Open Sourced - From Analysis to Communication in the Age of Web Mapping - Report Week

Special Topics - Project 4 Week 4

The final final.  This project ended with the creation of a Power Point slide presentation of the analysis we performed in previous weeks.  Creating the presentation was fairly straight-forward until I got to the audio part.  I tried several different ways to get the audio to start up automatically but I never was able to accomplish that.  After recording the whole presentation three times in different ways I finally gave up.  The rest of it was simple enough until I went into QGIS  to create a finished map.  For analysis week I didn't need a finished map from QGIS, just a map that had had the analysis done and the layers created.  It should have been an easy enough task, but every time I made one change in the layout view it would change all kinds of things.  I was very careful to switch over to the data window and turn the appropriate groups on or off before unlocking the groups in the layout view, and yet it still would change things in ways I never could figure out.  Finally I got the map to the point where I wasn't too embarrassed by it so I did a quick save and export before anything else could happen.

All in all this last project was rather interesting, but I thought it was a bit much for a final project to have so much new stuff thrown at us with very little guidance in using it.  Had each of the programs been worked into the previous lessons it wouldn't have been so bad, but at the very end it was rather frustrating.

But it's all over and done now and time to move on.

Here are the links for both my Web map and my Power Point presentation.

http://students.uwf.edu/mr80/STGIS/OkDesert.html

http://students.uwf.edu/mr80/STGIS/FoodDeserts_MRoth.pptx

Final Project

Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing - Final

The final project for this class was to use what was learned in all the previous classes to answer a question.  I chose to go with the suggested project for which the data was provided.  The question being, Is urbanization to blame for the decrease in clarity of the waters of Lake Tahoe.  

To answer this question a composite image was created of individual bands of a 2010 Landsat 5 TM image in ArcMap, then imported into Erdas Imagine where spectral signatures were created and a supervised classification was run.  This image was then returned to ArcMap to compare to a 1992 National Land Cover Database image.  The comparison showed urbanization is likely the cause of the problem.

It's a relief to finally finish this course as it was the most difficult of them all.  I think part of the problem was I kept looking for things to be black and white, and quite frequently they were more best guess.  It was a difficult concept for me to adjust to.  In the end I think I did okay, and somewhere along the way I also came to enjoy it.  I think that was at the very end, when I knew it was almost over and I'd never likely need to do this again.  But at least now I can look back at this with fond memories.  

GIS Portfolio

GIS Internship - Final Assignment

My final assignment was to create a GIS Portfolio with a little information about me, my goals, my resume and and examples of my work.  It was a little difficult selecting what maps to use for examples since so many showed off some awesome skills, but I think the ones I selected provide a good picture of what has been learned during this past year.

Here's is a link to my portfolio:

http://students.uwf.edu/mr80/MRothPortfolio.pdf