For most of my academic career, I have been a full-time lecturer in GIS. I have been involved in two major research projects during my academic career. The first developed out of my Master’s Thesis and involves the automated identification of landforms from Digital Elevation Models. The second was initially an offshoot of the idea of modelling surfaces, but eventually developed into my Ph.D. Dissertation on modelling and mapping place attachment.
Publications
Maguire, B. & Klinkenberg, B. (2018). “Visualization of place attachment” Applied Geography, 99, 77-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2018.07.007
Maguire, B., Pashinska, N., Datsenko, L., Govorov, M. & Putrenko, V. (2016). Вступ ло геоінформаційних систем для інфраструктури просторових даних [Introduction to GIS for spatial data infrastructure]. Volume 1 of GIS Technology and Spatial Data Infrastructure. Kyiv: Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
Gienko, G, Govorov, M, Maguire, B., Khmelevsky, Y, & Gienko, A., (2007). “A Virtual Professional Community To Support Effective Use Of Remotely Sensed Imagery.” South Pacific Journal of Natural Science, 25, 47-52.
Unpublished Work
Maguire, B. (2017). The Place in GIS Project: Modelling Place Attachment in Colliery Dam Park and Beyond. Presentation for VIU “Lunch and Learn” seminar series, Sept. 26, 2017.
Maguire, B. (2017). Modelling Place Attachment Using GIS. Doctoral Dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
King, T. & Maguire, B. (2014). Viewshed analysis in a forested environment using LiDAR data. Presentation given at ESRI User Conference, April 8, 2014, Victoria, B.C.
Maguire, B. (2012). Measuring a Sense of Place in Colliery Dam Park, Nanaimo. Presentation for VIU “Lunch and Learn” seminar series, Oct. 2, 2012.
Maguire, B & Klinkenberg, B (2005). Development of the landform classification system. Geotec 2005 Conference, Vancouver, B.C., February 14-16, 2005.
Maguire, B. (2005). Towards a Landform Geodatabase: The Automatic Classification of Landforms. Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
Vernier, P., Maguire, B., Moy, A., Bunnell, F., Preston, M., and Harestad, A. “Developing a web-based habitat assessment tool to explore the effects of forest practices on biodiversity indicators: an example from TFL 39 on Vancouver Island”. Poster presentation for Monitoring the effectiveness of biological conservation, Nov. 2-4, 2004, Richmond, B.C.
Ph.D. Dissertation
For my Ph.D. project, I took on a difficult modelling project. Human geographers often speak of a “sense of place” – the attachments that people have to important places, such as their home town, the home that they grew up in, or even their favourite pub. I wanted to see whether I could map and analyse people’s sense of place.
I chose Colliery Dam Park in Nanaimo as my place to study. This is a beautiful city park centred on two artificial lakes that were once used to supply water for a coal washing operation at Nanaimo Harbour. These lakes are cherished by local residents, particularly during the hottest days of summer when the lakes offer a cool oasis and a great swimming hole for local kids.
The lower lake at Colliery Dam Park, as viewed from the lower dam
Rather than asking people to place important features on a map, as many previous studies have done, I created a comprehensive spatial database of features that were mapped prior to surveys being conducted. This allowed features to be located accurately, and if two people mentioned the same features, their appreciation could be compared meaningfully, because they were tied to the same location. This allowed the emotional impact and importance of features to be combined to create a map representing place attachment in the park for individuals and groups.
Brad Maguire (L) and Chris Mueller (R) at data collection booth on Upper Colliery Lake (Photo: Brenda Maguire)
I chose to collect information in the park so that we could access people’s emotions and memories while they were still fresh. We set up a portable station so that we could collect information from study participants year-round, in all seasons and weather conditions.
Some of the key innovations of this study included:
- Discovering a way to create custom interpolated 3D decay surfaces based on any combination of point, line, or polygon features.
- Mapping features prior to conducting surveys, so that we could tie park features mentioned in the survey to mapped features on the ground.
- Using a combination of a named feature, a named emotion, importance value, and awareness distance to create a georeferenced surface.
- Combining awareness surfaces to provide an overall sense of the importance of different parts of a place.
This is a video that I developed to show the workings of the Place Analysis System that I developed as part of the Ph.D. dissertation.
https://viuvideos.viu.ca/id/0_hz4ysrnv?width=560&height=315&playerId=23448688
Museum Exhibit
During Summer, 2019, I worked with a team of students to help Dr. Stephen Earle prepare a museum exhibit for the Gabriola Museum on the geology of Gabriola Island. We obtained and combined bathymetric and topographic data for the study area, and built this into a block model, which was used with an automated router to carve a detailed model of the island at a scale of 1:13,000.
Visualisation of block model prior to physical model creation. Water level added to show current coastline.
Onto the carved model, overlays were projected to illustrate the geology and environment of the island. Because of the nature of the model and the projection, the cartography was quite constrained by the media.
Bedrock Geology of Gabriola Island (Edward Bracken and Brad Maguire)
False colour image (Landsat bands 4,3,2) of Gabriola Island