2011/01/01 by Lukar Thornton, Jamie Pearce, Anne Kavanagh · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Medicine · Environmental Science · #Urban Transport and Accessibility #Obesity, Physical Activity, Diet #Impact of Light on Environment and Health
paper · pdf · doi:10.1186/1479-5868-8-71
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Features of the built environment are increasingly being recognised as potentially important determinants of obesity. This has come about, in part, because of advances in methodological tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS has made the procurement of data related to the built environment easier and given researchers the flexibility to create a new generation of environmental exposure measures such as the travel time to the nearest supermarket or calculations of the amount of neighbourhood greenspace. Given the rapid advances in the availability of GIS data and the relative ease of use of GIS software, a glossary on the use of GIS to assess the built environment is timely. As a case study, we draw on aspects the food and physical activity environments as they might apply to obesity, to define key GIS terms related to data collection, concepts, and the measurement of environmental features.