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GIS neogeography

Foot and Mouth – a Geographical Problem

Foot and Mouth

So once again we find ourselves facing an outbreak of Foot and Mouth, hopefully this time around the importance of the geographical information in fighting the spread of the disease will be recognised early on. Things look hopeful, Defra have already a map of the initial outbreak on their website, and of course today the tools to communicate this information are very different from the last outbreak in 2001.

I was able to create this KML file in 5 minutes from the details on the Defra website.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

5 replies on “Foot and Mouth – a Geographical Problem”

Hi Ed

Good stuff:-)

Can I ask HOW you actually put the circle info together for the KML file (eg so the polygons / overlay shapes are a) roughly circular b) at the right diameter)

I was looking for circle plotting overlay functions last night that would accept a central lat/long value and then plot circles given a km radius and line colour (details at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010505.html )

thanks
tony

(apologies if this is posted several times – cocomment is freezing the submission, and I’m not sure at what point…)

As you say Ed, a very quick output. The usefulness of the tool or otherwise comes from what anaysis can be done with the output. Given that F&M can often be distributed as an airborne disease, some means of showing the wind direction and speed over time makes this more than just a pretty coloured map – oh, and also adding the location of the Pirbright Animal Virus Research Institute. As someone who lives in the survelance area, I have been surprised as to just how slowly the connection has been made.

It is most interesting that Google Maps comes to the rescue, as the DEFRA interactive map is not user friendly, and over this crisis at times has slowed dramatically or halted due to demand. In crisis management such as this getting the GIS message out to large volumes of people is critical.
Clearly with the DEFRA map there are fundamental problems

1. Is not user friendly
2. Map imagery does not have satellite and hybrid
3. Cannot handle large numbers of simultaneous connections.

If this crisis was to spread then I do believe DEFRA would again be unable to cope from a GIS perspective. Currently the NFU and Farmers Weekly are using my own Foot and Mouth Map in an effort to get the GIS message out.

Its is free for anyone to link to
http://www.gis-logic.co.uk/footandmouth.htm

Duncan Garratt
GIS Logic

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