Project Update

 

As of right now, I have completed the mapping of most of the historic boundaries and present boundaries of sites currently under the purview of the National Parks Service (NPS). The four sites all have different ethnic components with one site for European whites (Saratoga), Native Americans (Sand Creek Massacre), African Americans (Fort Monroe), and Asian Americans (Tule Lake Internment Camp). 

So far, I have only been able to construct one VERY rough draft for the Saratoga Battlefield site whilst I have not been able to do ones for the others. I am currently planning to do spatial correlations to calculate loss of acreage for each of these sites alongside pulling data on historical land occupation for areas that are actively populated on non-preserved land.

Another addition that needs to potentially be made is the addition of the Schuyler House to the map of Saratoga, as it was also a component of the battle and is actively protected by the NPS.

One point of note is that some of these sites have active preservation efforts stemming from outside of the National Parks Service. Organizations/Non-profits, such as the American Battlefield Trust, are actively preserving land for transfer over to the NPS once funding is acquired. These conserved lands are also displayed with different colorations to indicate non-government cooperation in preservation efforts.

Saratoga Battlefield (Stillwater, NY)

Sand Creek Massacre (Kiowa County, CO)

Fort Monroe (Hampton, VA)

Tule Lake Internment Camp (Tulelake, CA)

Project Proposal

 For my final project, I am mainly focusing on conservation efforts at a variety of federal historical sites across the country. The main question pertaining to these sites is "How much land is preserved at specific historical sites with different ethnic contexts?" Overall, I am selecting the sites of Gettysburg, Tule Lake Internment Camp, the Sand Creek massacre site, and one additional site with an African American component. My project will mostly revolve around researching the historical background of these sites, georeferencing appropriate maps to provide context, and overlaying the information with current NPS map boundaries. The ethnic context of the site and its location will both play a role in determining the NPS' goals in preserving the selected sites.

Spatial Analysis Lab

This upcoming lab was different from previous ones as we were given free rein over which spatial analysis tools we would use in reference to our previous tornadoes project. For this lab, I primarily used point density as kernel density was not a functioning option for the tornado points--for some unknown reason. As a result of using point density, I also incorporated a time slider to show the tornado densities within an output cell size of .1731952 and a circle radius of 1.44329. I also chose to distinguish the map by decades in order to provide enough data for each individual map to ensure clarity.

As expected, the highest concentrations of tornadoes were located in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast from the years of 1970-2000. I initially attempted to change the color schemes of the tornado densities to help distinguish the decades, but I found it to be highly time consuming for time that I did not have in the moment. Below are the maps that I created for this project:

SEAC 2023 GIS Recap

One of the speaker sessions during the conference consisted of a geospatial analysis of Big Buckhead Baptist cemetery in Georgia. The speaker/author for the article, Audrey McGill, demonstrated that use of LiDAR and GPR was a more ethical (and effective) approach to locating grave sites for forensic and bioarchaeological research.

GIS Check-In

Last week was the GIS milestone check-in that was considered either a pass or fail depending on our performance. Considering that I completed three out of the four questions, with only missing the fourth by a couple steps, I would consider my performance a "pass." Below is the corrected version of question from ArcGIS Pro. 

Essentially, all that I missed was creating a spatial join between the rivers and SE counties, which I was able to do after clarification of the wording from the initial question. As shown below, the counties (highlighted by number of nearby rivers) are properly displayed.

Rest of the maps are available via blackboard with all the necessary cartographic elements.

Geoprocessing Lab

 The entire focus of this assignment was to better understand the usage of spatial joins within GIS Pro. By combining data between tornadoes and hurricanes that struck the continental United States, one is supposed to better understand the joins' usage. 

After spending close to 3 1/2 hours to 4 hours in the lab, I got a bit fed up with the fact that my map was not accurately portraying where hurricanes have been most prevalent in the United States. Instead of what it was supposed to be doing, it was simply showing data from one year and I was unable to reverse it back to show the overall data after several hours of messing with it. The images provided are demonstrative of this issue as the hurricanes are not showing up.

Arctic Sea Ice Map Creation

 For this project, we were assigned a series of tutorials to be able to develop a map surrounding the melt of Arctic Sea Ice starting from the late 1970s to the present. Overall, the tutorial was very straight forward, but was complex in nature with all the additional new information that we have not been wholly subject to before. Ultimately, to create high quality maps like this one, I will need a lot more practice in the long run.