Geography 292: Geospatial Analysis with Web GIS

App 1: Delaware’s Native Gardens

URL: https://experience.arcgis.com/builder/?id=d0205f5e5afe47c19cc651576aefcddf&views=page

Description:

This project focuses on the information from weeks 1-4 of class. The project contains real-time information and is available to all mobile users with the URL. The focus of this project is to promote local biodiversity and sustainable planting. The app works by including a map for users to view, with red dots that represent logged plants. On the left side is a survey, which utilizes the WebGIS feature, to fill out if you planted a local garden and want to show others what types of plants and the location. This also includes a few questions: where the plant was located, if it was native, where it was planted, and the species. This information is available to all users after clicking one of the specific red dots.

App 2: Park Locations Within Delaware

URL: https://experience.arcgis.com/builder/?id=2fbe28e0b5ec4820a783af842787599b&views=insert

This project focuses on the information learned in weeks 5-7 in class. This project includes the data collection from Chapter 5, WebGIS sharing from Chapter 6, and the integration we learned about this week in Chapter 7. The focus of this project is to allow both runners and walkers to view where trails are in Delaware. This project includes two types of trail: pavement and gravel, based off whichever surface the user prefers. Users can select a trail (marked in purple) and see the attribute data of what the name is and the specific trail type. This information is public and available to anyone interested.

 

Chapter 7:

This chapter is about 3D web maps, the advantages of using this type of mapping and its features in GIS. It adds extra dimension, is easier to interpret than 2D, allows designers to build flexible scenarios quickly and effectively, offers powerful analytical functions, etc. A web scene can also contain multiple layers which is helpful in features, map image, raster, vector tile, and scene layers. There is a group called photorealistic scene that aims to re-create reality using photos to texture features. In a cartographic scene, it takes 2D thematic mapping techniques and moves them into 3D. The four main elements to a scene include surfaces. features, textures, and atmospheric effects: all of which add depth and context to the map. There’s also 3D object scene layers, which I was most excited to learn about, which are features used to represent and visualize 3D objects. They can be created manually or automatically using procedural rules. It also goes over some new technology that is only available in 3D: VR, XR, and the metaverse. The advantage of this is great for immersing users in GIS, for example, ArcGIS 360 VR is a web app that allows you to view 360 VR experiences (3VRs) on desktop PCs, mobile devices, and VR headsets.

Tutorial 7 :

I ran into a little trouble at the start with ArcGIS online with the scene option. For these tutorials, it requires you to be in the “scene” tab for ArcGIS online, but my browser (Microsoft Edge) had the hardware acceleration disabled, and I had to go into my settings and turn on the “hardware acceleration” toggle button so it could show 3D images.

I had a ton of fun figuring out how to do all of these 3D scenes and changing their shapes/colors! 7.1 and 7.2 were easy enough, it was cool to see how high the population density of DC was in 2020 (it was spiked really high lol). I liked 7.4 and 7.5 the most! Seeing the park come together was so cool, and I loved messing around with all the 3D objects and choosing different colors for the trees or picking different cars out. Also, for 7.5 it was super fun to be able to go underground and see a bunch of point of views!

 

Assign: Select one of your four ideas (Chapters 5-7) and create it. 

I could use this section on 3D scenes to represent and visualize green canopy and how it effects urban heat island effects. Using 3D tree models to show how the temperatures in urban areas. I can map an area and use the 3D vegetation symbology (oaks, maples, palms) and put them in my web scene. Using the daylight widget, i can show the trees cast shadows on buildings and sidewalks at different times of day, showing their cooling effect visually. This could be done in any location, including Delaware around the city. This could be expanded into showing where different building’s postions in the city also effect shadows and the warming of the areas around it.

This week only had one assigned chapter, number 7, which was focused on 3D web scenes. The objectives include being able to understand web scenes, knowing how and what scene laters are, learning the Scene Viewer tool, understanding 3D in different scenarios, and creating feature layers with z-values enabled. The purpose of 3D in WebGIS is to bring extra dimension to the map. This is especially useful for urban planning, architectural design, storytelling, filmmaking, and more industries. What interested me about this was how broad the uses of this software are, it feels like every chapter I learn a new way this could be used. The two types of 3D images are cartographic and photorealistic which can be used depending on your purpose for the map. Feature layers can be added over top of web scenes and can be configured to show a 3D image. This was super interesting and the book gave the examples of using 3D symbols to show a park bench, rock, or a streetlight. This chapter also discusses VR, XR, and the metaverse. These features bring location to users and allows them to interact and discover. These features are relatively newer technology developments and continue to be used by more people every single day. All these features are integrated into the WebGIS systems which is super cool! It also explains how 3D mapping is being used in urban planning and BIM. The tutorials of this chapter show how to create web scenes and 3D web apps. This includes creating a 3D map of the country and adding 3D object signals into a park. This chapter really opened my eyes to how creative you can be with WebGIS.

An example of a project that could be done utilizing the 3D web scenes would be to create a VR experience of the dorm rooms at Ohio Wesleyan. This would be using a photorealistic map with specific 3D symbols to showcase the desk, chairs, beds, and dressers that come with the different rooms. This could be helpful for incoming freshman attending the campus to view what their dorms would look like instead of relying on the set up dorms at orientation. New features could additionally be added that let you take specific measurements to know if your personal furniture would fit, however I am unsure how I would make that possible with my limited knowledge.

Chapter 7: A 3D scene can be more intuitive to interpret than a 2D map and allow for wider applicability with urban planning and defense simulation. Some 3D apps offer fly-around and X-ray vision. There are two types of scenes: photorealistic scenes and cartographic scenes. Photorealistic scenes aim to recreate reality using photos for textures and are commonly used for cities. A cartographic scene takes 2D mapping techniques and moves them into 3D to display abstract features such as population density and flight paths. A scene has four elements: surfaces, features, textures, and atmospheric effects. Surfaces are often referred to as a digital elevation model (DEM), digital terrain model (DTM), or digital surface model (DSM), and are continuous measurements. Features can be 2D layers or 3D scenes and are the operational layers of the 3D app. Texture provides exterior or interior covers of 3D features and is often aerial imagery or cartographic symbols. Atmospheric effects include lighting and fog. Scene layers have 3D object scene layers, building scene layers, integrated mesh scene layers, point cloud scene layers, point scene layers, and voxel scene layers. 3D object scene layers are used to visualize 3D objects and are created manually or automatically using procedural rules. Building scene layers allow you to visualize and interact with all aspects of buildings and have an overview, discipline (i.e., architectural and plumbing), category layer (i.e., windows and walls), and filters. Integrated mesh scene layers are constructed from sets of overlapping imagery, such as from drones. Point cloud scene layers display large volumes of symbolized point cloud data, typically from lidar or drone images. Voxel scene layers represent multidimensional spatiotemporal data in a 3D visualization. Atmospheric data and space-time cubes are voxel layers. I had a lot more trouble finding the things it was asking for in the tutorial, as some of the settings have been changed since this textbook was released.

Application: I can use this chapter to create a scene of a construction site and compare different plans to compare the impacts of underground pipes, what trees and other natural resources will need to be removed, and how they will fit in with the surrounding areas in terms of height.

Chapter 5 was interesting to work on. It focused on the ArcGIS enterprise which was a little confusing at first. I learned about what caching was and why it is important especially for highly accessed sites. This chapter also contained a lot of graphs and charts explaining how files work and operate. The steps on ArcGIS were pretty easy to follow and didn’t cause many issues. It was interesting to see the difference between raster and vector tile layers and things like how they are stored or updated.

Chapter 6 focused more on the visualization of the data developed and talked about it chapter 5. I thought this was interesting to visualize and actually see what was going on. This chapter also gave a bunch of pictures and charts to show how things are related or work together rather than just explaining it. When working on the tutorials in ArcGIS online it took a little bit of time to follow the steps and complete it. Taking a computer science and programming course it was also cool to see how coding comes into play in this chapter as well. Overall, I thought the chapter was interesting and important for learning how to use GIS.

An application involving these chapters could be a fisherman tracking where they caught fish on a lake. You could make the map use caching so the map is quick and easier to load. Once the person catches a fish you could use a gauge to chart how many fish they caught and the total weight or length of the fish.

Chapter 3:

I may have made some mistakes with the instructions for tutorial 3, since its not a very visually appealing app, but I couldn’t figure out where I went wrong with it when looking back through the directions. I had trouble figuring out the configuring for the 2D and 3D maps because one of the buttons I needed that was referenced in the book was within another section that wasn’t mentioned in the guide. I had to search for the answers, but it ended up being very simple; it was just in a group I couldn’t see. I like the look of the 2D map and 3D map next to each other. I also like the page sidebar because it makes it really easy to organize everything and its similar to working with ArcGISPro.

Chapter 4:

I had a lot of trouble with figuring out how to set a rule so that I could open the recyclables section with only a specific answer. The set rules button doesn’t show up when selecting the question, like is shown in the textbook; it is shown next to Behavior. The mobile apps portion of this chapter didn’t work well with my phone, since my location accuracy is pretty low. Luckily, I was still able to complete most of the mobile portions.

Application based on 3&4:

The work with mobile apps in chapter 4 seems like a fun way to add interactivity to a project. In thinking about art history again, I could create an app where people could note what their favorite pieces in a museum are, where they are, and add details about the pieces or their opinions through QuickCapture and AuGeo. Another idea is an app where people could report accessibility issues on campus, since there are quite a few, but different needs means that people notice different issues. Having a catalog from many different perspectives could provide helpful information for future work on campus.

Chapter 7: Reading the first paragraph, I got excited because I love working with 3-D maps. For me, it’s easier to understand what the map is really trying to show. I also liked seeing the symbols that could be used. I found the photos in the introduction to the assignment help to understand what all GIS can do with 3-D things. The instructions for how to create a 3-D web scene were very vague, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of different layers and basements that can be used for this. Doing virtual headsets with GIS is another completely different layer that I never even thought was a possibility. This chapter assignment was fun to complete. I loved exploring all the different types of symbols that GIS has to offer. I had a few issues with this chapter finding some of the things to change to make it look exactly like the book version does, but mine just has a few differences. 

 

Chapter 5: I found reading the introduction to this chapter very helpful because it related how learning GIS can transition right into real life work and why we need GIS in the first place. This chapter focused more on the big picture GIS world and how it fits into enterprises and machines. One important aspect that I pulled out from this chapter was city planning using GIS. Completing the assignment was a little challenging. There was a lot of different types of GIS applications that needed to be added and changed in this assignment. Lots of flipping back and forth between things. But it was a short chapter, so that was beneficial, and I still learned a lot. 

Chapter 6: One important thing from this chapter that stuck out to me was the differences between the types of spatiotemporal data that GIS has the ability to do. They include moving, discrete, stationary, and change. Creating maps, I believe that change maps would be the most intriguing to try and create due to the fact that when making the maps, you can physically see the change in GIS of the area. Going a step beyond and making a timelapse of the change map would also be a cool task to complete. The assignment for this chapter was fine to complete, again, lots of different aspects being added together. It was a little long so took time to complete the assignments and parts of this chapter. 

Application: Based on my interests in trying to make a city layout to see what layout makes the most sense, you can create a layout and compare the different layers using these applications. 

My final project consisted of creating two apps based on different ideas from the chapters we were assigned. I wanted to focus on two things I was passionate about, so I looked at bird breeding grounds in Ohio and I looked at land and tree canopy cover in Delaware. I found a lot of interesting things and it was cool to look at it all.

1. App Number 1: Focusing on applications from chapters 1-4. Bird Breeding Grounds in Ohio compared to Protected Areas in Ohio. 
   1. My main question was how much do bird breeding grounds overlap with already protected areas in Ohio? I created a map that is focused on the breeding blocks of birds in Ohio and how much they overlap with protected areas. The purpose of this app was to identify important habitats where bird conservation could be increased. It was interesting because I found that many of the protected areas are found in Southeast Ohio, which makes sense because the habitats down there are prime for housing birds during their breeding seasons. I also found out that there are specific blocks coordinated for different areas of Ohio, to make it easier on those who study the breeding patterns of different birds.  
   2. Link to app: https://owugis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=b0ae459cdbc649c8a27ff1092b462edf

1. App Number 2: Focusing on applications from chapters 5-7. 
   1. My main question throughout these chapters was centered around how much land cover and tree canopy cover there is in Delaware, Ohio. As we can see from the web scene/3D app I made, there isn’t much. It was interesting to see how in the city there is very little land cover, but if you expand the map outward, you can see where different parks, such as Alum Creek and Delaware State Park, have more land and tree cover. We could use this information to find out where the ideal places in the city would be to place more vegetation. We can also use this information to understand that the amount of land cover and tree cover in Delaware is less, so that means that more sunlight will reach into homes and buildings. If I were going to continue this project, I would examine how that relates to the amount of air conditioning being used in these areas. 
   2. Link to app: https://owugis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/3dviewer/index.html?appid=c993f8570d124ae0b63c11f47d4acbe7

 Chapter 5: 

On-premises and hybrid webGIS. The chapter begins by talking about the importance of these two features in GIS, stating how on-premises Web GIS allows users to actually use GIS within restricted situations, whether that be a lack of internet access or the necessity to use a specific internet connection. Hybrid Essentially allows organizations to keep their own information/data while still using services provided by ArcGIS Online. Although past this understanding, I was struggling to fully grasp the purpose and use of these services. Quite a bit of the explanations of different systems and services were very confusing to me. The chapter spent a lot of time explaining ArcGIS Online and Enterprise, but I’m still confused about the purposes of the two systems. It began to be a little easier to understand once I’d gotten to the parts talking about Raster and vector layers, and so on. Raster layers are beneficial for predominantly static information and basemaps. Vector layers work best as data maps that are customizable. These features seem quite similar to when we were learning about vectors and raster info in 291.

Tutorials: 

The tutorials within this chapter helped me quite a bit to understand map layers in a sense. We definitely crossed similar topics to map layers. 

Chapter 6: 

Real-time GIS is structured as a system that works with active data to consistently update said data. I initially thought the Internet of Things (IoT) was a really odd abbreviation, but overall it fits the latter topics the chapter talks about, including the smart cities and smart homes, which can exist through IoT, and the large variety of devices that this entails. Then the ingest and process parts of IoT seem to be essentially the communication aspects of interacting with smart technologies, ingest being the understanding of input information, and process being filtering and analysing possible responses, and lastly output being the final action. The chapter then later continues to talk about several GIS applications, or systems that are beneficial to different fields. One of these systems, which we’ve touched on the topic before, is ArcGIS Arcade, which is a simple expression language. I think this is interesting,g especially just because any kind of coding or system has always been really confusing for me. 

Tutorials: 

In the beginning sections, I’m able to see how real-time GIS is implemented and the tools that allow for maps to be automatically updated after a certain period, one of the examples being every 30 seconds. It was also interesting to learn how to make a dashboard. It seemed to make it an easy way to track the changes in different data systems, which is great for quite a lot of things. 

Application Ideas: 

I wanted to leave the application idea somewhat open so I could better decide how to apply it later on in the course, but similarly to some of the things we went over in the tutorials, I would be tracking deforestation ( based on my interests specifically around an expanding city) to see the further pollution impacts of it. I do this by using some of the features we used in chapter 5, and specifically in chapter 6,  the time-embedded feature layer.