There and Back Again

This was a fun lab. This week, we practiced importing aerial photos and identifying areas by tone and texture, and identifying features of a map by characteristics such as shadow, pattern, size and shape, and its association to other nearby features. (I.e., a long shape originating on a beach and protruding into the water is likely to be a pier.) Finally, we compared true and false color images and created a table of how the colors transformed between the two. This lab highlighted the challenges of making subjective qualitative judgments in map analysis -- what is the real boundary between coarse and mottled, or dark and very dark? What's the relative likelihood that a cluster of pixels is a tree, a road sign, or a moose?

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-9p03G9WqTVqbfW6F7IE1_OdXsHBqwBo/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=110455985222236608335&rtpof=true&sd=true https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-I0bx98nZ62pC8QzORUN1NVu9t4PXwaK/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110455985222236608335&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank"> This has been one of the most intense weeks of school I've ever had, including and especially grad school. Bringing together everything we learned in this course, I produced 5 maps, a PowerPoint presentation, a Word doc transcript, and a half dozen Excel files showing my data. Notable techniques and lessons from the final include: using the intersect tool to isolate layers in the study area and in the proposed corridor; using erase to make Swiss cheese layers with intersecting layers removed; using the polygon to centerline tool to estimate the transmission line length; using Excel to Table to import raw data, creating a locator to geocode address...

This was a fun lab. This week we practiced taking polygon shapefile data of the UWF campus, and georeferencing aerial photographs and a parcel map to it. One of the aerial photos was intentionally distorted, and the parcel map was for a development that had not happened yet at the time the aerial photos were taken. We also practiced creating new building polygons and new roads with the snapping tool. Part of the learning objectives were to learn about the number of control points needed to ensure accuracy, and the types of transformations we could use when georeferencing. Finally, we created a multiple ring buffer around as a conservation easement zone around an eagle nest on campus, and linked a photo of this nest through the attributes of the point file through Google Drive.