GISmatters specializes in quantitative location analysis for business, communications, municipal, environmental, medical, safety, and academic applications. We apply a rich set of GIS and geostatistical methodologies and tools to answer your questions about the spatial relationships among the data crucial to your enterprise.

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Networks

Weighting

Location Analysis: Weighting

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Many people know that the geographic "center" of the lower 48 states of the U.S. is at Meade's Ranch in northern Kansas - there's as much area of the country to the east of that point as there is to the west, and as much area north as south. Another way to think of it is as the "balance point", the place you would put your finger beneath a cardboard cut-out of the country to make it balance.

There are many other "centers" of the country that can be thought of similarly and calculated with GIS tools. The map above shows a few of them in addition to the geographic one (white marker): population (red), agriculture (green), and topography (orange). Each of these is another balance point of the lower 48 states, but weighted by population, or area under cultivation, or elevation instead of simply area.

The blue-to-red shading of the map indicates low-to-high population density on a county-by-county basis.