MUSA Student Work

About the MUSA Capstone

Through the MUSA capstone project, students are able to apply the spatial methods learned in the GIS
and statistical coursework to their content area in a research project. The projects typically involve a detailed research proposal, literature review, data collection, analysis and writing. Below are a few examples of student work.

Darryl Depencier, 2008

"Measuring Multi-Modal Travel Costs In the Vicinity of Limited-Access Transportation Networks"

Transportation sector planners have long used network data sets for routing, scheduling and
address locating. This data has usually been in vector (point, line and polygon) form, as is often the case when mapping physical objects, such as roads, trails or rivers. Vector networks become problematic however, when we are modeling spatial characteristics that are affected by the network, but are not directly part of it. The objective of this study is to generate a three dimensional raster surface where each transportation mode occupies its own plane. Full version in pdf.

Elizabeth Houser, 2007

"A Decision for Farmland Preservation: Utilizing GIS and Logistic Regression to Analyze Landowner Motivation in Lancaster County, PA"

The objective of this study is to examine factors influencing a landowner’s decision to preserve their
farmland. This case specifically examines farmland under conservation easement in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania and seeks to determine statistically significant factors influencing a preservation decision,
utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and logistic regression. Full version in pdf.

Pravin Mathur, 2007

"Agent-based Modeling of Urban Phenomena in GIS"

The major objective of this study is to examine the feasibility and utility of implementing
agent-based models with a geographic information system in order to simulate selected
urban growth processes. Full version in pdf.

Benjamin Mearns, 2007

"dinoride: Automatic Route-based Ridesharing on the Web"

This brief paper describes a web-based application, dinoride, which aims to
fill the need for a web-based centralized, automated, user-friendly rideshare application. Dinoride is unique in the tiny but fast growing field of web-based ridesharing for its ability to access this type of information, as well as for its implementation of a spatial algorithm better suited to the American ridesharing landscape: relatively sparse residential settlement, many alternate routes, few available shares, and long distances of travel. Dinoride will benefit further from refinement of routing and
matching rules, expansion of the data model, and extension of the user interface. Full version in pdf.

Peggy Wu, 2006

"Analysis of Community Investments Over Time"

This is a comparative study on the impacts of CDCs on neighborhood improvements over time.
Strategies to turn around distressed neighborhoods have been a paramount challenge confronting
government officials and professionals alike. This study uses housing appreciation as a proxy in assessing neighborhood quality improvements over time. It compares rate of appreciation in areas with CDCs to an area without, using residential property sales on cost per square foot (PSF) basis. Full version in pdf.