Discussion Post 1

Our first discussion in GIS Programming is about the uses of GIS in the real world. To facilitate our discussion, we were to find an article showing just about any interesting application of GIS - not necessarily limited to Python programming. My article focused on the use least-cost path analysis to assist in determining the route of Hernando de Soto's 1540 entrada:
http://saa.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/saa/aa/2015/00000080/00000001/art00003

The researchers wanted the optimal path to take into account the size of the party traveling that path. As pointed out in their article, optimal paths use slope information to find the best route and so the default best route is almost always along a flat area. Within the area under consideration that would mean that the best route will tend to be along canyon bottoms - which isn't appropriate when trying to determine where a large party of over 100 people, plus livestock and supplies, would be traveling. To fix this they 'degraded' the spatial resolution of a DEM (specifically a DEM from the 2000 U. S. Shuttle Endeavor with a 90 meter resolution) - this did not affect the accuracy of the DEM but did eliminate the default canyon bottom choice (p.50). In the end their preferred route was a wide northerly path that was a bit longer distance-wise, but it does match with accounts from the travelers themselves, as well as archaeological and linguistic place-name evidence.

Overall I liked that the article used GIS as one tool (out of many) to answer an unresolved question, and also that the traditional parameters of a cost-path analysis were changed to fit a specific project need. The article shows just one of the many ways GIS analysis can be used to answer spatially related research questions.

Reference:
Sampeck, Kathryn, and Jonathan Thayn, Howard H. Earnest, Jr.
2015     Geographic Information System Modeling of de Soto's Route from Joara to Chiaha:     Archaeology and Anthropology of Southeastern Road Networks in the Sixteenth Century.  American Antiquity (80) 1: 46 - 66.