00:01November 15th. For more than 25 years, GIS has played a significant role at the Environmental Protection Agency.

00:09EPA uses GIS in virtually every aspect of its work and now integrates and tracks 2.8 million environmental locations…

00:17…for more than 50 different databases across the country. In 2011, the agency began geocoding every grant location.

00:262011 was also the beginning of the EPA geoplatform online, an internal GIS portal to help organize…

00:34…communities of users and content as well as the beginning of the Environmental Analyst, a customized version…

00:41…of Community Analyst that makes available a wealth of demographic, business, and environmental variables…

00:47…to help drive policy decisions.

00:50EPA analysts can now make their own decisions looking at variables, such as population, income…

00:56…permit violations, and toxic release inventories. Data that used to take years to get published…

01:02…can now be published and shared within months. I found some of EPA’s perspectives intriguing.

01:08They said desktop professionals--they’re critical to our success but limited in numbers. Web applications…

01:18…we can build them, but they can be expensive, and this is not our core mission.

01:23And, the future is a world of self-service solutions…

01:27…where people can just do it. No building, no developing, and people just get their own answers.

01:34With this perspective, 2012 at EPA will be the year of self-service maps and spatial analysis.

01:44Now in this letter, I mentioned EPA using the Community Analyst platform to create their own self-service approach…

01:50…for environmental analysis. To help us understand more about how this works and the types of data it provides…

01:57…please welcome Evan Caldwell.

02:01Thanks, John. Community Analyst provides access to thousands of demographic variables…

02:08…and we can leverage this Software as a Service to better understand issues…

02:12…across many scales and make more informed decisions.

02:15Now this year, over $14 million will be awarded to about 30 organizations around the country…

02:21…for programs to reduce youth drug use.

02:24Let’s look at how we can use Community Analyst to better understand where some of that money should go.

02:31We can search the various datasets, including the 2010 Census data released last year, to quickly visualize areas with…

02:38…large high-school-age populations.

02:43Now, the geography of the data will adjust with the scale of my map, starting with states…

02:49…then counties, ZIP Codes, census tracts, and all the way down to the block group level.

03:00We can also set a filter to reveal areas of the map that meet a certain threshold, in this case, counties with 5,000 teenagers.

03:10Now, to layer in indicators associated with youth drug use, we can build a map query.

03:17Here, we can set thresholds so that we focus our search on areas with high school dropouts, high unemployment…

03:25…population growth, and a crime rate above the national average.

03:31This will quickly focus our results to the handful of counties…

03:34…that meet this search criteria, and we can further explore their data here. Now we need to know which counties…

03:42…have already received funding. We can add a map of existing grant allocations from ArcGIS Online.

03:49This is just one of the many ways that we can bring our own data into Community Analyst.

03:57Now we can see that certainly some of the high-priority counties we’ve identified do have existing funding…

04:02…but these three--Harnett, Horry, and Berkeley--don’t have anything.

04:08So let’s evaluate potential applicants in Berkeley County, South Carolina.

04:16We can search the business data included in Community Analyst to quickly look for youth organizations.

04:22This dataset contains a listing of over 12 million registered organizations around the country.

04:30And now we can see that there are a few potential applicants in this area, including this YMCA here.

04:36But how do we know how much of the county it actually services? Well, one approach is to use a drive-time analysis.

04:43Here, we can make an assumption that people are willing to drive about 30 minutes to this particular location…

04:48…and this is going to give us a good perspective on the actual geographic coverage of this YMCA.

04:56We can see that, with the drive time, it does cover a good portion of the county, but we don’t know how many people…

05:02…actually live in this area.

05:04Well, to get that information, we can use some of the prebuilt reports included in Community Analyst.

05:10These reports are generated on the fly, and I can also have them e-mailed to myself or other recipients, such as coworkers.

05:20The 2010 Census profile tells us exactly how many people live within this area, and it also provides some…

05:27…additional information, such as their diversity. The Tapestry Segmentation paints a picture of who these people are…

05:35…beyond the numbers. Here, we see that 15 percent of the population fits into the Rural Bypasses segment.

05:43The Detail page for this group provides some additional information on their characteristics and preferences.

05:48And this is a really useful report…

05:50…because it’s indicated that this YMCA will need to use programs targeted at rural populations…

05:55…rather than urban, based on some of their interests, such as watching NASCAR on TV and fishing and hunting.

06:04We just quickly used a small subset of the demographic and business data available in Community Analyst…

06:10…to quickly make a much more informed decision about where to allocate our funding, and organizations like EPA…

06:16…are building on top of Community Analyst so that they can provide easy access to their own data and make better policy decisions.