Reese's GIS Expedition

     For my internship, I was able to use my position in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection ( FDEP)  to utilize elements from my job for my internship. I will be starting this week coming week on the 23rd of January. For my internship I plan to map out the previous Boil Water Notices that the FDEP has received for the year of 2025. In doing so I hope to make density maps for certain communities but also for the whole of the FDEP Northwest District. This will also help to further my use of GIS in potable water as I believe there are more ways to utilize GIS with my work. I plan to work for 10 hours a week for for about 13 weeks to reach my 130 hours requirement. Overall I believe this will be a good internship and provide a good real use of my GIS skills.      As for the GIS user group to join, I chose the Seven Hills Regional User Group for GIS ( SHRUG ). It is one of the GIS groups that is more local to the Northwest District of Florid...

     This week, in the sixth and final Special Topics in Geographic Science lab, was about Scale Effect and Spatial Data Aggregation.     This weeks was broken into a few parts and has us analyzing scale and how it effects our data, as well as the aggregation of spatial data fore more governmental things such as gerrymandering.      So with the first part of the lab, we took data on hydrographic lines and polygons of a county and examined their lengths and details to one another. What we saw is that when the scale is increased, more detail and length is decreased. You can see this below in a screenshot from the lab where our highest scale, which is medium, is eclipsed in lengths as high goes father and the normal flowlines goes the farthest.      The next part was more of the same where we analyzed a DEM layer and resamples it. In this part we started by changing the resolution by 1 then 2, 5, 10, 30 and 90 meters. What we saw is th...

     This week, in the fifth Special Topics in Geographic Science lab, was about Interpolation with concerns to surfaces.     This lab was broken into two parts, the first half had us comparing Spline and IDW Interpolations to each other and the second half had us analyzing water quality with different interpolations.           With the first half, we were introduced to Spline and how to use it properly while also comparing it to IDW/DEM interpolation. Once we had produced the Spline, we then subtracted it with the Raster Calculator tool from IDW in order to see the differences between the two. What we saw was areas that were more negative were more aligned to IDW but areas that were more positive where aligned to Spline. This was in part because of the elevation differences between the two Interpolation methods and their variance on the points they came from. This is especially true for areas where they were equal, which causes a d...

     This week, in the fourth Special Topics in Geographic Science lab, was about TINs and DEMs with concerns to surfaces.        In this lab, we focused mainly on preforming correct analysis of layers onto a 3D spaces, as well as the visualization of the data they can provide. An example of this can be seen below, as after viewing and exploring TINs on a terrain surface, we then made a suitability map for ski runs. This involved a lot of process in changing our raster to a TIN, Slope, and Aspect, before reclassifying them all and putting them together. In doing so, we gave the inclines their own value in order to then show the steeper the slope the more suitable it would be for skiing.      After doing that, we then explored and made our own TINs. This was a helpful application as the symbology for TINs is very mailable, with points, aspect, edges, and slope. This was immensely helpful as what we did earlier with spatial analy...

     This week, in the third Special Topics in Geographic Science lab, was about assessment with concerns to data quality.       In this lab, we did an assessment on road lengths in Jackson county Oregon. This was done in order to give us more experience with assessing the accuracy with concerns to road length data. As you will see in the the map below we had taken the full lengths of our road files, Tiger and Centerlines in order to preform a percent difference evaluation between them. With the full lengths between the two road lengths being Tiger Roads with 11,382.7 kilometer and Street Centerlines with 10,805.8 kilometers.       As for how we got the map, we did some analysis. So, to start I used the clip tool to obtain both road lengths contained within the provided grid. This trimmed out any toads that had left the grid so all the data could remain within the grid. Next, since my data for the road lengths was alr...

     This week, in the second Special Topics in Geographic Science lab, was about standards with concerns to data quality.       In this lab, we made an accuracy assessment of two road networks, one from Streetmap USA and the other from the City of Albuquerque. To start, we added our shapefiles to our map that you see below of both our road networks. With them, we then made a good few test points where the roads intersect, as you can see in the map, in order to preform our accuracy assessment.       Once done, we then added more detailed imagery to the map so that we could change 20 or so of our test points into actual reference points. When doing so, we placed these reference points where we believed was the exact center of the intersections. Once we had our 20 points, we then went back and placed our Streetmaps USA and City of Albuquerque points where they displayed the corresponding intersections in their shapefiles. With a total...