Richard Thomas: Geographical Information Systems (GIS) MSc Course

A selection of project work and written assignments submitted for my 2013/14 GIS MSc course at the University of Leeds.

Winner of the AGI Student of the Year Award 2014
ABSTRACT: "Previous research has shown that the likelihood of choosing to commute by bicycle can be very dependent on the availability of acceptable cycle routes of reasonable distance, avoiding hills and with a minimum of cycling in motorized traffic. Several papers have also highlighted this is an aspect that has been difficult to measure effectively and thus is often done using indirect methods such as summing quantity of cycle infrastructure within an area. Transport simulation models have historically focused on motorized traffic and thus often do not have enough detail at a small street level to be representative for modeling non-motorized traffic. Taking the UK city of Bristol as a basis for analysis, this study looks at a method of combining route cost functions (derived from third party cycle-specific routing software) for a large number of realistic commuting journeys. To overcome availability limitations on small area census commuting data, an additional method is developed to generate representative synthetic commuting origin-destination flow data at a fine spatial granularity using the census data that is available as constraints."
Synopsis (4 pages) (0.8 MB PDF)
Full Dissertation (4.5 MB PDF)
Associated Java Software ("GenSynthFlow") - source code and detailed Java documentation

Residential classification of bristol urban area using administrative data - geodemographic classification for 2005 (approximately mid-way between censuses) using only administrative data, based on residential property types, life states of typical occupants (pensioners, families, childless working adults, unemployed) and level of affluence. Revised version (2.7 MB PDF)
Demographic profile: geographical distributions of ethnicity, deprivation and health, Yorkshire 2001 - investigation of methodologies for taking meaningful measurements of ethnicity, deprivation and health across Yorkshire - exploring in detail unusual distributions. (2.8 MB PDF)
Spatial analysis of the geography of burglary in Leeds - investigation of techniques to investigate spatial clustering (2.0 MB PDF)
Influence of education vs ethnicity on fertility - building and analysing a statistical model for the 2001 English census measure of Total Fertility Rate (TFR). (0.8 MB PDF)

Hydrological modelling of river flood potential in SW England (Excerpt) - analysis of the hydrology behind the severe flooding in the Somerset Levels River Parrett catchment in January 2014, considering the effects of upper reaches land use and related methods of reducing flooding. (3.1 MB PDF)
Hydrological modelling with real rainfall and flow data - development of a Python ArcGIS script-based methodology for automated extraction of recorded time-series rainfall data (from UK MetOffice) for specified locations (typically river catchment areas). Demonstrated using a simple hydrological model which is compared against actual flow data measurements. (3.3 MB PDF)
Modelling uncertainty in climate-induced sea level rise (Excerpt) - estimating (using Monte Carlo simulation methods) the uncertainty in flooding location due to sea-level rise in an area of the Norfolk coast. (1.3 MB PDF)
Land Capability Mapping - performing agricultural land analysis for an area of Scotland using 2 different methods: British Land Capability for Agriculture (LCA) Classification and Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE). (2.7 MB PDF)

Listed Buildings and Monuments - interactive map linking to building-specific images and details from English Heritage
Comparing Historic Maps - selectable (public domain) map overlays. Note that as this is a server-free web-page, map overlays may be slow to load when initially selected.

"Commuter Sim" Project (source code, detailed Java documentation) - modelling some of the trade-offs between commuting by car or bike. This was an experiment in trying to implement a relatively simple behavioural model within a highly interactive software environment.
"Task List" Project (introduction and source code, detailed Java documentation) - an ESRI ArcGIS "AddIn" to create an integrated toolbar for displaying and updating a simple list of tasks. These will be automatically stored within the ArcMap map files (*.mxd). The AddIn should automatically install itself and appear when ArcMap is started.