Much of the research we do in the Geospatial Analysis Lab (GAL) is on human or wildlife movement, which involves measuring movement over time often using GPS tracking. Dealing with time in GIS is notoriously challenging, a most GISystems are designed to store, analyse and visualize spatial data such as tables, vectors or rasters (i.e. two dimensional spatial information). Time is often integrated into GISystems as an attribute of spatial features, which is the case in our research on GPS tracking feral swine, and other projects. With time as an attribute of spatial data, we can visualize and analyze mobility and movement processes like animal movement in GIS. One way to deal with time in GIS is to aggregate all features within a time period. When time is stored as a feature attribute, we can plot or analyze all records in the table. In wildlife movement research this allows us to visualize and analyze the space use of individuals over the entire study period. Comparing the overall spac

In response to the COVID-19 situation here in Ontario, the Geospatial Lab is going to start a new project looking at measuring mobility indicators before, during, and after government mandated regulations to curb mobility, and encourage social distancing. We will be working closely with project partners at Telus, using their Insights Data platform, as part of their Data for Good initiative. We will also be working closely with project partners Esri Canada ltd to develop an interactive data visualization dashboard that will be used as a public facing web platform to disseminate our results. We are really looking forward to getting going on this project and hopefully coming up with some interesting and helpful findings. We will be working with Dr Colin Robertson and The Spatial Lab at Wilfrid Laurier University, and also collaborate with other researchers at Western including the HEAL lab , and researchers at the Geospatial Data Science Lab at U. Wisconsin-Madison, who are do

Welcome to the Geospatial Lab at Western Universities Blog page. Here we will write about new tools and techniques we are trying, highlight preliminary results, or discuss other things we see in the literature and/or news. Hope you like it!