Today was my last day going into the office for the preservation parks. I went over everything that I’d finished while I was there as well as the notes that I had taken on the directions for everything. We also discussed what else needs to be done to complete the project and what else could be done with the geodatabase.

Overall this internship has been a great challenge in my ability to learn as I go and to use past knowledge in new ways. I think this internship could do a lot of interesting things for the preservation parks as more people work with them.

This week I worked on writing up what I’ve been doing all semester. They plan to continue the work into the summer and the next semester, so I’ve been recording all that I’ve been doing and how I’ve been doing it. It’ll be important for the next person working with the preservation parks to keep the data standardized. The only way to do that with the transition in workers is to keep good records of what’s been done. The instructions will also be important if they ever want to create a similar project on their own.

Next week, I’ll be sharing my write up and instructions with my supervisor and they know all that I’ve gotten done and where they want to take the project next.

I’ve added the data for most of the locations that they requested. The only ones that they’ll need to complete with the next worker or on their own is Hogback Ridge. Hogback didn’t have a drawn map of the utilities, so those will have to be located with the utility line location equipment. I have included instructions for that equipment in my write up, but any other person that wants to use it for projects should probably get similar training that I did. I don’t believe that my instructions are sufficient to totally learn the process, but can be used as a reminder after training.

This week I’ve gone out to more parks, and some repeats that needed more accurate points, to collect GPS points. These were the last parks that I have drawn maps for which leaves only one park that needs mapped, but doesn’t have a reference map. Next week I should be able to finish transferring the drawn map data to the geodatabase. I’ve also started writing up what I’ve done throughout the semester so that the project can be continued.

The last time I was in the office tracing, I noticed that some of the parks were harder to trace than others, for different reasons. There were some parks that the drawn maps just didn’t line up well enough to the GIS map and some that I couldn’t reference well due to tree cover.

So, the past couple weeks I’ve been going out to the different parks to take GPS reference points to be able to georeference the drawn maps more accurately. I was able to do this for some of the maps. However, there are 2 parks whose drawn maps don’t seem to match what is actually in the parks or what I have on the basemap.

For Shale Hollow park, I believe this is due to the park only just opening during the time when the basemap image was taken, so the difference in basemap and what I had seen in the park threw me off. I’m going to go back to the park to take more accurate GPS points so that I can overlay the drawn map even without matching it to the basemap image.

For the Emily Traphagen park, the drawn map definitely doesn’t match what was actually done in the park. However, the main differences don’t relate to the utility lines, so I’m going to return and double check to see if the utility lines can still be used in the map.

I don’t have a drawn utility map for Hogback ridge park, so I’ll have to use the line locator if I want to trace those lines.

I worked on tracing the utilities for all the other parks this week in the office.

This week I was able to use the as-bill maps to trace the water and electric lines for 2 of the parks that need to be mapped. I was able to associate the maps just through landmarks visible in ArcMap. These added graphics were transferred to layers as a part of the geodatabase. I plan to continue doing this with other locations.

However, I won’t be able to do this with all of the maps. There are some parks where the trees make the roads untraceable on ArcMap. For some others, the as-bill map gets too distorted when I try to associate them to use them. For these I’ll have to go out with the GPS to get better data to associate the maps with or go out with the utility line locator to trace them in the field.

This week I brought the GPS that I will be using to mark the utility lines to the office. I made a test point to see if I was able to transfer the point onto ArcGIS. I was not able to do this due to an issue with the communications port.

I was able to resolve this issue by putting the coordinates from the GPS into ArcGIS through the ‘Go to XY’ tool. I was able to turn this into a layer in the geodatabase via the ‘convert graphics to features’ function and then that was added as a layer to my map.

When I try to do this with multiple points I think it would be more efficient to make a table of all of the points for a line on excel and then add the whole table as a layer. I’ll be able to do this at school throughout the week and then bring the tables to the office on Friday via a flashdrive. I’m considering converting the excel file to a .dbf file before I try to transfer it because I know .dbf files transfer more easily than excel files.

Also, Janelle Valdinger came in today to teach me how to read the maps of property utility lines. We were able to get maps for some of the parks and should be able to use them directly to map the utility lines on ArcGIS. I’m going to look into the possibility of converting a PDF document to a jpeg and then being able to assign geographic data to it. The maps that we were able to get are well marked which makes them easier to understand and use.

This week I went out to Deer Haven Park with my supervisor and 2 professionals from the city of Delaware. The long term plan for the project is to map out the locations of the utility lines on all of the preservation park’s properties, which can be done using a tool owned by the city of Delaware. So, today we went out so that I could learn how to use the equipment, get some experience with it, and discuss the best methods of moving forward for the project.

The equipment works by connecting one machine to an exposed part of the line that you want to find. If I understood correctly, that machine sends a current through the pipe at a certain frequency so that it runs along the whole line. Then, using a separate machine that is set to that specific frequency, we are able to find the frequency and therefore the location of the line by following the strength of the frequency above ground. To follow it, the second machine is swept over the ground to find where the frequency is being picked up the strongest.

We ran into some issue because the separate utilities seem to overlap or be connected in the places where we can initially connect the lines, meaning that the current  was going through multiple lines at once and it was difficult to distinguish which one we were following. The other issue is that, because of the mechanics of the process, the pipes have to be metal in order to detect them. For most of the lines this isn’t an issue, but for the water line we can only track it for as far as it is copper.

The next step for this project is that we are going to try to get the building plans for the different properties to get an idea of where the lines go in and out of the buildings and also to see if the lines were possibly marked on those maps. Then, I’ll use the utility line locator and a GPS unit to mark the lines for the different locations.

So far for my internship with the preservation parks, I have

• Created a geodatabase
• Transfered all of their habitat shape files into layers in the database
• Standardized the coordinate system for all of the layers
• Added an acreage attribute for all of the polygons and a distance in feet attribute for all of the lines
• Formatted all of the layers to match the format of their previous maps
• Recorded all of the process so far, so that they can be used by the preservation parks later
• Been in touch with the city of Delaware in order to get the utility line locator equipment