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Friday, November 28, 2008
GIS software tracks Boston plows and right whale movement
By Brendan Lynch
MIT debuts RoboClam
NECN: Efrain Viscarolasaga on the future of fish farming
Two local civic institutions a half-mile apart are using mapping software to track right whales off the East Coast and snow plows off the southeast expressway.
On the Florida and Georgia coasts, New England Aquarium researchers funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using geographic information systems — software used to store and display location-based information — to track both endangered right whales and cargo ships to keep the latter from hitting and killing the former. And on Boston’s lawn-furniture-strewn streets, the city of Boston plans to use GIS to coordinate its response to snowstorms.
Such local GIS activity should be good for New England GIS companies — like Reading Information Technology Inc. in Reading or Blue Marble Geographics in Gardiner, Maine — but both the city of Boston and the Aquarium are using California-based Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc.’s ArcGIS software, a GIS market share leader, for their projects.
A block away from City Hall on School Street, however, Applied Geographics Inc. revamped the town of Amherst’s GIS tools this summer. Users can edit, save and e-mail custom maps in addition to viewing property, cemetery, and utility information. AppGeo also created the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp.’s GIS tool, which allows users to search for available commercial land parcels.
Aquarium researcher Kerry Lagueux is using GIS to monitor the critical habitat area of the North Atlantic right whale, or “the most urban ocean environment in the world.” Whale hunting made the right whale endangered, but now collisions with cargo ships are its leading cause of mortality, killing about one whale a year, Lagueux said. The ships dwarf the whales, which are typically about 35 feet to 55 feet in length, Lagueux said.
“(The ships are) so large they probably wouldn’t even feel it” in a collision, he said.
From December to March, aerial surveys of the area use global positioning system technology to plot the whales’ location. From Central Wharf, Lagueux collects the speed, location, direction and destination data that ships send out, and both sets of data are correlated on a map.
The data has already been used to suggest alternate shipping routes and a maximum ship speed, Lagueux said.
At City Hall, plans are afoot to use GIS to display traffic backups, emergency calls and plow locations during snow emergencies. Maps would to tell plow truck drivers which streets are in the worst condition and show the quickest and safest way to reach them.
While Boston’s assessing department and the Boston Redevelopment Authority have been using GIS for a few years, the city is looking to spread the technology across its departments, according to CIO Bill Oates. The city hired a GIS manager, Claire Lane, in February, and has devoted about $1 million to GIS in fiscal 2009. The city also plans to make more of its GIS information publicly available and include more data layers such as parcels of land, fire and police districts, and zoning and planning districts, Lane said.
“Anything you can do with plows, you can do with street sweepers or any of our public services,” Lane said.
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