Conference Schedule

11:00am - 12:00pm 7:00pm-8:00pm UTC

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Monitoring Special Status Species on the Merced Vernal Pools Grasslands Reserve Speaker: Erin Mutch, UC Merced

The Spatial Analysis and Research Center (SpARC) has worked closely with the campus planning department in maintaining GIS layers and have developed an Esri ArcGIS Collector App which is used to survey and monitor special status species. The Merced Vernal Pool Grasslands Reserve lands are also environmental mitigation lands and are subject to federal and state permit conditions and regulations. A GIS database is maintained to help track research activities and for environmental compliance.

Daily Imaging for Earth Science with the Planet CubeSat Constellation Speaker: Joseph Mascaro, Planet

Through our Education and Research program, Planet has more than 5,000 users studying a wide variety of disciplines, including climate change in the cryosphere, terrestrial ecosystems and vegetation dynamics, wildlife biology, threats to coral reefs and other marine habitats, agricultural productivity, and disaster response and humanitarian assistance. We will discuss the scientific and educational value of Planet’s persistent monitoring capability.

Spatial and Temporal Changes of Soil-Crop-Environment Relationships Speaker: Elia Scudiero, UC Riverside

Agricultural soils are notoriously spatially heterogeneous and many soil properties (e.g., water content) are temporally variable, making soil a complex media. This talk will feature research on the use of field measurements, near ground and remote sensing, and spatiotemporal data analysis for understanding soil-crop-water interactions and managing agricultural input site-specifically.

11:00am - 12:00pm 7:00pm-8:00pm UTC

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Metamap: Building a More Accessible Campus Map Speakers: Sachi R Cooper, UC Los Angeles; Quinn O'Connor UC Los Angeles; and Carolanne Link, UC Los Angeles

Metamap is a student-initiated collaborative project to improve the UCLA campus map for people with disabilities. We aim to log accessible assets, routes, and maintenance issues that pose a threat to accessibility. Our project is an example of the synergies between various different campus entities, including student government, to use GIS for the benefit of the entire campus community.

Mapping Hate Crime in the United States Speaker(s): Shannon Speed, UC Los Angeles; Jamie Chan, UC Los Angeles; and Chris Lam, UC Los Angeles

Hate crime is a national human rights problem. Incidents are rising, but statistics are unreliable. The need for a publicly available resource documenting hate crimes is great, yet accurate data are not available. The Hate Crime Map addresses this need by providing a crowd-sourced platform where victims can report incidents. The map offers data and sophisticated visualizations by state & county of the types & cause (race, gender, religion) of the attacks. This panel will introduce the map.

12:10pm - 12:50pm 8:10pm-8:50pm UTC

Mappy Lunch Hour

Get together to talk about maps with fellow conference attendees. Three Tracks:

• General
• COVID-19
• Remote Sensing

1:00pm - 2:00pm 9:00pm-10:00pm UTC

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Integrated Risk Assessment and Geospatial Analysis for SARS-CoV-2 in Wastewater for Vulnerable Populations Speaker: Arianna Tariqi, UC Merced and Fernando Roman, UC Merced

Wastewater monitoring for SARS-CoV-2 RNA has been shown cost effective to predict outbreaks of COVID-19 by 2-10 days. The virus recovered in wastewater can sample whole city populations with results in 1-2 days. Monitoring efforts are also being deployed in at least 27 countries and 88 universities but there is lack of a global repository of these efforts. Thus, we created a global dashboard of SARS-CoV-2 wastewater testing so the public can easily see where testing is happening in their area.

Visualizing Preterm Birth in the Bay Area Speaker: Jiue-An (Jay) Yang, UC San Diego and Dr. Marta Jankowska, UC San Diego

Preterm birth is the leading cause of death under the age of 5, and can lead to lifelong health issues. Its complex causes are associated with genetic, biological, environmental, and sociodemographic factors. We present a geographic data visualization platform to explore rates of PTB and related risk factors in understanding PTB in the Bay Area. This is an essential step for pattern exploration, hypothesis generation, and presents opportunities to increase public and stakeholder involvement.

Mapping Health Inequities: UCSF Health Atlas and California Health Maps Speaker: Debby Oh, UC San Francisco

Where we live influences health in both positive and negative ways. Interactive maps can provide researchers, policy makers, and public health professionals a better understanding of the relationship between place and health. The UCSF Health Atlas (healthatlas.ucsf.edu) is an online portal that visualizes social determinants of health as they relate to COVID-19 and other health outcomes in California. California Health Maps (californiahealthmaps.org) is an interactive mapping tool with cancer incidence at seven different geographic levels.

1:00pm - 2:00pm 9:00pm-10:00pm UTC

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Speaker(s):

• Cam Denney, Alameda County Community Food Bank
• Cecilia Vu, ESRI
• Martha Morrissey, Development Seed

3:00pm - 4:00pm 11:00pm-12:00am UTC

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Recommending Street Closures for Social Distancing Using Bike Share Trip Data Speaker: Ethan Ebinger, UC Berkeley

To encourage social distancing during the ongoing pandemic many cities have closed roads to vehicular traffic. These slow streets allow residents to get fresh air and access essential buildings in a more sustainable way. This project builds on the need for additional street closures in the Bay Area. I used open-source bike share data from Bay Wheels to identify the most frequented biking paths by system users and make recommendations for jurisdictions looking to create healthy urban spaces.

San Diego Homelessness Hub (H-Hub) Speaker: Julie Wartell, UC San Diego and Andrew Nguyen, UC San Diego

Our region’s homelessness crisis is complex, and so too is the availability and accessibility of the types of data necessary to better understand and help solve this critical challenge. Numerous entities have a wealth of data, but frequently it is inaccessible and/or unavailable in a useful format. The Homelessness Hub based at UCSD serves as an open-access and easy-to-use repository for homelessness data in San Diego County. We look forward to demo'ing and discussing it!

Geostatistics of Armed Conflict in Sudan (1997-2020) Speaker: Sri Ramesh, UC Berkeley

Are the types of political violence events found in Sudan since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005 correlated to their locations? I will discuss using geostatistics and the Armed Conflict Location Event Database to answer this question, particularly spatial regressions of the locations of protests, homicides, and other violence events against regional demographics. This research will inform a more peaceful resolution to the Sudanese peace process that started in 2005.

Old Data New Visualizations Speaker: Jamie Jamison, UC Los Angeles

I have an ongoing project creating shapefiles for older datasets from the mainframe computing era. Among the challenges working with older data is that even if well documented, finding the appropriate shapefiles may take some searching. The presentation will cover examples of the available documentation, suggestions of what to do if documentation is or isn’t present, pre-personal computer era variable naming and walk-through finding the appropriate historical shapefile.

Understanding Our ArcGIS Users On Campus: UCSD AGO Stats Dashboard Speaker: Amy Work, UC San Diego and Dan LaSusa, UC San Diego

With the activation of SSO at UC San Diego, all students, faculty, staff, and UCSD affiliates can readily access ArcGIS resources. There's no need to reach out to ask about getting access to licenses. With the elimination of the gate-keeper, we wanted to have a better idea of where users were coming from across campus. We created a dashboard to pull information from ArcGIS Online about our users and combined that with data from our campus databases to see how are users are on campus.

3:00pm - 4:00pm 11:00pm-12:00am UTC

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Spatial Equity Mapping: Patterns and Distributions of Neighborhood Risk Speaker: Nicole Pereira, UC Los Angeles and Jared Schor, UC Los Angeles

Using the Neighborhood Risk Index (NRI), an index comprised of 10 indicators or risk factors, we measure how prevalent social and environmental risk factors are for children in a given city by presenting one dimensional maps of neighborhood risk levels classified by zero, low, medium, and high risk. We also display spatial patterns for each risk factor within city boundaries. These maps identify areas of opportunity in neighborhoods to positively influence child development.

Spatial Disparities in the burden of COVID-19 by Social Determinants of Health Among Veterans in Veterans Administration Speaker: Hoda S. Abdel Magid, Stanford

The purpose of this study is to examine spatial disparities in COVID-19 testing and test positivity among Veterans enrolled in Veterans Affairs Healthcare (VA). We calculate and map age-adjusted and race-stratified age-adjusted testing rates for each county in the contagious US separately for White Veterans and Black Veterans after adjusting for community-level social determinants of health. Rates were standardized to the nationwide population of Veterans in active care at VA.

MetaMap Speaker: Alyssa Hemler, UC Los Angeles

MetaMap is a collaboration between UCLA USAC Facilities Commission, UCLA Committee on Disability, UCLA Disabilities and Computing Programming Office, UCLA IDRE, and the UCLA Facilities Maintenance Department. It will be an interactive map that can guide people to accessible routes, bathrooms, elevators, power entrances, and blue lights, which will be integrated with the UCLA 311 app. Reporting updates, problems, or obstructions to accessibility will be easy to do via the UCLA 311 app.

GIS-Based Geologic Mapping and Analysis of the Kaipo Mélange, New Zealand Speaker: Andre Mere, UC Riverside

I use a combination of 1m resolution LiDAR data, aerial photography and in-person digital field mapping to generate a new GIS-based large-scale geologic map of a fault-related tectonic mélange exposed within the southernmost Kaipo Slip in north Southland, New Zealand. Using new mapping and LiDAR data, I construct a geologic cross-section and conduct topographic analysis to investigate the relationship between tectonic deformation of basement rocks and quaternary landscape response.

11:00am - 12:00pm 7:00pm-8:00pm UTC

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Mapping 2018 Wildfires using Bluesky Framework and QGIS Speaker: Katherine Brenner, UC Los Angeles

This summer I have been working in the Marlier Lab mapping the largest 2018 Wildfires in California. I have been using Bluesky framework to create emissions estimates and have been using QGIS to do this as well.

Current Advances and Future Potential of Digital Mapping Speaker: Nicolas Barth, UC Riverside

The last decade has seen considerable advances in technology that assists digital field mapping, which the geoscience community generally has been somewhat slow to embrace. This talk will introduce a few of the modern mapping platforms (devices, softwares) and highlight mapping applications in teaching, research, geological mapping surveys, and scientific response to natural disasters.

UCR-Star: The UCR Spatio-Temporal Active Repository Speaker: Ahmed Eldawy, UC Riverside

UCR Star [https://ucrstar.com] is a free and public repository for geospatial data. It is built to serve the geospatial community and facilitate the discovery of public geospatial datasets to use in research and development. It provides an interactive map exploration interface on-top of terabytes of public geospatial data with the ability to search, visualize, explore, download, share, and cite these datasets. UCR-Star is public and users can submit requests to add more datasets to the archive.

Gaps the the Grid: The Promises, Pitfalls, and Resurgence of Discrete Global Grids in Modern Geospatial Analysis Speaker: Max Andrew Gardner, UC Berkeley

This talk aims to provide an historical context for the renewed interest in Discrete Global Grids (DGGs) by exploring what they do well and what they don't. In particular, we'll take a look at what happens when we need to assimilate gridded data with data reported at the level of traditional administrative boundaries.

Bamberg: Using The New ArcGIS Story Maps Speaker: Kian Tyler Carson, UC Angeles and Anusha Goyal, UC Angeles

This project was my first experience with ESRI's new version of Story Maps. While Maria Jankowska did the research, my co-worker and I were tasked with transitioning the project to the new Story Map Platform. It was challenging but the new user interface is useful for creating an informative and aesthetic project. We employed features such as the sidecar function and dynamic web maps to complement the static graphics. GIS programs are constantly evolving and this project taught us to adapt.

Creating a Virtual, Spatial Map Room Speaker: Kian Tyler Carson, UC Los Angeles

Considering the current global Coronavirus pandemic, physical map rooms are, at least temporarily a thing of the past. However, a global pandemic does not alleviate the demand for map viewers. Maps are required for many tasks including research and must continue to be available to the public. This virtual map room can provide viewers a way to safely find and view the maps they desire, without visiting physical map rooms that place them at risk for transmission of the virus.

12:10pm - 12:50pm 8:10pm-8:50pm UTC

Mappy Lunch Hour

Get together to talk about maps with fellow conference attendees. Three tracks:

• General
• Tools to Share
• Environment and Sustainability

1:00pm - 2:00pm 9:00pm-10:00pm UTC

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Teaching GIS: StoryMaps & Sustainable Development Goals Speaker: Karen Beardsley, UC Davis

In summer 2020, with all learning moved to virtual, I taught Introduction to GIS, an upper division course required for many majors, at UC Davis. Given the difficulties in giving tests and group work, I chose to emphasize project work. Student learned theory through lectures and practical skills using ArcGIS Pro. I also taught ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps, with final projects worth 45% of the grade and presented using StoryMaps and focused on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Fieldwork from Afar: Using Storymaps for Site Visits Speaker: Rayne Laborde, UC Los Angeles and Cassie Hoeprich, UC Los Angeles

As COVID-19 limits our ability to move freely, how can architects, planners, and others produce accessible, comprehensive site analysis documents? Using a storymap developed for a recent student pedestrian safety study, cityLAB researchers will share how storymaps made it possible to conduct informative “site walks” from afar with stakeholders and board members.

Gay Migration Versus Person-Environment Attitudinal Fit: A Regional Analysis Speaker: Emily Esposito, UC Riverside

Gay migration is the anecdotal idea that lesbian and gay (LG) people migrate from places that are not gay-friendly to gay-friendly places to find acceptance. We used archival data to examine migration patterns based on regional gay-friendliness, personal sexuality attitudes and sexual orientation. We observed gay migration in LG people migrating based on regional gay-friendliness, while the fit or misfit of personal attitudes and regional gay-friendliness predicted migration in straight people.

1:00pm - 2:00pm 9:00pm-10:00pm UTC

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Speaker(s):

• Maylei Blackwell, UC Los Angeles
• Juliann Anesi, UC Los Angeles
• Brenda Nicolas, LMU
• Michelle Vasquez, USC

Mapping Indigenous LA is a countermapping project based on the sedimented layers of Indigenous spatial knowledges based on storymaps with community educators, youth and elders. Our project includes the Tongva and Tataviam, the first people of Los Angeles, who struggle for recognition of their sacred spaces and their political rights; American Indians who were displaced through governmental policies of relocation and termination; and the Indigenous diasporas of Latin America and Oceania, people displaced by militarism, neoliberal economic policies and overlapping colonial histories. Our project features Indigenous community cartographies that ask: How do those who have been here since time immemorial, for decades, or newly arriving build and maintain indigenous identities, community, and create alliances through overlapping geographies of Los Angeles? How do the original peoples of the Los Angeles basin (and islands) relate specifically to the land and how subsequent relocations and migrations of indigenous peoples have reworked space, place, and meaning? In order to disseminate these previously unexplored histories beyond the time frame of the project, we have developed a set of Indigenous LA storymaps that allow users to navigate the multiple social geographies and digital archives of indigenous communities of Los Angeles.

3:00pm - 4:00pm 11:00pm-12:00am UTC

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Geospatial Technologies for Marine Archaeology: Project Recover Speaker: Heidi Batchelor, UC San Diego

Project Recover, a partnership including Scripps Institution of Oceanography, combines historical data with the latest oceanographic and geospatial technologies to locate and document submerged wreckage associated with WWII. Data collected by AUVs, ROVs, scuba divers, and ship-based systems are analyzed in order to locate and document these underwater sites. Examples of several geospatial technologies will be demonstrated in this workshop.

3:00pm - 4:00pm 11:00pm-12:00am UTC

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Application of Remote Sensing and GIS in Developing Neighborhood Environmental Measures to Promote Public Health Speaker: Pushkar Inamdar, UC San Francisco

The emerging literature on green space and blue space indicates that these factors are likely to mitigate stress and promote public health. This talk outlines an approach to the application of computer vision and machine learning methods to quantify green ( grass, trees, shrubbery, etc.) and blue (ponds, lakes, rivers, bays, and oceans, etc) spaces for Census block groups. We are planning to use these results to find their association with health outcomes among breast cancer survivors.

GIS and Public Health: Carving an Undergraduate Path with Passion and Enthusiasm Speaker: Heather Noel-Chien Chou, UC Los Angeles

Being the “different” one as a Geography major and GIS minor among my “pre-med” and life science peers has not been easy. But the rocky start opened me up to a new path of career and skill interests that combines the best of both GIS and Public Health. Join me in this live discussion about how I am beginning my undergraduate journey in GIS and how I plan to inspire others with my burning curiosity and passion for this versatile and promising discipline.

4:00pm - 5:00pm 12:00am-1:00am UTC

Event and poster highlights, event feedback (mountains and valleys), next year, how do we continue these collaborations