Additional GIS work
T hroughout the past 4 years, most of my GIS work has been focused on designing corridors and modeling bird distributions. However, I often end up helping people with smaller projects on the side. Here is an overview of some additional GIS work I have done.
Cartography
Over the past two years at NAU, I created several map series that I was pretty happy with. The first series was for an Arizona Game and Fish Department Heritage Fund grant proposal. We applied for a grant to create linkage designs near urban areas, so I created a series of approximately 20 maps which depicted incorporated cities, a 5 mile buffer of the cities, and wildland fracture zones for which we were proposing to create linkage designs. I was very pleased with the clarity of these maps, which I owe to ArcMap's transparency abilities.
The second series I created was a set of 20-25 maps for Todd Bayless' report on prarie dogs, mountain plovers, and burrowing owls to the Arizona Game and Fish Department. These maps depicted ownership, USGS topo maps, and prairie dog colonies. I also created a set of maps depicting transect lines and prarie dog colonies Todd could use for conducting site surveys (not shown below).
Map created for AZGFD Heritage Fund grant application. Click for large version.
Map created for AZGFD Heritage Fund grant application. Click for large version.
Map displaying prairie dog colonies. Click for large version.
Map displaying prairie dog colonies. Click for large version.
Additional modeling
While at NAU, I created a custom ArcGIS toolbox in Python for Shawn Newell, a Master's student of Paul Beier's performing sensitivity analyses on GIS-based corridors. This toolbox allowed Shawn to model 16-18 different corridor scenarios for 8 species in batch mode by using ArcToolbox's command line option. Because each corridor analysis takes 10-20 minutes to run, this saved a lot of time by allowing Shawn to run batch analyses overnight without supervising ArcGIS. I also wrote a couple scripts to calculate summary statistics of habitat suitability in each corridor. These scripts summarized more than 200 habitat suitability grids in about 8 minutes, saving a considerable amount of time (In all fairness, it took me a little more than an hour to write the scripts; on the whole this was still much more efficient than summarizing each model by hand).
Most of my modeling experience in the past 4 years has been ecological species-based models. However, I'm interested in nearly all forms of GIS-based environmental modeling land-based modeling techniques such as watershed modeling and land use change modeling.
GIS technician work at Purdue
My experience as a GIS technician for Purdue's Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department in 2002-2003 gave me my first taste of batch processing and troubleshooting. I performed a wide range of work, such as preparing data for hydrologic modeling, assisting students in a grad-level GIS class with their term projects (while I was still an undergrad), and maintaining data. Some of the large projects I worked on include:
- Creation of a 45-layer digital GIS atlas for all 92 counties of Indiana. This required customizing ArcView with Avenue scripts to perform large batch clipping operations.
- Creation of ArcView extension for Office of Indiana State Chemist. This extension simplified procedures for state pesticide investigators.
- Creation of 200+ unique maps in 14 hours for field use by a student intern investigating sensitive water bodies. This required Avenue scripting to increase efficiency.
- Complex vector analysis of all state highways within distance thresholds of sensitive water bodies. I calculated miles of roads falling within 60 permutations of sensitivity and created poster-sized maps depicting these sensitive roads (show below). This data was used by the Department of Transportation to reduce winter road salting near sensitive water bodies.
Map depicting sensitive water bodies analysis. Click for large version.
Spreadsheet showing different sensitivity permutations. Click for large version.