GIS and Mapping

Incorporating 576,460 acres, a Voinovich School team has created a map that spans the entirety of Ohio’s coal-bearing region.

In 2008, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ (ODNR) Division of Mineral Resource Management contracted with the Voinovich School to complete the project. Depicting the Appalachian foothills, the map illustrates the history of surface coal mining in Ohio, particularly mines built prior to statewide mining regulations.
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Elbie Bentley, an Ohio University graduate student studying cartography, has had a longtime dream to “make atlases and maps and work at National Geographic.”With an internship at National Geographic magazine next fall, helping to produce the publication’s special edition fold-out maps, she’s well on her way.
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If you’ve ever wondered why some streams in southeast Ohio look more orange-colored than blue, you’re not alone. Such color variation distinguishes types of streams from one another and, in the case of the orange water, help to tell the story of how southeast Ohio’s coal mining heritage modified the region’s ecology.A group of researchers at the Voinovich School has been immersed in the subject since 2005, working to develop a better stream classification system for southeast Ohio’s Western Allegheny Plateau eco-region.
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On May 4, the Great Lakes WIND Network (GLWN) showcased their new interactive website, database and mapping tools developed by Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs to more than 23,000 attendants at WINDPOWER 2009, the world’s largest annual wind energy event in Chicago.According to the director of GLWN, these tools attracted endless attention at GLWN’s pavilion rendering the GLWN’s staff “virtual prisoners at the pc.”

The Voinovich School has been working with GLWN since July of 2008 to create an information database and interactive website that will help connect companies who supply or have the potential to supply parts for wind energy manufacturing, said Dave Simon, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Manager at the Voinovich School, who has been working on the project.
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On April 3, 2006, a valve failure on the fourth floor of Grover Center caused damage to 70 offices, 12 classrooms, and WellWorks fitness center, causing more than 200 Ohio University employees to work 18 hour days for one week to deal with water and 338 classes to be moved to other buildings on campus, according to an account on Ohio University’s website.Now, with the help of the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, if this type of situation happens again Facilities Management will have the information at their fingertips to deal with the situation more quickly.

The Voinovich School has been working with Facilities Management since 2005 to convert all their data on blueprints to GIS maps.GIS is a technique used to create visual maps with the capacity to hold an unlimited amount of data.Each feature, for example a road, can contain information not only about the road’s location, but also what it is made of, its speed limit, its slope, when it was last worked on, etc.
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