HEMA Research Infrastructure

The facility is composed of: (1) eight high-end computational workstations with dual 19 inch falt panel monitors which are used by graduate students and visiting scientists; (2) an HPCC (High Performance Computational Cluster) with 5 low nodes and one high node (all dual Xeon processors) connected by a 1 Gb/s high performance switch; (3) two SCSI 3 disk arrays supporting thirty-two hot-pluggable disks and 4.2 TB of disk storage; and (4) a Dell robotic autolaoder tape backup system. Printers include: a HP 4100 PS duplex printer; a Canon i9100 19inch print-to-edge 4800 dpi printer; and a color Lexmark laser printer.

Open GIS and Remote Sensing Labs

The lab is a place that allow students and professors the chance to kick back and discuss projects and ideas. the entire facility is designed to promote communicate and exchange of ideas. One rom of the lab focusses on GIS and spatial analysis and the other is for remote sensing. We have photos of both lab rooms at the right.

The open lab encourages students to work together in small teams and to discuss projects. Each work area is composed of a hgh-end workstation (Pentium 4) each with 19in dual panel monitors. Work areas also contain file cabinets and space for stoage for books and other items.

 

Conference Room

The laboratory also has an 8 person conference room with a computer projector and white board. This room serves as the brainstorming and meeting room. We have bi-weekly meetings lab meetings here and this is the place where we greet our guests too.

 

Lab Corners

The lab contains two small meeting areas located in corners of the lab. One corner is called the GIS Cafe corner due to the style of the chairs and tables.

Another corner is the casual corner where we can relax and discuss ideas away from computers, whiteboards and other distractions. Its the perfect place for some end of day converstations.

We also have a multimedia corner where we can have vistors view PowerPoint and Camtasia animations of our projects. There are speakers here too for demonstrations of our sound work.

Graduate students in the facility have backgrounds in ecology, economics, geography, biology and engineering.

 

Land Use Databases

We have a variety of GIS databases in our lab. Some of the most prominent are:

1. high quality land use/cover for several areas of the world. for Michigan, we have the entire state for 1978 and many updates of this database that reflect land use/cover for the late 1990s. We also have high qaulity d ata for Milwaukee, Chicago, the state of Indiana, and Minneapolis St. Paul. We are a member of the New York state GIS consortium and have access to a variety of land use databases for NY state. We also have the European land use/cover 1km dataset and a variety of land use database for East Africa.

2. North American MODIS dataset. We have archived and processed three years of MODIS data for North America for a variety of vegetation cover products including leaf area index (LAI), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), albedo (black and white), and NDVI.

3. Rivers, roads, and other vector linework. We have many national and international databases on the location of roads, rivers and other open water bodies.

4. Digital Elevation Model (DEMs). We regularly use SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) and NED (National Elevation Dataset). We also have process the GTOPO 1km glboal elevation database as well.

5. IUCN Database. We have processed many of the GIS biodiversity datasets from the IUCN.

6. US Census. We have processed the entire Upper Midwest for several levels of US Census data including blocl, blockgrou, tract and minor civil division (county subdivision). Data on population, housing, income, and education are contained in these datasets. We also have the PUMS and iPUMS database which contain complete demographic profiles of 5% of individuals in the census. PUMS data are for 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses.

7. We possess the national 4km PRISM cliamte database that contains monthly averages interpolated from weather station data from 1880 to current.

8. Worldwatch Databases. We also have data at the national and global level on natural resource consumption, poppulation, health, fertility, incidence of war and conflict, food production and disease.

9. An Upper Great lakes 30 year historical parcel database from a NASA and USDA study is used for our MABEL model.