Project Titles and Abstracts - Fall 2007

1. Is it an attractive wind resource?
2. Is there landowner and community support?
3. Is the permitting feasible?
4. Is the land use compatible?
5. Is there a nearby access to an appropriate electrical interconnect point?
6. Are the site conditions appropriate for access during construction and operations?
7. Is there aviation compatibility?
8. Is there a favorable electricity market?

A complete site suitability analysis would have to take into consideration all eight criteria. This fact finding process will concentrate on factual data, specifically, considerations 1, 3, 5, and 7. Attractiveness of the wind source will be based upon the Wind Power Class rating system used by National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with 1 being the lowest and 7 being the highest. This data is available through MassGIS. For permitting analysis, the map(s) will include a spatial overlay of the jurisdictions over each part of the coast. I will create this data set based upon my own research. Transmission lines data, available from MassGIS, will cover consideration 5, as this is the most popular way to connect offshore wind farms to land grids. I will also search to see if the New England Federal Aviation Administration has created guidelines for wind turbine height as there is currently no federal standard. This data will be incorporated as appropriate.

Finally, I will have to obtain the proposed site locations from Cape Wind and Blue H that I wish to study. An overlay of the sites with the site suitability analysis should answer my question. Since these companies are profit driven, I expect my results to show that proposed wind farm sites are adequately sited within technical considerations. I am not sure, however, whether each company will choose to site in different or the same permitting jurisdictions or even whether it currently has any effect on their siting choices.

The North Bergen Transit Line:
Good Idea? Bad Idea?A Comparative Analysis

I will be looking at a proposed light rail line, called the Northern Branch Line, running from my hometown, Tenafly, NJ, to the North Bergen Junction Station with connecting service to the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Line (which goes on to the Hudson River waterfront ferries). By comparing the proposed line with other transit lines already in use, I will create a suitability study for the Northern Branch Line. First, I will map the proposed rail line and the station locations (which nj transit has provided online) with an aerial/satellite image background (to show how the stations will fit into the neighborhood context). Next, I will use census SF3 data and populatedplaces2000 data to map income, population, population density, car ownership, and public transportation to work useage. I will also map land use to show where the residential areas are concentrated. I will rasterize the distance from the pre-existing rail line stations and compare that with a rasterized distance from the proposed line stations. Intersecting the population, population density, car ownership, and public transportation use data with the distance data will show where there is a sufficient population within useable distance to support a rail line. It will also be interesting to compare the number of people within walking distance to the station, people within driving distance to the station, and people on bus feeder lines to the station. In the end, I expect to confirm NJ transit’s line-suitability selection and in the process, I may discover some under-supported rail lines.

Urban Parks: A Suitability Study

I am proposing to work on methods for identifying building footprints in New Orleans. There are currently no digital maps of building footprints in New Orleans since the hurricane and I want to try and generate rough polygons that can be used to identify buildings using a combination of high-resolution orthophotos (6 inch) and Lidar data. Currently there is Lidar data available but this is not at a high enough resolution to process using commercial software. I want to try and combine these two sources to extract this data using image processing software and ArcGIS. My interest in doing this is to examine the energy consumption of different building volumes at a city-wide level.

Socioeconomic Study and Planning Using a GIS Approach in Africa

The research focuses on the GIS conversion of internet accessible spatial data, and the re-projection, processing, creation of the unified personal database and different spatial analysis for the assessment of the socio – economic situation of some countries in Africa. The analysis was made for the understanding of this regional situation in the future and for the planning of appropriate measures. The spatial data was downloaded from various internet sources with the various projections, formats and in this research in particular was applied to the methods studied in the course 11.520.

Voting Patterns of Hispanics in the US

I would like to explore and analyze the voting patterns of Hispanic population in the US. In the first part, I would like to analyze the voting patterns of Hispanic population in the United States for the last presidential elections. If possible (provided information is available) identify whether these patters have changed compared to the last election. I also plan to compare these patterns to other ethnic groups: namely, black and whites.  In the second part, I would like to analyze the Hispanic voting
patterns in five states: California, Texas, Florida, New York and Massachusetts for the last gubernatorial election and compare it to the presidential pattern and to the other two ethnic groups under considerations (blacks and whites). I would also like to differentiate voting patterns according to whether Hispanic population is located in big (>100,000) and small cities (<100,000).

Malaria and its Impact on Land Use in the Amazon

Siting a Mixed-Use Development that Protects Habitat Near an Edge City

1. Be near a major metropolitan area of at least 500,000 people
2. Be a discernable center of a region where more people go during the day than at night (a workplace) or a potential new center
3. Be near a federally or state managed tract of park land (ie a national park or national wildlife refuge, etc)
4. Currently have or be able to support at least 1 million square feet of office space
5. Be within a certain distance of a major highway network

Roxbury, South Boston, and Chelsea: A case study of three Boys & Girls Clubs’ social and economic contexts.

Public Transportation Access in the Greater Philadelphia Area

I will be looking at transportation issues in Philadelphia.  Having grown up in the suburbs on the New Jersey side, where public transportation is little heard of, I am curious to see what modes of transportation are available to different communities in the Philadelphia area.  I hope to be able to draw some conclusions about locations where rail lines are more accessible than bus lines or vice versa, for example.  Using the 2000 census, I will analyze socioeconomic data to look for patterns in income, education, race, employment, etc. and corresponding methods of public transportation.  I will also attempt to draw some conclusions from the census data on commuters to compare private transportation options to public.  Most of the data is being gathered from the PA Spatial Data Access website, though it has been difficult to find the transportation data for Philadelphia.  Some of the data, such as Regional Rail Stations, are more readily available for consumer friendly applications, such as Google Earth and Google Maps Mashups.  I am extracting the data from these applications and converting the data to database files that are readable in ArcGIS and can be projected onto the maps made with the census data for spatial analysis.

Environmental Justice in Eastern Massachusetts:  Public Health Indicators for Environmental Justice Communities of Concern

Is there a correlation between public health issues such as asthma, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension, and Environmental Justice Communities of Concern?  Which EPA criteria for EJCCs are most likely to indicate poor access to recreational land, high levels of pollutants, and higher numbers of public health cases?  Should these criteria be readjusted for analyzing eastern Mass. in the future?  In order to analyze this question, datasets on public health and violent crimes will be pulled from the Massachusetts Children and Families database.  Also datasets for air pollution releases, as well as toxic releases, will be pulled from the EPA’s envirofacts database.  Finally, the land use and MA state shapefiles will be pulled from MassGIS.  By rasterizing location so that “good” locations are considered far from air emissions locations and close to public recreation areas, an analysis can be done to build a model of the propensity for “good” or “bad” locations to be within different types of EJ high risk communities, as defined by the EPA.  This model will also include weighting of different communities according to the number of various health risks incurred.  Two different sets of maps will be created: one relating to hypertension and diabetes and its correlation to violence and public recreation areas, and the second relating to asthma and particulate emissions. 

In this project I am using census and land use data to propose a location for a new light rail line in Boston.  Some of the variables I am taking into account are population density, poverty density, and age from the census data, and open land, including already existing rights of way, from land use data.  If time / space permits, I am also hoping to use parcel data in my final analysis to determine the physical footprint and building density on a very detailed level, rather than just block group population (for example, locating a station adjacent a high rise complex would benefit more people than placing it father away from the high rise in the same high density tract). 
Since the scope of this project would be extremely large if I consider the entirety of metro Boston, I am narrowing down my search to a few pre-selected areas.  Based on historical context (where old streetcar and elevated lines existed) and my knowledge of Boston neighborhoods, I am restricting my search area to the neighborhoods between Columbus Ave / the orange line to the west and Dorchester Ave / The Red Line to the east.  I am also imposing a minimum half-mile distance between stations to prevent clustering, which would slow the efficiency of the new rail line. 
Initial location estimates based on rights-of-way include Washington St, Warren St. / Blue Hill Ave, and the existing railroad corridor used by the MBTA Fairmount Line

To estimate the evapotranspiration from a watershed is a tough task for hydrologists, primarily due to the variability of physical properties over a watershed. With the help of ArcGIS, I try to reflect the spatial distribution of vegetation as well as LAI, and by adopting the FAO method, to estimate the spatial distribution of evapotranspiration from a watershed. By doing a spatial analysis, I generate the watershed boundary based on the USGS DEM data, and then extract the LAI and
land use data from USGS over the watershed. Finally, under the assumption of constant atmospheric conditions over this watershed, I estimate the evapotranspiration using the FAO method. The objective of this project is to illustrate the possibility of estimation of the evapotranspiration based on spatial viability.

Assessing Grocery Market Demand in New Orlean’s Lower Ninth Ward

Hurricane Katrina brought international attention to the devastating impacts on the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans.  Little less known is the fact that the Lower Ninth has been an underserved neighborhood for years before the storm. The Lower Ninth – an area of is about 1.25 miles from East to West and 2 miles North to South – has not had a grocery store, food store, or supermarket in the area for the last 25 years. Residents of the Lower Ninth have relied on grocery stores and markets outside of their neighborhood for over 2 decades. This project will attempt to assess whether or not there is sufficient retail demand for a grocery store or small market in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Methodology : The NOLA Food Map website lists markets and food stores in the New Orleans area. By constructing a point file using geo-coded addresses of these food stores, this will then allow me to construct buffers that show distances that Lower Ninth Ward residents currently travel in order to access food stores. A explanatory map will be constructed to demonstrate distance of existing stores from the Lower Ninth Ward. The second step will be to show retail demand for a grocery store, based on calculations of disposable income/square mile. Data for disposable income will be derived from Bureau of Labor Statistic’ Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2005 as well as household income data from ESRI (2007). This information will then be compared to additional analysis of how much retail demand (spending on groceries/square mile) is needed to support a small store of a certain square footage in the Lower Ninth Ward.
General Results/Conclusion:  The conclusion will probably be that there is enough retail market demand in the Lower Ninth Ward, mainly because there is hardly any competition for these grocery dollars right now.

My final project entails my exploration of various factors that may contribute to the presence or absence of crime in the Greater Boston Area (namely, the municipalities that fall within I-495).  I am using MassGIS data to look at crime statistics for each municipality (including occurrences of specific kinds of property and violent crimes, as well as location of police stations and police employment).  I also intend to connect this with U.S. Census data regarding demographic information about these municipalities, including poverty, unemployment, building vacancies, population density, education levels attained, etc.  Because the Census data is at the block group level and the crime data is at the town level, I will have to dissolve the block groups by plotting their centroids, doing a spatial join, and using the summarize feature.  I am planning to create several maps, both using vector and raster models, to highlight interesting spatial patterns, especially those that I perceive as being deviations from common preconceived stereotypes about the causes of crime.

Exploring Trends in Socioeconomic Factors of Metropolitan Boston by Town Classification

Examining Violent Crime Trends in Boston

In the past decades, Boston has shown an overall trend of decreasing crime rates; however, some regions within Boston still are more notorious violent than others.  This study will show how violent crime in various districts in Boston has changed over the past several years.  These districts are based upon the regions defined by the Boston Police Department and will be used in conjunction with Boston Blockgroup definitions.  The locations and frequencies of violent crime will be compared to districts’ income and age levels, and additionally, these incidents will be compared to land use, especially educational land use.  While crime rates may be decreasing overall, there have been reports that crime surrounding schools is on the rise.  The data collected will be analyzed to either support or negate this claim.

A report by the Cambridge, MA Mayor’s Committee on University-Community Relation in 1991 found that while the benefits of universities' activities flow freely across local, state and national boundaries, there is often tension between universities and their local/neighboring communities. In the past six years (2001-2006) has the city been able to ensure that the local impacts of university growth are balanced by local benefits? I decided to explore the assertion that when the inventory of taxable property decreases (as universities expand) it causes city revenues to also decrease. In particular I wanted to explore the relationship between payments to the city and university growth. I looked at both tax and tax exempt university property expansion compared to changes in real estate taxes levied and other payments to the city. My methodology involved obtaining data from the City’s website, the Census Bureau (2000) and MassGIS; compiling the data into GIS; and exploring interesting trends toidentify surprises and draw conclusions. The results indicated that:

• Real estate taxes paid by universities provide only one metric for capturing how the city is dealing with university growth/expansion
• MIT is the highest taxpayer in Cambridge
• The ratio of universities’ payments to the city of Cambridge and the universities’ size is not always proportional
• The City of Cambridge has been able to balance university growth through means other than strictly real estate taxes.  Though not explored in depth in my analysis, other negotiated agreements between the city and universities, namely Harvard and MIT have enabled the city to not only collect more revenues for the city, but also ensure that as residential property values increase, they do not lead to higher property taxes for Cambridge residents.

Research Question: Is there a difference in the location pattern of old and new Hispanic immigrants within the metropolitan statistical area of Dallas and Houston? Is there a difference in the social and economic indicators (like per capita income, level of education, employment sector) between old and new immigrants?
Hypothesis: Newer immigrants will be poorer with lower levels of education than the older immigrants. This will affect their location choices and they will be concentrated in immigrant enclaves in the city proper. Older immigrants will have higher incomes and levels of education; consequently, they won’t be concentrated in enclaves but will rather assimilate into higher income areas outside the city proper. We will test this hypothesis for two cities in Texas, Dallas and Houston. Texas has been selected because it has one of the highest percentages of Hispanic immigrants in the US.
Methodology: We have the shape files for the primary metropolitan statistical area (PMSA) and city proper for Dallas and Houston. We have the dataset for the year of entry for foreign born immigrants; for our analysis, we define old immigrants as those who entered the US before 1980 and new immigrants as those who entered the US post-1990. We will then create a union of the PMSA shape file with the social and economic indicators for Hispanics and then analyze the location pattern as well as the social/economic status of old and new immigrants using the union shapefile.