Geography 291: Geospatial Analysis with Desktop GIS

Hi everyone! My name is Hannah Cox and I am a Junior environmental science major and zoology minor here at OWU. I am from Orange County, California. Some of my hobbies include lacrosse, reading, and anything related to sea turtles!

Shuurman Ch.1 Thoughts:

When I initially began reading this chapter by Shuurman, it was clear that GIS is a multidimensional software with many different uses for many individuals. That is the beauty (and sometimes faults) of having a program like GIS because it can be used so broadly depending on what it is needed for.

I really appreciated the section discussing spatial analysis, separating it completely from mapping because of the large differences between them. Although spatial analysis and mapping can intersect, spatial analysis generates more knowledge than what can be interpreted from maps or data. The author made it clear that when having GIS, you must understand how to frame questions to implement a successful quantitative model and if it is sufficient in the context of the available data. 

I was intrigued by the terms GISystems and GIScience. GISystems contain components like data input, analysis, mapping, etc., whereas GIScience is simply a theory that underlies GISystems. Having each GIS followed by systems or science represented the interrelatedness as well as how fuzzy the distinction can be between them. 

I enjoyed reading the last section of the chapter discussing the various ways GIS has been used. It is really amazing how GIS can be used to help various businesses, municipalities, and cities/urban areas. GIS is a fantastic example of how the digital world can help organize and fix real-world problems.

Google/Google Scholar GIS Application:
I sought out how GIS can be helpful in sea turtle conservation.

In my search, I found that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission monitoring marine turtle mortality and identifying the mortality factors in Florida since 1980. Between 1980 and 2022, there had been 53,444 strandings consisting of turtles found alive, injured, or deceased. Data was taken around all of Florida with the image showing the bottom south of Florida.  GIS can also be used to visually represent nesting data during nesting season along a known nesting beach.

Sources:

https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/myfwc::sea-turtle-strandings-florida/explore?location=26.513152%2C-81.516692%2C7.21

https://sjcfl.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Viewer/index.html?appid=1d8d52ed9d5744659daacc32912c3eb1

Hi Krygier! You already know who I am from last semester, but my name is Jacob DeMaggio and I am a freshman here from Saint Louis, Missouri. I am an Environmental Science majorr (possibly a double major in Zoology) and additionally a Spanish minor.

When reading Schuurman ch. 1 I thought it was very insightful how at the beginning of the chapter the author addresses the matter that GIS has multiple identities based on who the user is and what questions they’re asking. To me, it not only showed how GIS can have multiple different “identities” but also how there is no exact way to pinpoint a definition of GIS that everyone will agree upon.  Additionally, I found it interesting when there was a brief discussion on what spatial analysis is and how it differs from mapping and GIS, how it extracts more data and information than can be gleaned by map data. I specifically find this interesting because I would always think that spatial analysis would be the same as mapping data. I also find it interesting that there were multiple different people, from multiple different areas (the U.S., Canada, and the UK) and how many people believed that the development of GIS was inevitable. It started to make me think about how our world today would be different if we didn’t have GIS, and it made me realize how much we use it on a daily basis in our cars every day, and for us to not have had that would have made everyone’s lives so much worse, which showed me how grateful I am to be in a time where GIS does exist. On page 7 the author quotes someone that uses an analogy of GIS and a calculator and helped make more sense of GIS. The analogy was that both are fairly straightforward and clear-cut as to what they do, but you have to understand all of their functions and intricacies of them before being able to effectively use them. It also has been shown throughout the reading that it is evident that there is a difference between the quantitative implications of GIS as well as the cartographic implications of GIS and also the relationship between the two of them.

When looking for GIS applications, I looked at the application for members of the LGBTQ community, and it discussed how with GIS we are able to make relationships between sexuality, place, and space. It goes deeper into how “queer space transgresses the normative and challenges (hetero)sexualized space”. Another GIS application I looked at was for crime-related GIS applications and I found that you can us GIS to create a map that can identify where the crimes are occurring and clarify what crimes are or are not related based on your research, which in turn can allow investigators to target their efforts and line officers to patrol and respond to locations while being more fully aware.

Sources:

https://community.esri.com/t5/conservation-gis/why-should-gis-matter-to-queer-people/ba-p/1011618

https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/sitecore-archive/Files/Pdfs/library/brochures/pdfs/crime-analysis.pdf

Data Inventory + final (2)

Don’t cry over GIS, it isn’t worth it. Thank you again.

Week 4 and 5 Lee Leonard

I’m hoping no one sees this. I condensed week 4 and 5 into one PDF and intend to do the same for the data inventory and final. Thank you!

Final-GEOG191 (1) . I hope this works and is accessible!

Hopefully this works:

Weaver – Delaware Data+ Final

 

 

I’m hoping this link works, but here is my final.

GEOG 191 Final- Cailee Plunkett

Zip Code

> Contains all zip codes in Delaware County, Ohio

Recorded Document

> Contains points that represent recorded documents. These include subdivisions, vacations, surveys, etc.

School District

> Contains all school districts within the county 

Map Sheet

> Contains all map sheets within the county 

Farm Lot

> Identifies all farm lots and their boundaries in both the US Military and Virginia Military survey districts

Township

> Identifies the geographic boundaries of each township within the county 

Street Centerline

> Shows the center of pavement on public and private roads within the county 

Annexation

> Contains the annexations and conforming boundaries from 1853 to now

Condo

> Shows all condominium polygon boundaries within the county 

Subdivision

> Shows all subdivisions and condo polygons within the county 

Survey

> A shapefile of point coverage that shows land surveys within Delaware County 

Dedicated ROW

> Consists of all designated Right-of-Way lines within the county, and is updated daily 

Tax District

> Contains all tax districts within the county 

GPS

> Shows all GPS identified monuments established between 1991 and 1997

Original Township

> Contains the original boundaries of the townships within the county before tax district changes affected their shapes

Imagery 2019

> Aerial imagery of Delaware County from 2019 

Hydrology

Shows all major waterways within the county 

Precinct

> Shows all voting precincts within the county 

Parcel

> Consists of the polygons that represent parcel lines within the county 

PLSS

> Consists of the Public Land Survey System polygons in both the US Military and Virginia Military Survey Districts of Delaware County

Address Point

> A spatially accurate representation of all certified addresses within Delaware County

2022 Leaf- On Imagery (SID File)

> 2022 imagery 

Building Outline

> Contains building outlines of all structures within the county 

Delaware County Contours

> Contains two-foot contours for the county 

2021 Imagery (SID File)

> Imagery of the county for 2021

Delaware County E911 Data

Address mapping intended to aid with 911 response

Chapter 6:

 

> Domains provide a way for you to constrain input information by limiting the choice of values for a particular field

> Using domains maintains data integrity- does not allow other values to be added during data collection 

 

Chapter 7:

> The process of creating map features from addresses, place names, etc. is geocoding. 

> To geocode addresses, you need an address table, reference data, and an address locator

 

Chapter 8:

> In the first exercise, I created a kernel density to see where areas of high density may occur.

> Kernel density: the density calculated of point features around each output raster cell 

> Temporal data represents a state in time

 

Chapter 9: 

 

> Rasters are composed of a grid of cells instead of x, y coordinates

> Used to define and record geographic phenomena 

> The reclassify tool is used to replace raster cell values with new cell values so that the rasters can be combined

Chapter 10:

 

> Dynamic labels are created when ArcGIS places labels for features in a layer with one click based on predetermined labeling rules.

> Useful for most mapping projects, but label positions can change depending on map scale