Global Database for Geospatial Indicators

Geospatial Indicators (GI) is an exploration into the use of GIS, remote sensing and spatial reasoning methods to identify regions at risk due to inadequate food and water resources that are a result of inherent environmental scarcity, stress due to environmental dynamics and change, or inadequate social capital. To support the GI modeling effort, a database of natural and social features scalable to one to one million and including over thirty spatial data themes is constructed from extant open data sources. Recent scientific efforts have stimulated the creation of numerous well-resolved global databases representing environmental and social parameters of importance to science, such as, global vegetation, disaggregated population, topography, land surface features such as road and rail, hydrography and land cover—these state-of-the practice databases are now in a unified Global Database (GDB). Most original sources lacked structural uniformity—representing earth features at different scales, projections, and formats. A need therefore existed to prepare a harmonized database. GDB has been constructed for all developing nations. Additionally “geospatial indicator ” models required estimates of certain parameters that needed to be derived from extant data. Derived features include population projections to 2010, hazard risk maps for severe storms, flooding, tsunami, earthquake and volcano, agricultural primeness, infrastructure intensity and disaggregated GDP