Today I am going to talk a little bit about spatial analysis, and most importantly, how it affects your life.

Why are maps so important?

Have you ever thought about how maps are extremely important, and how they are present in your life?

If you have never thought about it before, I invite you to try it for a moment. I can assure you have tons of examples of using at least one map on your daily basis in order to simplify your life by ordering food, calling an Uber, checking the time you will spend to get somewhere, or even exploring a relationship app. I am sure you probably use one of the following ones every single day: GPS, Waze, Google Maps, Google Earth, Uber, Uber Eats, iFood, Tinder, etc. The magic about spatial information is that they are incredibly accessible nowadays, in the palm of your hands: in your mobile.

By now, I hope I could catch your attention to know a little bit more about the incredible tool that helps us to increase our comfort, productivity, business, and knowledge about the space we’re living.

The power of spatial data

Currently, almost all existing data on earth has a coordinate, which means that every data is related to a unique point in space. If you are able to use this information, you can use it in your favor.

To illustrate this scenario, I will give you a simple example:

Imagine you are the owner of a bakery, and you are trying to expand the number of stores in your city to increase the number of clients and expand your brand. At the same time, you need to know the right place to open that new store, because obviously, you do not want to lose money by open it in a bad place.

Therefore, you start to wonder if there are many bakeries in your city, and where are they. By using these two data, you can identify:

1. How the bakeries are distributed in the city;
2. If there are a lack of bakeries in part of the city;
3. Identify the place with the least bakery competition.

Now, you are using spatial data to think about the best place to open your business. Next, you can think about things like the most crowded places to open it, if it is a commercial or residential area, if they are other food stores so you can assume people will know your store, etc. (of course, the more you think about it, the more you define the best data to use).

Obviously, that was a simple example. The power of spatial data can be used to develop a city by planning where to construct a road, where are to build a hospital, etc. In the case of coronavirus pandemic, spatial data was used to identify the areas where the virus was spreading, the most critical areas based on this disease, where to apply the lockdown, to prevent deforestation, to evacuate an area in cases of wildfires and extremely events (tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.).

On the other hand, spatial data can also be used for bad things, such as bombing other countries.

The challenges of representing the earth

All of those examples above can be represented on maps. To create a spatial analysis to represent the earth the workflow is to ask a question, find and prepare the data, apply a method to it, analyze it, refine the results, share the results. The most challenging part is to work with huge databases and choose the right data to represent what you want. Right now, we are experiencing a Big Data phenomenon: where there are an enormous amount of data sets about everything you can imagine. Therefore, we can say that spatial analysis is and for sure will be necessary to understand social and environmental issues from now on.