelligence, logistics management and spy satellites. Geographic Information Systems better answer questions about location, patterns and trends. For example:. Where are the land features found? If you need to find the closest gas station, GIS can show you the way. GIS can find optimal location by connecting traffic volumes, zoning information, and demographics.

What geographical patterns exist? In conservation, we want to know animal habitat using GPS collars and land cover. By knowing animal locations, we can correlate preferred land types with GPS locations. In the end, we have a massive database with all types of species of animals. What changes have occurred over a given period of time? Time is the missing element to study change.

For example, we understand change through remote sensing of the environment. Also, we better predict disasters by finding change over time. What are the spatial implications? If a company wants to build a new project, GIS excels in storing environment data.

Most environmental assessments use GIS to understand the impact of projects in the landscape. How will GIS grow in the upcoming years? This is a question that is Geographic Information Science understands best. It draws from computer science, mathematics, geography, statistics, cartography, and geodesy. Yes, they have. But geographers can answer these questions much better with Geographic Information Systems. When we first started recording inventories on paper maps, it was quite a tedious process.

But what did we really need? We needed a GIS to record and store observations. Also, we needed a table to store attributes about the data. Geographic information systems GIS let us interpret data understanding relationships, patterns, and trends. Then, viewing and analyzing data geographically impacts our understanding of the world we live in. Williams, Robert , Selling a geographical information system to government policymakers. How much information is geospatially referenced?

Networks and cognition Pages Department of Forestry and Rural Development. Government of Canada, Published Current speculation is that its closer to Change detection using two different dates images giving output results.

GIS application in remote sensing. I am an Hydrogeologist working with ministry of water resources. I am currently attached with a water laboratory where Physical, Chemical and Microbial analysis is being carried out by chemists and microbiologists. More than water samples were being collected and data is being generated accordingly on each parameter on a quarterly basis. I am interested in GIS training. Which program on GIS will you recommend I start with for proper data interpretation and management in order to correlate the analytical results with geologic information of the water source.

There are better options nowadays than several years back. Kindly provide guidance on how best I can use a mobile phone to electronically collect and send elecronically to data base geocodes of TB patient residencies and their DOT service point in a city setting.