Day: February 23, 2012

Interactive Marine Spatial Planning: Siting Tidal Energy Arrays around the Mull of Kintyre

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

PLoS ONE, published 11 Jan 2012

Karen A. Alexander, Ron Janssen, Gustavo Arciniegas, Timothy G. O’Higgins, Tessa Eikelboom, and Thomas A. Wilding

“The rapid development of the offshore renewable energy sector has led to an increased requirement for Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and, increasingly, this is carried out in the context of the ‘ecosystem approach’ (EA) to management. We demonstrate a novel method to facilitate implementation of the EA. Using a real-time interactive mapping device (touch-table) and stakeholder workshops we gathered data and facilitated negotiation of spatial trade-offs at a potential site for tidal renewable energy off the Mull of Kintyre (Scotland).

Steps taken during the ‘local knowledge’ workshop.

Steps taken during the ‘local knowledge’ workshop.

“Conflicts between the interests of tidal energy developers and commercial and recreational users of the area were identified, and use preferences and concerns of stakeholders were highlighted. Social, cultural and spatial issues associated with conversion of common pool to private resource were also revealed. The method identified important gaps in existing spatial data and helped to fill these through interactive user inputs. The workshops developed a degree of consensus between conflicting users on the best areas for potential development suggesting that this approach should be adopted during MSP.”

Spatial and Temporal Aberration Detection Methods for Disease Outbreaks in Syndromic Surveillance Systems

/ Matt Artz

Annals of GISAnnals of GIS, Volume 17, Issue 4, 2011

Dongmei Chen, John Cunningham, Kieran Moore, and Jie Tian

“Early surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases is a key element for their control by public health agencies. The goal of syndromic disease surveillance is to identify emerging infectious risks to public health in real or near real time as a method of early detection, trend monitoring, and false-alarm avoidance. This article reviews temporal, spatial, and spatial–temporal aberration detection techniques that can be used to facilitate the early detection of infectious disease outbreaks that can occur in nonrandom yet clustered distributions in geographic information systems (GIS)-based syndromic surveillance systems. The focus is on the approaches appropriate for prospective surveillance data. In addition, this article discusses the impact of data privacy, security, and data quality on detection algorithms and explores what the future GIS-based syndromic surveillance systems may hold.”