For this project, we analyzed the relationship between the amount of greenspace and the wealth of a given area. It has been found that accessibility to parks and other greenspace often leads to a higher quality of life, as it promotes physical activity, which benefits both one’s mental and physical health. However, the amount of green space available to a community varies largely between different neighbourhoods and their associated ‘wealth’, as measured by the median total household income. Our goal of this analysis was to find out if the wealth of a community ultimately impacts their health, through the presence or absence of nearby greenspace.
As this geographical analysis was a three-membered group project, it was pertinent that we all had good project management skills in order to stay organized throughout the entire project. Due to the fact that only one person could physically work on the GIS analysis at a time using ArcMap, we found it worked best if one person worked on the computer doing the actual operations, one person recorded all of the steps that were taken during the analysis, and one person referenced our project proposal project analysis document to make sure we were following the correct steps and using the correct data sets. After the analysis was completed, we divided up the written report into three equal parts and set a deadline for everyone to finish their part by, so that we could combine and edit the full report in order to assure that it flowed well and was coherent.
As a result of this project, I learned many interesting things about the physical data we analyzed, as well as GIS analysis and group project management in general. During the data acquisition phase at the beginning of the project, I was quick to discover that finding and obtaining the exact data that was needed for the analysis is a difficult task. Although there is lots of data that is openly available online, finding data that was relatively recent and in the desired file format proved to be challenging. As data takes time to be organized and published after it is collected, not having access to the most recent information can likely decrease the overall accuracy of a GIS analysis. Additionally, as with all group work, I realized the importance of project management. As we all have different schedules and work-habits, assigning roles early on was a highly effective strategy in order to ensure everyone knew which part of the project they were to complete long in advance of the due date.