Geographic information systems: a use case for journalists DataJournalism.com: “…Speak with a few GIS professionals and a common theme will emerge: they struggle to explain to their loved ones exactly what it is they do. Many of us understand superficially that GIS has something to do with ‘mapping’ and ‘geography’, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Similar to how tools such as spreadsheets or databases are used to manipulate, summarise, query, edit, and visualise information, GIS allows the same operations to take place — but with the addition of a spatial dimension, connecting your data to a location in space. For example, if you had a database of all homes built in your community, it might contain details about each house’s features, such as the year it was built, the number of floors, the total living space, the value of the property, when a building permit was last issued, and much more. With this information you could derive all kinds of interesting insights about the makeup of homes in your community.
By adding geocoded home addresses to this database, you would now have the ability to evaluate these homes based on their physical location to one another, on their density in certain areas, as well as their proximity to certain landmarks, such a landfill or a train station. This is GIS in its simplest form…GIS technology and concepts are all around us and have real-world consequences. The following are just a few examples that are of great public interest:
- emergency services dispatching
- forestry management
- traffic and public transportation management
- flood forecasting and climatology
- housing development
- epidemiology and public health
- online food order and ridesharing services
- mail and parcel delivery services.
Any journalist hoping to closely scrutinise policy decisions emanating from these areas would be well served by learning the same tools and concepts that drive many of those very decisions. This is GIS-driven journalism in response to the rise of GIS in society. This is no different than a traditional political reporter learning basic accounting principles in order to make sense of government budgets and annual reports…”
A gobal approach for natural history museum collections Popular Science – Is there a way to keep track of all the items held in natural history museums? By Charlotte Hu: “Natural history museums offer amazing portals into worlds miles away from our own, and into eras from the distant past. Comprised of fossils, minerals, preserved specimens, and much more, some collections are of palatial grandeur.
Although every museum has some sort of system in place to track incoming and outgoing items, those systems are not connected, museum to museum. Keeping a more detailed record of who has what across the world could not only be important for conservation, but for cataloging how life on Earth has changed, and forecasting how it will continue to do so in the future. For example, there are case studies showing how analyzing the collections of these museums can be useful for studying pandemic preparedness, invasive species, colonial heritage, and more.
But this lack of connection might be a thing of the past. A paper published in the journal Science last week describes how a dozen large museums came together to map the entire collections of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums across 28 countries in order to figure out what digital infrastructure is needed to establish a global inventory survey.
Source: Integration of the world’s natural history collections can provide a resource for decision-makers. Kirk R. JohnsonIan F. P. Owens, and the Global Collection Group. 23 Mar 2023 Vol 379, Issue 6638 pp. 1192-1194 DOI: 10.1126/science.adf6434 – Over the past three centuries, people have collected objects and specimens and placed them in natural history museums throughout the world. Taken as a whole, this global collection is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it, an unparalleled source of information that is directly relevant to issues as diverse as wildlife conservation, climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security, invasive species, rare minerals, and the bioeconomy (1). Strategic coordination and use of the global collection has the potential to focus future collecting and guide decisions that are relevant to the future of humanity and biodiversity.
To begin to map the aggregate holdings of the global collection, we describe here a simple and fast method to assess the contents of any natural history museum, and report results based on our assessment of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums and herbaria from 28 countries. Today, more than a thousand natural history museums exist, with the largest ones located in Europe and North America. The world’s natural history collections provide a window into the planet’s past and present, and they are increasingly being used to make actionable predictions relative to climate change, biodiversity loss, and infectious disease.
For example, natural history museum data are the fundamental source of primary biodiversity knowledge underlying major policy frameworks. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C used over 385 million species occurrence records, aggregated and tracked by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), from 5432 data providers, mostly natural history museums (2, 3), to show species movement in response to climate change [see supplementary materials (SM) for additional case studies]…
