Hi! I’m Lily Ogrodowski, and I’m a first-year Environmental Science major and Chemistry minor. I took GEOG 291 earlier this semester, so I have already created and am familiar with my ArcGIS account, and I took the introductory quiz.
ArcGIS Online Website Exploration
From poking around the ArcGIS Online website, I was excited to learn about the ESRI Community website, which allows you to discuss and ask questions about topics with other people in the GIS community. It seems like a really efficient way to collaborate and solve problems!
Additionally, on the Scene tab, you can create your own scene or explore one of the preloaded ones. I was intrigued by the 3D model of Boston, and it was incredibly detailed! Like Google Earth but better. One of the preset views was color-coded, so it must be possible to add layers and features to a 3D scene, which seems like a really interesting concept.
Get Started: What is ArcGIS Online?
It seems like ArcGIS Online is more geared towards project sharing and collaboration than desktop ArcGIS was. Because it is web-based, it is probably more widely accessible (even on mobile!), and files get uploaded or shared to the cloud instead of just being saved onto your computer.
I also really like how the site enumerates real-world problems and then links to a tutorial for mapping the associated data. For example, the site piques your interest in reducing an invasive weed, then provides you with a tutorial on how to map campgrounds that are particularly affected so that action can be taken. How cool!
One more thing: while reading about using the Scene feature, I thought it was really interesting how you can adjust the sun’s position. Watching a day, month, or year in the intended area to see how much sunlight it gets is pretty fascinating to me. Especially in regions near the poles where levels of sunlight are highly variable throughout the year, this seems like a really interesting study.
Web Course: ArcGIS Online Basics
Figure 1: My certificate from completing the ArcGIS Online Basics Course.
Real-World GIS Applications
I was thinking about ice cream while doing this work, and I decided to look up GIS applications on ice cream…which were unfortunately lacking. However, it led me to an article discussing an apparent prevalence of fast-food restaurants near high schools in Santa Clara County, California. The study concluded with the help of geographic analysis that high schools with more fast food restaurants clustered around them actually have higher obesity rates.
Figure 2: Map of Santa Clara County Fast Food Restaurants (pink dots) within a certain distance of High Schools (black flags).
Some of my favorite hobbies include fiber arts, whether they be knitting, crocheting, embroidery, or the like. I found a super cool article where a person hand-embroidered GIS-generated maps depicting a bike route along the Mississippi River.
Figure 3: Hand-embroidered, physical renditions of a GIS map of the Mississippi River. How cool!
Sources:
Nixon, Hilary, and Lauren Doud. “Do fast food restaurants cluster around high schools? A geospatial analysis of proximity of fast food restaurants to high schools and the connection to childhood obesity rates.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 2.1 (2011): 181-194.
Biggs, Heidi. “Stitching Together Body, Land, and Data through Embroidered Geographies.” Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. 2026.