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.

Greenville Sanborn Map

For this assignment, the class was expected to georeference one of the historical Sanborn maps and create feature classes pertaining to the different structures that could be found within it. For my project, I worked on a map of the southern portion of Greenville and worked on two blocks along Pendleton St.

Overall, the skills I used were effective in outlining these couple blocks, but I was inhibited by knowledge of the Sanborn map notations and how they were used to denote changes in story height within a single building. For instance, I had to label some buildings as two stories despite there being what could possibly be a patio or just a single floor. In addition, my georeferencing, admittedly, was not wholly accurate as a I struggled to find a way to best align the wider, historic roads with the more narrow, modern ones. As for my legend, I also struggled to remove the RGB values that were used to denote the overlayed historic map.