Health

Greenpeace Indonesia

Blue Raster partnered with Greenpeace and Global Forest Watch (GFW) to help protect one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems: forests. Their threat from fires and deforestation has been characterized by some as one of the worst environmental disasters in recent history. Fires across Indonesia have far-reaching effects on both air pollution and climate change while deforestation depletes the natural forests and changes landscapes for years to come. The Greenpeace Indonesia mapping application fuses the most helpful datasets together and makes them available to the public. Datasets include: detailed concession information including forest cover, fires instances provided by NASA’s Fire Information for Resources Management System (FIRMS), and selected animal habitats. 

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Greenpeace Indonesia allows decision makers to accomplish ambitious goals by getting the latest data in the hands of the public: especially in the hands of people who can act on it. The Energy Desk at Greenpeace further describes the mapping app in their post, “Investigation: Mapping Indonesia’s fires and logging rights”. Additionally, Channel NewsAsia suggests in their publication, “Greenpeace Indonesia launches map to track haze-causing fires,” that the map can be used as evidence in court — this is certainly a game changer.

This application uses the ArcGIS JavaScript API, React JS, and Flux, creating a reliable repository of data that can be viewed and downloaded within the application. Many Indonesian residents are able to have access to data for the first time, and hold land owners responsible for deforestation and illegal fires that have repercussions across Southeast Asia.

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Since the catastrophic fires last year, Indonesia’s president has made commitments to ending the destruction of the carbon-rich peatlands but this will only be possible with free access to up-to-date information on land use and land tenure. In 2011, the Indonesian government promised a single mapping platform to publish this data – One Map – but it now may not see the light of day until 2019 at the earliest. We can’t wait that long, which is why we’ve compiled and released the most comprehensive concession maps available. We worked closely with the team at Blue Raster to combine our data with several other map layers provided by GFW, including fire and deforestation alerts. Together, these data sets provide an essential tool for producers, traders, consumer companies and researchers to monitor activity on the ground in near-real time and – cruicually – see who controls the land on which fires and deforestation occur. Out hope is that the Kepo Hutan maps will spur the government into action and set the standard for the official maps which are so desperately needed.

-KiKi Taufik, Coordinator of Greenpeace Indonesia’s Forests Campaign

DHS Program Mobile App v2.0 Released

Blue Raster is excited to announce the release of the The DHS Program Mobile App v2.0. A more intuitive interface, offline data download feature and enhanced cartography are a few of the upgrades creating excitement around v2.0.

Here’s a first look at what’s new in this release.

DHS-Mobile-2015-as-released_Compilation

125 indicators

Now when you use the app, you have access to 101 additional indicators — providing more than three times as much data than was previously accessible in v1.0. Behind the scenes, data is being supplied by the STATcompiler database through The DHS Program API. This ensures that you always have up-to-date data, even as new countries and indicators are added or adjusted.

Beautiful, clear design

We updated the look and feel of the app to give you a more compelling, intuitive user experience. We also revamped the maps to feature the latest in cartographic design allowing for better interpretation and clarity.

Take data offline

In v1.0, you could display trends for a single country through Quickstats and compare and contrast 25 preloaded indicators through a series of tables, charts and maps. Now v2.0 features the ability to download Quickstat data packages by country, making complete sets of data accessible even when offline. Through a combination of SQLite, Adobe PhoneGap, HTML5, AngularJS, and JavaScript, Blue Raster and The DHS Program are able to provide far more indicators offline to Android and iOS users.


Get the app for your device today.

Unless We Act Now: UNICEF

Unless We Act Now ReportBlue Raster is proud to announce a collaboration with The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to contribute to Unless We Act Now: The Impact of Climate Change on Children – a report published by UNICEF at the annual Conference of Parties (COP21), also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. COP21 is a renowned conference that brings together international voices representing government and UN Agencies, NGOs and civil society to assess climate change and set universal agreements and goals for reducing climate change and adapting to the changes that have already begun.

The Unless We Act Now report leveraged geospatial analysis of current demographic, environmental and projected climate data, in order to direct aid to child populations across the world as they face unforgiving changing weather patterns.

UNICEF has made putting children first their mission, and although climate change is an imminent threat to populations across the world, it is children who are hit the hardest as their bodies are most vulnerable to change. Being able to understand where these 2.3 billion children are was the first step, but taking this further to understand how environmental conditions such as droughts, floods, and extreme heat effect food and water supply, sanitation, and the spread of disease is made possible through GIS analysis via ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Online.

Climate Change affects children in unique ways — these maps show where Children and Climate Change intersect.

unicefMap1COP21 is a fantastic opportunity for UNICEF to present our “Unless We Act Now: The Impacts of Climate Change on Children” report, as climate change will be of critical importance when protecting and preserving the future livelihood of children around the world. Blue Raster was with us every step of the way during the data analysis and cartographic development, and their timely responses, adaptive and analytical methods, and personal connections to spatial data subject matter experts working around the world helped make this project a resounding success.

Nicholas Rees, Policy Analysis Specialist, UNICEF New York

A map poster featuring the analytical and cartographic work was then featured at the 2016 Esri User Conference and won the ICA and IMIA Excellence in Cartography award, and was selected for publication in 2017 Esri Map Book, Volume 32.

“The Impact of Climate Change on Children by UNICEF was recognized by the judges for it’s powerful, stark design on a relevant, topical subject. This work delivered a high impact, strong message with clarity and effective simplicity.”

Esri Insider, July 14, 2016

A special thanks to:
Trevor Croft, DHS Program   |   Paul Reig and Tianyi Luo, World Resources Institute   |   Carmelle Terborgh, Esri
Deborah-Balk, The City University of New York   |   Susana Adamo and Kytt MacManus, CIESIN Columbia University

children

STATcompiler Redefined: Into the Modern Era

More than 15 years after initial creation, STATCompiler has reached a level of unparalleled excellency with the latest release. The newly designed Beta STATCompiler website now reflects the most up-to-date indicator data from The DHS Program in a platform accessible universally across devices.

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There are several changes to STATCompiler that bring it in to a new era:

  • New user interface and all new cartography for beautiful maps and visualizations
  • Over 500 new indicators including data from the DHS-6 tabulation plan on topics such as domestic violence, female genital cutting, malaria and maternal mortality
  • Metadata is now included in the “indicator details” with full definitions, denominators, and the measure of data (rate, percentage, etc.).
  • Confidence Intervals are now included in the graphics, an especially important consideration for rare events, particularly HIV prevalence and maternal mortality.
  • New data visualizations such as pop-ups in the map that summarizes trends over time
  • Mobile friendly interface allows it to be accessed on tablet devices.
  • The site now leverages the DHS Program’s public Application Programming Interface (API) ensuring data continuity and authenticity.

STATCompiler is built with modern tools such as JavaScript, HTML 5, the ArcGIS JavaScript API and incorporates proven legacy tools such as ColdFusion.

 

Appalachia Community Data Portal

Blue raster is pleased to announce the release of the newest HealthLandsape tool – the Appalachia Community Data Portal.

Created for the Appalachian region, the tool enables users to explore demographic, education, income, and health disparities for more than 400 Appalachia counties. The tool marries datasets from the the U.S. Census Bureau, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.

Economics

Using the Appalachia Data Portal tool, users can create side-by-side maps between indicators (for example, diabetes and poverty) to visualize potential relationships. Users can also overlay infrastructure data such as interstate networks or locations of Health Facilities, and start to visualize patterns between the two. Graphs and charts are available to see the numbers behind the data.

Explore the Appalachia Data Portal, and more health information tools, at healthlandscape.org.


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