Reese's GIS Expedition

      The progress on my internship is going steady and has provided greater knowledge on my work as well as for mapping out the Precautionary Boil Water Notices. As of now I am over halfway done with compiling all of the data entries need to continue the project. With what has been done so far, it has illuminated areas that need improvement for the systems the Florida Department of Environmental Protection have. These areas being, repeat offenders who have not reported certain documents and whether some documents were put into a database or were duplicates. With concerns to GIS and the internship, it has given an appreciation for map making with the data that has been obtained so far. One of the days when I was working with the data, I changed its values to see how it would look showing certain data. This provided a good glimpse in how I will tackle the density mapping and incomplete vs complete PBWNs map. Overall, it has been a heartening experience to use to the skills...

      The assignments for the past two weeks had us looking at GIS businesses as well as conducting our own GIS job search to see what could be found. These are the takeaways I had from both assignments.     For the GIS businesses, it became clearer that GIS has been an ever expanding field of work that is used by multiple sectors. While I already had already known this, it was eye opening to view ESRI's industries tab and see all the sectors have in depth explanations for what they use GIS for. An example would be from my own internship where my state job falls under both water and  Environmental and Natural Resources Agencies. It also helped when conducting the job search the following week.     When I was conducting my job search, I knew from last week I wanted to find a job that used GIS but also involved what field of work I'm interested in. As when viewing GIS businesses it was evident that life sciences like ecology do requires use of GIS. ...

     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...