Geographic Information Systems in Community-Based Gerontological Research and Practice

Creation of a consistent 3D model of a city requires accurate data. Usually, accuracy assurance problems of data are solved by time consuming and expensive process of collecting and aligning with ground control points (GCP). Therefore, alternative methods become important. Using existing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) databases may decrease the time and cost of creating a reference dataset by reducing the number of GCPs required for producing high quality 3D data or GIS databases can serve as reference data. For this purpose, new spatial data analysis methods are needed to assure that GIS databases are of high-quality. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology and its sample development for comparative spatial analysis of digitized point cloud and the corresponding GIS database in order to statistically assess opportunities to align Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) data with existing GIS databases or to improve involved datasets. The method is evaluated using LiDAR data provided by Estonian company Reach-U Ltd. and GIS database layers from different Estonian open and closed databases.

The application of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology in education is becoming increasingly vital for enhancing digital literacy and spatial analysis skills. Rahmatullah Lempake Islamic Boarding School in Samarinda is one of the educational institutions with significant potential to utilize this technology in supporting the management of its environment and local resources. The initiative aims to provide students with training in GIS, enhancing their knowledge and skills in spatial data management and geographic analysis. The training employed a combination of lectures, discussions, and practical sessions using GIS software. It was attended by students aged 12 to 15 and covered foundational topics, such as an introduction to GIS, mapping applications, and data analysis techniques. The results of this training demonstrated a notable improvement in the students' understanding and basic GIS skills, as well as increased awareness of the technology's potential applications in their local environment. The integration of GIS into the educational process offers significant benefits, particularly in enhancing students' technological literacy and spatial analysis capabilities, which can be applied to environmental management activities within the Islamic boarding school. In conclusion, the GIS training at Rahmatullah Lempake Islamic Boarding School has effectively developed the students' foundational skills in technology and geographic analysis, offering practical benefits for future resource management and environmental planning endeavors.

The Minnesota Lake Superior shoreline (Minnesota'S “North Shore”) is characterized by a rocky shoreline with stretches of sand, gravel and cobble as well as several stream and ditch inlets into Lake Superior. The risk of spills is from both land and water. The 150 plus mile stretch of shoreline has a very limited amount of response equipment or nearby responders. The Duluth-Superior Harbor is at the estuarine mouth of the St. Louis River and is divided by the Minnesota and Wisconsin border. The harbor includes sensitive shorelines and habitats, numerous stream, ditch and storm sewer outfalls, as well as an active shipping industry. Geographic Information System (GIS) is a great tool for conducting data analysis and planning. GIS allows users to analyze and visualize large volumes of data to make decisions quickly. While many spill response planners use GIS as a planning response tool, many responders do not have the training and equipment to make efficient use of the capabilities of GIS. This project uses GIS to gather and analyze available data and then put it into a useful “hardcopy” visual format for responders to use in the field. Maps produced from various GIS data sources outline the response strategies for sensitive areas to be protected; types and quantities of response equipment needed; access areas; and other important features. These “hardcopy” displays can be included in contingency plans. Larger laminated versions can be stored with response equipment caches. For response planners that are more familiar with GIS, the tool includes several useful features including “clickable” hyperlinks that connect to georeferenced oblique aerial photos of the Lake Superior shoreline. Also included are GIS data from U.S. EPA and NOAA, including sensitive environment, economic and cultural resources; potential spill sources; and response resources. Where available, sewer data for both sanitary and storm sewers is included, along with high resolution aerial photos; navigation charts; highway stream crossing data; and other habitat information. These various data sources are valuable tools for spill response planners to more accurately and effectively develop workable response strategies and also for use during an actual response to more effectively and efficiently direct responders and resources. This GIS product also incorporates an Access database which allows for easy report generation and information updating.

The article is devoted to the problem of incorporation geographic information systems (GIS) in world school practice. The authors single out the stages of GIS application in school geographical education based on the retrospective analysis of the scientific literature. The first stage (late 70s – early 90s of the XX century) is the beginning of the first educational GIS programs and partnership agreements between schools and universities. The second stage (mid-90s of the XX century – the beginning of the XXI century) comprises the distribution of GIS-educational programs in European and Australian schools with the involvement of leading developers of GIS-packages (ESRI, Intergraph, MapInfo Corp., etc.). The third stage (2005–2012) marks the spread of the GIS school education in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America; on the fourth stage (from 2012 to the present) geographic information systems emerge in school curricula in most countries. The characteristics of the GIS-technologies development stages are given considering the GIS didactic possibilities for the study of school geography, as well as highlighting their advantages and disadvantages.

To make sure that regional reconstruction goes smoothly, it is important to know how rural construction areas in a river basin change over time and space and what factors affect those changes. This study focuses on the rural construction areas in the Nanxi River Basin. Through geographic information systems’ spatial analysis methods, the construction area morphology, center of gravity migration, and agglomeration degree are analyzed to reveal its spatiotemporal evolution from 1990 to 2020. The geographical detector is used to explore the interaction of multidimensional driving factors such as natural geography, socio-economic development, and cultural heritage protection. The research results show that (1) the rural construction area in the Nanxi River Basin shows an evolution trend of “agglomeration expansion and northward shift of the center of gravity.” (2) Cultural, economic, and natural factors all play a part in how rural construction areas change over time. Cultural factors, like the distance between farms and the layout of educational resources, have the most significant impact, followed by economic and natural factors. (3) The study also suggests a “cultural gene-natural base-economic potential” model that can help us understand how to protect cultural heritage and boost the economy at the same time. This result has direct guiding significance for the implementation of China’s rural revitalization strategy. It can give natural resource planning departments a scientific way to figure out the best way to use land and give cultural heritage management agencies a way to come up with safe development plans. It also provides a reference for the sustainable development path of resource-rich villages around the world.

The menopausal transition is marked by hormonal changes and is quite often accompanied by cognitive and emotional complaints. Recent data also suggest a heightened risk for depression. Little is known about the changes in emotional regulation that might contribute to the increased risk of depression in this population. The aim of this study was to examine the brain correlates of emotional regulation in healthy, nondepressed midlife women. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was obtained in response to a standardized emotional regulation task. Levels of congruency were set and brain activation was measured during high- and low-conflict-resolution trials. Fourteen women aged 40 to 60 years were enrolled into the study, and 11 were included in the final analyses. Activity associated with resolution of emotional conflict was observed in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (P < 0.05). No regions were engaged in the generation/monitoring of emotional conflict. Moreover, there was a significant deactivation of the amygdala in response to fearful faces (P < 0.05). Unlike similar studies in younger populations, these results suggest a more significant engagement of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and less amygdala activation in emotional regulation in midlife women. These findings are, however, consistent with previous studies in older populations. We hypothesize that a shift in emotional regulation circuitry might therefore occur in women during the menopausal transition and possibly contribute to the occurrence of mood and anxiety symptoms in women during/after this period in life.

Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for African urban planning and research is now becoming a reality. But there is limited technical expertise and the necessary infrastructure to support local government efforts in data‐poor environments. As a result, the creation of urban geo‐spatial databases have tended to reside in the central government, large municipalities, research institutions, donor funded projects and individual research initiatives. To date, such applications have focused on observable and quantifiable aspects of the urban built environment while experiential information has remained peripheral. This paper employs a participatory GIS approach to integrate community local knowledge with traditional urban spatial data. Our objective is to populate urban‐based geo‐spatial databases for a more robust understanding of quality of life in Athi River town, Kenya. The Athi River GIS includes formal data and local knowledge on land cover, land use, hydrology, topography, infrastructure, industry, service provision, and housing. Community data was obtained through mental mapping, focus group discussions, GPS‐based transect walks, social histories of exclusion, oral narratives of land use, and relevant archival material. The study concludes that GIS in Kenya is being introduced within an empiricist and positivist epistemological and methodological framework. With more focus on the visual and quantifiable aspects of the built environment, the perceptions of disenfranchised peri‐urban communities are being excluded. In the paper, a place‐based (re) definition of residential quality of life is achieved by integrating community local knowledge into a GIS as an information layer. In the study, local knowledge and expert GIS data are thus found to be complementary.

RETRACTED: Green urban garden landscape simulation platform based on high-resolution image recognition technology and GIS

Osteoporosis is a prevalent condition that may exist in a silent form, in which increased fracture risk can be detected by measurement of bone mineral density (BMD), or as a symptomatic condition after a fragility fracture has occurred. In October 2004, the Surgeon General of the United States published a lengthy report on osteoporosis (1), which is a must-read for healthcare professionals interested in this disease. The chapter “Assessing the Risk of Bone Disease and Fracture” discusses many aspects of bone mass measurement, but relegates biochemical markers of bone turnover to the subsection “Looking to the Future: Potential Complements to BMD” (1). In a sense, this designation is appropriate because these markers currently have no “diagnostic” value, whereas the WHO has designated a BMD >2.5 SD below the mean for healthy adults younger than 50 years as diagnostic for osteoporosis even in the absence of a bone fracture. Considerable evidence exists, however, that biochemical marker data alone can be used to assess fracture risk in older persons and are additive to BMD data with respect to fracture risk prediction. In reality, neither clinical tool is optimal for this purpose. Two recent studies in older populations have pointed out that among individuals who have sustained a fragility fracture, before the fracture only 40%–45% would have been diagnosed with …

Background and Objective: Aging is associated with a decline in attentional and executive abilities, which are linked to physiological, structural, and functional brain changes. A variety of novel non-invasive brain stimulation methods have been probed in terms of their neuroenhancement efficacy in the last decade; one that holds significant promise is transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) that delivers an alternate current at random amplitude and frequency. The aim of this study was to investigate whether repeated sessions of tRNS applied as an add-on to cognitive training (CT) may induce long-term near and far transfer cognitive improvements.Methods: In this sham-controlled, randomized, double-blinded study forty-two older adults (age range 60–86 years) were randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups that received 20 min of 0.705 mA tRNS (N = 14), 1 mA tRNS (N = 14), or sham tRNS (N = 19) combined with 30 min of CT of executive functions (cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, working memory). tRNS was applied bilaterally over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices for five sessions. The primary outcome (non-verbal logical reasoning) and other cognitive functions (attention, memory, executive functions) were assessed before and after the intervention and at a 1-month follow-up.Results: Non-verbal logical reasoning, inhibitory control and reaction time improved significantly over time, but stimulation did not differentially affect this improvement. These changes occurred during CT, while no further improvement was observed during follow-up. Performance change in logical reasoning was significantly correlated with age in the group receiving 1 mA tRNS, indicating that older participants profited more from tRNS than younger participants. Performance change in non-verbal working memory was significantly correlated with age in the group receiving sham tRNS, indicating that in contrast to active tRNS, older participants in the sham group declined more than younger participants.Interpretation: CT induced cognitive improvements in all treatment groups, but tRNS did not modulate most of these cognitive improvements. However, the effect of tRNS depended on age in some cognitive functions. We discuss possible explanations leading to this result that can help to improve the design of future neuroenhancement studies in older populations.

Application and utility of geographic information systems in pharmacy specific health research: A scoping review.

Spatial aspects are often crucial for agriculture-related companies. This paper presents how methods of spatial analysis can help to elaborate regional network planning strategy for a large agricultural bank. Corporate reporting microdata, a novel source for the research of Russian business, were processed and visualized with geographical information system (GIS). The overlay of agribusiness clusters and bank accessibility zones revealed uneven patterns of its current branch network. This approach was applicable as a first step for the location choice strategy. The results allowed us to propose a new office location in order to cover territories for the further development of the bank.

As the development of the theory and technology of geographical information, Geographical Information System (GIS) has been widely applied in variety of industries. It usually refers to the analytical problem of multi-factor in GIS thematic application. In this field, the determination of factors' weight is a common and important problem. It actually deals the data when processing the spatial analysis applying GIS, for example, according to the importance of some factor, assign some value to it then process spatial overlay operation using the values and finally conclude some evaluation or result. In reality, there are many factors that affect the some kind of evaluation. Usually, we choose several more important factors as the evaluation criterion in order to make convenient for research. Then we assign some weight values to these factors and process spatial analysis then conclude some decision or evaluation to make support for decision-making. We can choose the factors that can make more impaction on the evaluation or decision-making using the method of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). However, it has strong subjectivity of the factors' weight values assigned by this method. Rough set theory, which can effectively remove the impaction made by artificial factors, can make up the deficiency. It can make the spatial analysis more objective and more effective combining the two methods in GIS spatial analysis.

We are on the edge of a revolution in the way we visualize and query digital data about our environment. To date, computer displays of our environment in the third dimension have been limited to computer-aided design (CAD) packages and the query of related data limited to geographical information systems (GIS) packages in two dimensions. The current innovation wave across the spatial data information field is based on the development and dissemination of three-dimensional GIS (3-D GIS) which allows data to be visualized and queried on an x, y and z axis plane. A number of the key players in information visualization allow conventional two-dimensional data to be viewed and exported in a three-dimensional format, currently using the standard Virtual Reality Modeling Language 2.0 (VRML 2.0). However such methods of visualization and data query are limited in their practicality. The move towards 3-D GIS in standard packages has been rather hit and miss, with the third dimension often only used as a substitute for basic CAD-like visualization. We argue here that 3-D GIS will only become a reality when it is directly linked with CAD models; and that the Internet is the most appropriate medium through which this is most likely to occur. We illustrate these arguments in an overview of research into the virtual city in general and our own development of ‘Virtual London’ in particular. Further, we explore the rise of the global virtual city, a network of virtual cities that provide an insight into the future of digital space.

The practice and application of geographic information systems have a positive promoting effect on the development of digital cities. It can provides high-quality geographic information services, which has profound research significance. Therefore, the study improves the Mask R-CNN algorithm and combines the improved algorithm with 3D modeling to construct a new 3D modeling model for multi-source data fusion. Finally, the 3D modeling algorithm is integrated with the geographic information system, and a novel 3D modeling geographic information system model based on multi-source data fusion is proposed. In the street image segmentation task, the improved algorithm achieved an accuracy of 98.97% and a loss value of 1.08, demonstrating good stability and robustness. The proposed model can not only accurately detect and segment target images of streets, but also finely segment the boundary areas between objects. In practical applications, the research model has achieved the level I modeling accuracy standard in the 3D modeling tasks of multiple typical urban blocks, with the error controlled within a reasonable range. It has good engineering practicability and promotion value. In summary, the research proposes a new three-dimensional modeling geographic information system model based on multi-source data fusion, which has good target image recognition and segmentation capabilities, providing useful suggestions and guidance for constructing digital cities.