My GIS Story
The following maps reflect the work I've done and the skills I've developed during my time in Harper College's GIS program.
This exercise had me use multispectral images of cornfields in Alberta, Canada to assess damage to the vegetation after a hailstorm. I performed change analysis by applying the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) (which relies on the Red and Near Infrared bands)to pre- and post-storm images to determine the average loss of healthy vegetation in each crop field. This was done using the Compute Change Raster Function. I then used the Zonal Statistics as Table Tool to determine the mean vegetation loss in each field.
For this exercise, I used the enrich tool to compare possible locations to open a book store in Poland. One site was in Warsaw and focused on locals making purchases. The other was in the town of Czaplinek and focused on revenue from tourists. Factors used in this analysis included the number of people over the age of 15 in the area, their purchasing power, and how much they spend on books and stationery.
In this exercise, I was tasked with creating a map to be used by the police in Pittsburgh for a parade they were having. This map highlighted the parade route, and alternate route, the area that would be closed off to traffic for the parade, buildings along the parade route, and bus and light rail stations in the area. It also had information about the length of the parade and the number of streets that would be closed. In this exercise I digitized buildings in the are that Ire not in the database. I created a feature class of the Pittsburgh Central Business District where the parade was held. I also ex created a layer with only roads within that area, I used the Feature To Line tool to break up the streets. I then built a network dataset and created an alternate route around the exclusion zone where the parade was being held. I also created feature classes for the intersecting streets and buildings facing the parade route.
In this lab, I used data from the World Ocean Database to find the mean sea water temperature changes in the Gulf of Mexico over the course of June of 2022, the start of the hurricane season. I downloaded netCDF data files and use the NetCDF Profiles To Feature Class tool to add the data to the map. I then joined the layers and exported them to a feature class. I filtered the data and created a chart to show the change over the month of June.
Conclusion
My time in Harper's GIS program has given me many opportunities to explore different applications of GIS. It has also helped me to build the skills needed to work in the GIS field.
