GIS Day: Posters and Presenters

Many of the concepts that students must master in Agronomy's soil, crop, and environmental science curricula are inherently spatial. Although we implicitly acknowledge the existence of spatial patterns in our courses, our ability to explicitly make these spatial patterns clear to our students has been limited. The presenter will describe how Isee intends to meet these goals by A) developing Isee, an intuitive, web-based geographic information application that will allow students to access a large variety of maps (data layers) for any area of Indiana using state-of-the-art geobrowsers such as OpenLayers and Google Earth, and B) using Isee to integrate spatial educational experiences into Agronomy curricula, focusing on beginning undergraduate courses which reach over 400 students per year.

Despite major improvements in GIS technologies in recent years, it remains particularly difficult to efficiently locate geospatial data. Purdue Libraries, in keeping with their efforts to build a distributed, cross-discipline data repository, is nearing an alpha release of a metadata portal through which large amounts of base data as well as Purdue-produced geospatial data can be located, downloaded or connected to. GIS Librarian Miller will discuss the project and how it might interact with existing campus systems.

NASA's esteemed (but lesser-known) globe data viewer, WorldWind, has gone java. This talk by Purdue Libraries GA and ECE grad student Salman Javed is about his in-progress attempts to prepare the WorldWind globe viewer for embedding in other web applications that could then communicate with the globe (e.g. throw WMS, WCS, other layers to the globe).

The Indiana Water Monitoring Inventory is a portal for locating water monitoring information conducted by a variety of government agencies and organizations in the state of Indiana. The goal of this project was to implement a web site through which potential users of monitoring information can find location and attributes of water monitoring sites. To accomplish this, the user interface was developed with Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API). Basic functionality of displaying geographic information, the database structure, loading data, interaction between PHP and Java Script and the user interface will be described in the presentation. The inventory can be accessed at https://engineering.purdue.edu/~inwater

We have recently started using the virtual machine technology to speed up our development of online maps, based on ArcIMS or Google Maps -- and various databases. These are developed in our department on a virtual or physical server, and then the image of the machine is loaded on the Agriculture Information Technology groups virtualized cluster. It is successful in that the hardware costs of setting up servers are eliminated, management is available 24/7, security is handled by professionals, and performance is quite good. I will display the steps in the process of virtualizing, which are not difficult.

Physical inactivity and obesity are major public health issues. Recent studies have provided evidence that attributes of the built environment influence physical activity among adults and that factors such as greater urban sprawl are related to overweight and obesity. Few studies have developed objective individual-level measures of the built environment, a geographic scale that may be more relevant to certain types of physical activity, such as walking. In addition, further research is needed to assess the associations of both objective and perceived environmental factors with physical activity. In this 2-year exploratory study funded by the National Cancer Institute, we are addressing these research gaps.

Giardia infection has been found in a wide range of hosts including human, domestic, and wild animals. Dogs are the definitive host of G.duodenalis, which can cause diarrhea and other symptoms. Although zoonotic transmission of Giardia remains unclear, epidemiologic evidence suggests that some Giardia species are zoonotic. Additionally, Giardia has been associated with epidemics in the US and other countries making it one of the most important public health concerns. Prevalence of Giardia among dogs in the United States ranged from 10% in well-treated dogs to 30-50% in puppies and up to 100% in breeding kennels. However, prevalence of Giardia in pet dogs visiting private hospitals in the United States is not well known. Our objective was to estimates Giardia prevalence in US pet dogs visiting private hospitals and its distribution in some urban areas in the State of Colorado.