A few weeks ago, I attended the 2017 ENVI Analytics Symposium (EAS) in Denver, CO.

The Symposium was put together by Harris Geospatial Solutions. Harris developed ENVI, image analysis software for image scientists, image analysts, and GIS professionals to extract accurate and meaningful information from many kinds of data.

ENVIis designed to be used by anyone who relies on imagery and data to make decisions and provides expert-level results across the board, regardless of a user’s prior experience with imagery.

ENVI is flexible and can be customized to meet specific project needs and can be deployed and accessed from the desktop, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. Fully integrated with ArcGIS for Desktop and ArcGIS for Server from ESRI, users can access ENVI tools directly within the Arc environment to add image analysis capabilities to their GIS models and applications.

This week the news hit close to home: my son was working in the Manderley Bay Hotel when the shooter opened fire on Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas outside. He was safe thank God, but terribly shaken by the event as visitors poured into the hotel with panicked stories and later, the hotel was in lockdown for several hours. The level of fear and panic generated by this event was hard to contain as most people didn’t know what was happening and heard only shots  coming from up high.

Rather than rehashing the news here, which everyone has read already via TV or popups on their phones, I’m going to blog through maps that show factual information on this and other recent disasters that have hit close to home, both manmade and natural. Maps put events in perspective, take one incident out of isolation and place it in context.

From The Guardian: The United States owns way, way more guns per capita than the rest of the world. And the best research on gun violence suggests that’s probably contributing to our homicide problem — as exemplified by Sunday night’s horrific shooting.

Here’s a map of firearm ownership around the world, using 2012 data compiled by The Guardian. The United States has nearly twice as many guns per 100 people as the next closest country, Yemen — 88.8 guns per 100 as opposed to 54.8 in Yemen:

We have also the aftermath of the devastation from three hurricanes making landfall in the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Barbuda and others, plus an earthquake in Mexico. Fortunately maps are abundant in the GIS world for tracking and analysis of the events, plus disaster recovery efforts.

In many parts of the world people do not have physical addresses, nor defined property boundaries. The importance of identifying location by addressing/location with just three words is brought to light in this video by what3words:

For the full article with comments please visit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-site-mapping-tools-explore-amazon-hq2-location-stewart-berry/

Using Site Mapping Tools to Explore the Amazon HQ2 Location

Summary

Amazon is performing a competitive site selection process and is considering metro regions in North America for its second corporate headquarters.

• Amazon HQ2 will generate $5 billion in construction and create 50,000 jobs
• Amazon wants one competitive response per metropolitan statistical area (MSA)
• A similar layout to Amazon’s Seattle campus is preferred

The Maptitude mapping software is an excellent tool for data analysis and visualization. We will use several different Maptitude tools to explore how they work together to provide tangible results. As an exercise we will:

• Explore the characteristics of a study area in the USA
• Work through a real-world set of requirements