Esri • Winter 2009/2010 www.esri.com/arcnews Vol. 31 No. 4 Kingston University London: 20 Years of GIS Education By Kenneth Field, Course Director, Kingston Centre for GIS In the United Kingdom, Kingston University London (KUL) holds a special place in the history of academic programmes in geographic information systems. In 1989, Kingston was the first higher education institution (HEI) in the world to design and offer a three-year bachelor’s degree wholly in GIS. September 2009 marked 20 years of the course as it comes of age and welcomes its 21st intake. With more than 650 graduates of the bachelor’s degree course, 50 master’s graduates, and more than 400 students of our distancelearning training course for professional in-service training, as well as successful doctoral candidates, the university has many students who have gone on to develop careers in the geographic information (GI) industry. continued on page 3 Design and Collaborate over the Web Web Editing and User-Generated Content (UGC) at ArcGIS 9.4 ArcGIS 9.4 Web editing will change the way organizations collect and manage spatial data. It gives users the ability to modify geographic content within any Web mapping application and provides a venue for online communities to become active contributors to the geodatabase. Web editing makes it easy to capture ideas and observations for distributed problem solving and extend GIS editing capabilities to more people within the organization. These capabilities can also be used to capture user-generated content (UGC). continued on page 2 Willie Smits Shares Methodology for Sustainable Forests “We can use technologies such as GIS to save biodiversity. We can still help local people retain their cultures and traditional means of existence.” This is the message of Dr. Willie Smits, founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation and the Masarang Foundation, which raise money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world. Smits, a keynote speaker at the 2009 Esri International User Conference, is a biologist dedicated to rebuilding orangutan populations and improving forest habitats worldwide. His campaign has two fronts. One is a zealous battle against deforestation and habitat destruction, and the other is the promotion of sustainable agribusiness that benefits both species of primates, human and orangutan. “We cannot save the environment if we do not simultaneously take care of people’s needs,” maintains Smits. In recent decades, palm oil plantations have become prevalent on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra where, for thousands of years, colonies of orangutans have thrived in lush tropical forest. The main goal of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation is to protect orangutans and their natural habitat, but the desecration of this habitat has become so pervasive that the foundation has taken into its care more than 1,000 orphaned orangutans. Scientists estimate that wild orangutans are disappearing at the rate of 2,000 a year and will be extinct in 10 years. continued on page 8 New Web editing capabilities allow citizens to easily share their observations. Time Awareness Leads to Better Understanding of Complex Geographies Visualizing Time in GIS Temporal GIS is an emerging capability for integrating temporal data with location and attribute data, enabling temporal visualization and ultimately temporal analysis. Visualizing change on a computer screen in a GIS environment may give the viewer more options, but it is still a challenge. At ArcGIS 9.4, Esri has made time a core component of GIS. Simple and easy temporal mapping and visualization functionality means that the map is now time aware. The new time-aware functionality in ArcGIS 9.4 lets users create and manage time-based data, display and animate temporal datasets, and publish and query temporal map services. (See the complete article on page 12.) Portland, Oregon, Trailblazes a Successful Regional GIS By Matteo Luccio People from around the world come to Portland, Oregon, to study the city’s successful model for growth management and comprehensive land-use planning. Few, however, know that this success is enabled by a regional land information system (RLIS) that was conceived and implemented 20 years ago by Metro, the first elected regional government in the United States, along with cooperating local jurisdictions, to help meet state planning requirements. RLIS has since been the key tool used to plan, evaluate policy, and formulate development models in the Portland area. Metro, which comprises three counties and 25 cities, secured the funding and political support required for the system, covering 544 square continued on page 6 GIS for City Solutions Eugene, Oregon Jacksonville Beach, Florida Singapore Tallahassee, Florida Toronto, Ontario, Canada Special in This Issue 18 19 20 22 23 GIS for Disease Monitoring Combating Mosquitoes Decline of Bats Tracking H1N1 Flu Focusing on Maps with GIS U.S. Forest Service Canadian Firm in New York U.S. Geological Survey 32 33 34 Town centers envisioned by the 50-year plan for managing growth in the Portland metropolitan area. Water Resources Management with GIS Black Sea, Russia 26 Rwanda, Africa 28 Boulder County, Colorado 29 The State of Wyoming 30 36 38 39