My research interests are centred on geographic information systems (GIS) and their application to land management and planning issues and spatial analysis in general. I have been fortunate to be able to work with top-notch colleagues who truly make this part of the job both stimulating and fun. More details and links will be added below as time permits. A summary of my research grants can be found here.
Govisualisation of local climate change adaptation and mitigation
Stephen Sheppard is the project leader for a Geoide Phase 4 project that is focused on developing new spatial information tools and appliciation protocols for visualising localised impacts of climate change. My work is centred on the City of Toronto context and involves research with John Danahy, Robert Wright, and Robin Harrup on identifying and visualising localised urban heat island effects and potential cooling strategies (e.g. tree shading, green roofs). To date, we have developed the foundation for a multi-scale approach to these issues through a combination of highly detailed ground-based LiDAR modelling of streetscapes, 3D CAD modelling of urban form and web-GIS. We will be working to refine and integrate these approaches in the coming year.
Spatial decision support
My interest in spatial decision support focuses generally (but not exclusively!) on integrating GIS with multi-criteria analysis (MCA) methods and theories to aid in problem scoping, generating feasible strategies, and evaluating the relative merits of proposed options. I am particularly interested in group-based spatial decision support and have published papers with Brent Hall on consensus-building among stakeholders with divergent viewpoints, representing the geographic dimensions of land-related conflict and spatial variations in criteria weight sensitivity (Feick and Hall, 1999; 2000; 2002, 2004).
Public participation GIS
My work in public participation GIS (PPGIS), is centred broadly on software designs and use protocols that foster citizen and community group engagement in the design and choice phases of local planning decisions. Supported by a GEOIDE Phase III grant (Promoting sustainable communities through spatial decision support), our research team developed and applied web-based tools that allow individuals to share, in real-time, map-based discussions that permit communication through spatially referenced map annotations and text messaging (see Hall et al, in press). The initial version of the MapChat software has been used in several contexts (affordable housing – Collingwood (ON), community asset mapping, Bulkley Valley (BC)). The second version of this MapChat software is now available from Brent Hall’s and Mike Leahy’s MapChat site.
In addition, Robert Shipley and I have used GIS-based visualization to examine how citizen’s evaluations of rural cultural heritage landscapes evolve in response to simulated landscape changes (see Shipley and Feick, 2009).
Spatial data structures and analysis
Barry Boots and I have worked together for some time now on using recursive Voronoi diagrams (RVD) to provide a variable resolution data model for spatial analysis. Our earlier work concentrated on the theoretical constructs and geometric properties of RVDs (Boots et al, 2002; Boots and Feick, 2003). More recently, we demonstrated how RVD structures can be used for spatial interpolation method with sparse point-based data samples and to view a data set at different resolutions (Feick and Boots, 2005).
