Reference no: EM132472506

Geo-Spatial Analysis (GIS) Project Assignment -

1. Background

You have been recruited by Bovine company to investigate the occurrence of the parasitic disease fasciolosis - caused by the trematode Fasciola hepatica - which is endemic in cattle and sheep in large parts of the state of Victoria (Australia) and other parts of the world.

2. General Overview

The purpose of your analysis is to use the techniques that you have learned to visualise, describe, explore and confirm a hypothesis using the data provided. This will include identifying areas of presence/absence of the trematode and exploring why this might be the case. For example, can the spatial patterns observed be explained by one or more variables in your dataset? Can these be used to accurately predict it? Why or why not?

Your project will be completed in two stages as instructed below.

Part A - Problem Definition, Visualisation and Exploratory Analysis

This part of the assignment should be restricted to between 3,000 and 5,000 words.

Your main tasks in Part A of the assignment are to:

1) Perform a review of the literature to further understand the problem;

2) Use suitable tools to visualise the patterns and distribution of the dataset - don't ignore any variable;

3) Use suitable tools to explore the dataset; and

4) Develop a hypothesis to test (accept or reject) in Part B.

To assist broken down some of the tasks in the following sections -

1. Introduction and Literature Review

Before you even open the dataset you should perform a literature review of the problem. This should include consulting journals on the problem. In particular, search the online databases such as ScienceDirect using suitable keywords.

Ask yourself these questions as you go through:

a) What is the problem?;

b) Is it important enough for me to research it? "Tell" your readers why; and

c) What do we know about it already? Are there any gaps in the literature or suggestions therein that have yet to be investigated - there's no point just repeating a study that has already been done.

2. Objectives

Following on from your background/literature review - what do you intend to do in this study? For Part A, exploring your dataset to generate a hypothesis about the distribution of the disease and potential causal factors should be expressed strongly. For Part B, it will be more focussed on confirming or rejecting your hypothesis (i.e., can it be modelled with sufficient accuracy?).

3. Materials and Methods

3.1 Study Area - Include some background information on your study area. This will help you compare your research to other studies in different areas and also for others to do the same. For example, results can often vary due to climate, so that might be a reasonable addition to this section.

3.2 Dataset - Fairly straight forward - describe your dataset. You can leverage from my metadata table. Visualisation (i.e. choropleth maps) can also be done here or you may prefer to separate into methods and results (up to you).

3.3 Methods - For this research YOU MUST include a flowchart of the methods you intend to use. You must also fully explain your flowchart, including justification of the methods you chose. Each method should also be fully and technically explained including, where appropriate, equations. You should avoid the temptation to describe your methods in the following style, for example, "and then I opened the XYZ tool in ArcGIS and filled in the dialog box as shown below. After that I was ready to use that input in another ArcGIS tool".

You will need methods for exploratory data analysis (EDA) in Part A, and confirmatory data analysis (CDA) in Part B. Justification is important.

4. Results

Your results are the outcome of your methods in line with your research objective(s). Avoid the temptation to put more methods in this section or results in the methods section. Likewise, avoid the temptation to just insert screen shots of everything that pops up in your GIS software. It's exceptionally boring. Use figures sparingly and, where possible, try to group them into one major method output to achieve maximum impact. For example, it would be unwise to have a figure for each of mean centre, median centre and standard distance when they could all complement one figure (I am not saying you need these at all, just to illustrate the point - get as much as you can out of one figure or group of figures (e.g. 1a,b,c,d) rather than create new ones.).

5. Discussion

My suggestion for a good discussion is to convert your objectives into short key point headings - for each heading, write a paragraph - what do you put in that paragraph - here are some ideas - Are your results as you expected? Do they differ from similar studies? Is there potential for something new; for example, did you find something that hadn't been found before, such as the trematode surviving in unexpected conditions or the utilisation of an unexpected host. What are the implications of your research? For example, will establishment of a new bivariate relationship assist management strategies? In other words, where do your results "sit" in the context of others'? For example AuthorX may have confirmed that the major driver is rainfall, but you have found no association whatsoever - that is interesting.

Finally, discuss what's next. Sometimes that might not be anything, but in your case (Part A) it will be the establishment of your hypothesis and a brief statement on how that might be achieved. For Part B, it might be to look at other variables, techniques etc.

6. Conclusion

As mentioned above, conclude based on your research question(s) and objective(s) and if they were answered and achieved. That is, what do you think the data means? You don't need to discuss this further (that's for the discussion). What's the big deal? E.g. "The application of new generation satellite sensors is removing the major impediments for natural resource management that were impossible to overcome a decade prior". You should be able to get a good idea of what has been achieved just by reading the intro and conclusion.

Part A Requirements - The project require a report. It must be properly structured and include a title page, table of contents, numbered sections, figures and tables, and all of the sections mentioned above. You must also use correct in-text and end- text referencing.

Part B - Confirmatory Analysis

In this part of the project you must update/modify Part A to include the additional step of proceeding to confirm (or reject) your hypothesis. This will require you to make changes/additions.

This document should represent your final report on the subject and is expected to be 4,000 to 6,000 words long. You may reference Part A of your report and borrow integral parts. Your report must, as usual, be properly structured and presented (e.g. table of contents, introduction, body, conclusion, appendices...).

Attachment:- GIS Project Files.rar