Get the GIS of it

The most challenging aspect of the lab itself this week was figuring out how to correctly reclassify rasters, render them as polygons, and merge them with others to get the tables to populate correctly. I was stuck on this step of the lab for a couple hours. When I was finally able to get it to work for selecting the buildings within the USGS flood plain(after finding a post from the professor about how other students found it easier to complete, see screenshot below), my online desktop/software decided that it did not want to complete the rendering process to select for the buildings within the LiDAR flood plain. I tried restarting the online desktop multiple times to see if I could just restart the process, but it ended up not even loading the contents of the map. If I can get the map to load correctly or have the opportunity to redo this last part of the assignment this week, I will resubmit the assignment and update this blog post as well. 

 This week I completed 4 exercises to learn how to use 3D visualization, perform line-of-sight and viewshed analysis, and share 3D content. The most interesting tools and requirements I learned from the exercises are listed below. Local Scenes: can be used to display subsurface data Extrusion: displays 2D data as a 3D layer (works on points, lines, and polygons)     Requirements for uploading a 3D scene: must be a scene layer with multipatch data layer must use absolute heights for feature elevation (cannot be defined on the ground or relative to the ground) if the multipatch content is projected then the layers x and y units need to match the z units

  For this week's lab assignment, I learned how to use multiple tools that aid in the processing and presentation of LiDAR data. The map shown at the top of the poster below depicts the LiDAR data that was used for this assignment. From this data, I was able to get information on vegetation density, height, and ground cover. I was also able to create an image showing the elevation of the area. The four images shown below the LiDAR data depict the study location, a canopy density map, a forest height map, and a digital elevation model.

       F or  this assignment, I created three maps, each using a different hotspot technique. To achieve this I first calculated the area in square miles for each hotspot map by creating a new field called “Shape_Area_sqmi.” I then used the Calculate Geometry option by right-clicking the new field in each attribute table. Since the kernel density hotspot map consisted of multiple separate polygons, I had to use the “summary statistics” geoprocessing tool to add all of their areas together to get the total coverage. I then selected the 2018 homicides within the 2017 hotspot areas by location. After that, I exported the selected features to create a shapefile containing those selections. Next, I used spatial join for each hotspot map to get the count of 2018 homicides within each map. I, again, had to use the “summary statistics” geoprocessing tool to add all of the 2018 homicides within the kernel density map.  For each of the new shapefiles I created (hom20...

I am currently a grad student in the Historical Archaeology department at UWF and am also working on the completion of a grad certification in GIS. This Fall I will begin working on putting together my thesis for my master's and will hopefully finish by the end of Spring. I really enjoy living in Pensacola and I don't think I'll be leaving here for a while after I graduate. Since I am used to moving every 2 years it might be a bit difficult for me to stay in one place. I really enjoy being able to see and experience new places. The places that I have lived that are shown in my story map  are not the only places that I have ever traveled. I have been to Mexico and Puerto Rico many times. I have also been to Jamaica, Haiti, the Cayman Islands, England, Scotland, and Guatemala. I hope I get to continue traveling often.