Alex

About Alex

Cofounder of AARoads.com. Webmaster of both AARoads and Interstate-guide.com. Former cartographer for Mapsource, Inc. and Universal Map Group, LLC. Map specialist for GIS Cartography & Publishing Services.

Introduction to ERDAS Image – Washington Forest Thematic Data

The third lab assignment for Remote Sensing/Photo Interpretation introduces ERDAS (Earth Resources Data Analysis System) Image. The first part of the lab provided a basic overview of the program, initially with some rudimentary tasks involving Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery and a LANDSAT Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite image of forestland in Washington State. Working with the data from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, learned how to add [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:55:10-04:00November 3rd, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) Identification for Pascagoula, MS

The second module for GIS4035 Remote Sensing/Photo Interpretation introduces the USGS Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) classification system. Originally compiled by James R. Anderson and associates, A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data was published by the United States Government Printing Office in 1976. There are four levels in the hierarchy, with Level I categorizing LULC on air photos with small scale and low spatial [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:58:52-04:00October 27th, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Remote Sensing – Visual Image Interpretation Basics

A short two days following the completion of the Final Project for GIS4043, I am delving into Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing (GIS4035). The first lab provides an overview on elements of visual image interpretation, with historical black and white air photos of Pensacola Airport and Pensacola Beach in Northwest Florida. The first aspect of aerial photography interpretation references the tone, or the shades of gray from light/white to [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:47:46-04:00October 22nd, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Bobwhite Manatee Transmission Line Analysis – Final Project

The final project for GIS4043/Intro to GIS conducts analysis on the Bobwhite Manatee Transmission Project in Southwest Florida. Part of the Florida Power & Light (FPL) infrastructure, the 24.5 mile long transmission corridor was developed to serve growing areas of eastern Manatee and Sarasota Counties, including Lakewood Ranch. Additionally the new line offers redundancy during hurricanes, something tested since it was completed with Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:57:19-04:00October 13th, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Georeferencing UWF aerials for Eagles nest easement analysis

The sixth lab for Intro to GIS introduces Georeferencing, which transforms raster data such as an aerial photo or a scan of a subdivision plat, to closely match vector data within GIS. I am familiar with Georeferencing from my cartography jobs, where we often acquired subdivision and other development plats and digitized them for updating map products. Georeferencing utilizes control points, which match features on the raster image without any [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:29:37-04:00October 3rd, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Geocoding Data – Manatee County Schools

This week's lab project introduced me to Geocoding within ArcGIS Pro and some Excel spreadsheet tactics used to prepare the data for it. The focus of this project is to extract the geographic location for Manatee County Schools from the list posted on the Florida Department of Education web site. Started the lab with a simple copy and paste of the schools list, which includes 84 entries ranging from [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:25:09-04:00September 22nd, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Buffer Analysis with Desoto National Forest data

This week's GIS Lab introduced spatial analysis and more specifically, the concept of buffers. Buffers in GIS can be applied to spatial data to conduct analysis on a specifically defined area surrounding the data in question. My last experience with buffers was back in 1998 at the University of Delaware. Our final project then used buffers as part of the analysis for the White Clay Creek Watershed in northern [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:21:48-04:00September 17th, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Map Projection Variation with Florida County data

This week's GIS lab delved into map projections, the manipulation of attribute data and the creation of a feature class out of selected data. We were tasked with taking a polygon shapefile of Florida's County Boundaries and reprojecting it from the original Albers Conical Equal Area (Albers) coordinate system to both the State Plane Coordinate System (State Plane Florida North) and the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM 16 North) [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:12:01-04:00September 14th, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

ArcGIS Field Maps – Tampa area route markers

Three weeks into GIS4043, we were introduced to a package including data collection, ArcGIS Online, Story Maps and ArcGIS Field Maps. While I have worked with ArcGIS Online creating state maps with data from various Departments of Transportation for research and write-ups for pages on AARoads, a lot of this was new to me.   The purpose of this week's lab is to create a Feature Class with data [...]

By |2023-11-03T16:02:56-04:00September 11th, 2023|GIS|0 Comments

Cartography Overview – University of West Florida Map

Following several days of anxiousness following the formation and movement of Hurricane Idalia, I finally was able to resume work on the second Lab assignment for GIS4043. This week's focus is on cartographic basics and design, something I have familiarity with having worked for three map companies. However my experience goes back to ArcMap, and the ArcGIS Pro system definitely requires some time investment to acclimate. The general purpose [...]

By |2023-11-03T15:48:12-04:00August 31st, 2023|GIS|0 Comments
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