Author: Laura Hintsanen

During August and September we started to gather long-term data on river navigation routes and speeds in the Peruvian Amazonia. A few river boat companies are collaborating with us and together with them we established a pilot system of tracking devices that send real-time location information from river boats to our server.

This information is  made available for the local actors trough an sms service. The long-term monitoring data will be used to analyze the spatio-temporal changes in river navigation and accessibility patterns. More information regarding this project will soon be available on this site.

The work of our project was presented in GI Norden Conference, Turku 9.-10.6. with an abstract and presentation.

As a part of the MetropAccess-project, we organized an applied course for geography students. The course consisted of a theory day, an independent data gathering period, and an analysis day. During the theory day, we learned the basics of global navigation satellite systems and how the GNSS-technology can be used in accessibility studies.

During a two weeks independent work period, each course attendant gathered data on cycling speeds in different parts of Helsinki by biking along different routes and tracking the routes either with a GPS-device or using a smart phone GPS-application. Later, these data were analyzed in a GIS together with other spatial data in order to understand why and how cycling speeds vary in our study area.

 

 

The MetropAccess-project was introduced for former university students at the Kumpula campus Alumni-evening in March. Next to our poster (which can be downloaded here) we had an interactive map where everyone could pinpoint the place where they had come from and the mode of transport they used when arriving at the campus.

Bus was clearly the most popular mode of transport during the Alumni-evening:The map statistics showed that 4 people arrived by train, 8 people by car, 6 by walking, 4 by metro, 3 by tram, and 24 by bus 🙂