Wilson Map Lab
Using the spatial concepts, methods, and data to create a better world
Our Mission
The Wilson Map Lab provides a venue to connect faculty, staff and students with projects focused on the use of spatial analysis and modeling to characterize and explore ways to improve the performance, sustainability and resilience of natural and human landscapes.
These imperatives fit nicely under the “map” banner given the explosive growth in the ways maps have been used to promote the production and sharing of knowledge in the digital era.
Our Research
The research projects taken up by the faculty, staff and students affiliated with the Wilson Map Lab seek to advance knowledge and show how this information can be used to explore new opportunities or solve persistent problems. The inclusion of students in nearly all of the project teams is intentional given the ways the research activities help to build the next generation of leaders in the academy as well as the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.
The projects tackled in this lab vary tremendously in terms of their length and magnitude, and the work of the Wilson Map Lab as a whole is supported by a blend of research grants, contracts, and philanthropy.
Our current work is funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Our facilities and team
The Wilson Map Lab is located on the first floor of the Allan Hancock Foundation Building in the center of USC’s University Park Campus and provides a rich array of computational resources to support spatial data acquisition, analysis, modeling, and mapping. The lab also shares the cost and use of the virtual computing infrastructure that supports the Spatial Sciences Institute’s academic programs. The day-to-day operations of the Wilson Map Lab are led by Beau MacDonald, the GIS Project Administrator, and supported by varying numbers of post-doctoral fellows, and doctoral, masters, and undergraduate student researchers.
Our Collaborators and Partners
Many of the research projects in the Wilson Map Lab are collaborative and include one or more partners, including the Public Exchange in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Center for Soil Dynamics Technologies led by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center and Enigma-Environment Initiative in the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the Southern California Center for Latino Health led by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute that is jointly led by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
The aforementioned partnerships provide opportunities to use spatial methods and data to augment the contributions of scholars working in a large number and variety of disciplines in Dornsife College and the professional schools. This work makes extensive use of GIS (geographic information systems and services), GPS (global positioning systems), and remote sensing, and increasingly relies on collaborations with public agencies, private firms, and community groups that inform our work and shorten the path from knowledge discovery to interventions that seek to improve equity and build sustainable and resilient systems to support life on Earth.
Our products
The faculty, staff and students affiliated with the Wilson Map Lab produce a variety of publications as well as custom applications and data collections. The latter include the GeoHealth Hub and a large number of custom datasets, dashboards, python notebooks, and story maps. The GeoHealth Hub can be accessed at https://usc-geohealth-hub-uscssi.hub.arcgis.com/ and several examples of the other products can be accessed via the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Public Exchange at https://publicexchange.usc.edu/urban-trees-initiative/ and https://publicexchange.usc.edu/food-insecurity-in-la-county/.