As of today, all remaining lectures have been cancelled as classes move online for the foreseeable future due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today we began our presentations on health geography. The topic of my paper was calculating and modelling access to healthcare in terms of car travel times and bus accessibility in East Anglia. This was an interesting read as it is a rather old paper,using techniques and tools that would be considered obsolete by today’s standards.

The study involved using a vector road network of the region divided into nodes, with locations of general practitioner services placed at the nearest node. Driving-time distance was then calculated from individual postal codes, to find car travel time from each residence.

The other part of the study involved mapping bus networks and classifying them based on service degree. GP locations were buffered 800m and all bus routes passing through were identified. These bus routes were each again buffered 800m and all postal codes lying within the buffer were then counted as being bus accessible.

Naturally, there were a lot of flaws with this study, namely that there are a large number of simplifications and ignored variables, along with some rather arbitrary decision. The techniques used also seem very unwieldy by today’s standards, as the study could likely have been done by using an Origin Destination Cost Matrix or Generate Service Area tool in a fraction of the time and with greater precision. However, it was nonetheless interesting to see how GIS was carried out using vector data in the days before ArcMap.

Due to this paper, I found another presentation extremely interesting, that also covered accessibility to GPs in a different region of the UK. However, this presentation was on a much newer paper, where the authors actually did use Create Drive-Time Area tools in ArcOnline and carried out GWR analyses to great detail, making it a far more advanced and recent version of the paper I presented on.

Today we began thinking about our final project ideas. I am considering doing a species distribution modelling project revolving around the use of the Maxent modelling software.