Reese's GIS Expedition

    This week, in the second Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing lab, was about Land use/Land cover, Ground Truthing, and accuracy assessment.      To start, the first part of the lab concerned land use and land cover. This is where we go in and make classification areas aerially of land and what we believe them to be. As you can see on the map below, this can be anything from residential, to marshland, to commercial, and everything in-between. For most of this lab part, it was mostly making the polygon areas. Unlike Intro to GIS, we did not make our own polygons or points often, however in this class we do. Once the base map was placed, I classified each area as best I could, as well as clipping and making sure no polygons overlapped.      With the first part done, then we moved on to ground truthing and accuracy assessment. With this part we used a tool in ArcGIS to place points randomly, and then do ground truthing to see if our land u...

     This week was the start of the next class and lab, Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing.       This being the first lab, it was an overview of the class as well as learning Visual Interpretation. Which had us identifying tone and texture, identifying features, and interpreting color.     For identifying tone and texture, we observed the now completed map below. When we first viewed the map, we were asked to make polygons for the tone of the map. This is because while the map is black and white, we can see the gradient that the map has in these two colors. Where it goes from very light, light, medium, dark, and very dark. So, in the lab we viewed the map and chose areas that we believe are the tones we were asked to find. We next did the same with texture, searching for areas on the map that were very fine, fine, mottled, coarse, and very coarse. Which you can see in the image below. I felt somewhat confident in my ability to identify ...

 This week, in the final GIS lab, was about applying all we had learned to do our own project analysis on a transmission line that was going through Sarasota County and Manatee County.      This lab was very hands-off and had use what we learned from the entire course to get our results. In the provided power point and transcript below, you can see I did try my best.  A quick summary of the lab is we had to find the impacts of the transmission line on the environment, homes, county parcels, and schools. With the environment, there was a fair amount of conservation land and wetlands inside the preferred corridor. However, due to time and difficulty, I was unable to present any results on the acres of land inside the corridor. With homes, I had much better luck, as there were 24 houses within the transmission line area, and 42 homes in the 400-ft buffer around the transmission line. With parcels, there were 30 Sarasota County parcels and 132 Manatee County pa...

     This week, in the sixth GIS lab, it was about georeferencing and editing maps.      This week’s lab had a big emphasis on georeferencing, as it was the most intensive part of the lab. So, to start, we added all the layers that were in the geodatabase provided. These being the roads, buildings, and eagle nest to the map. Next, we then placed out first jpeg of the northern part of University of West Florida (Uwf_n) to the map. With it, we opened the georeferencing pane, and centered it to the location where the rest of our map elements were, as the jpeg was placed in a null zone in the ocean. With everything all in one area, we began georeferencing the unknown jpeg to the known building and road locations. To start, we lined one of the building's polygon corners to the jpeg image where the building was. Once done, we added a control point from the unknown jpeg location to the known building location.      With the first control point place...