Christa's GIS Archive

This week's module was on Spatial Enhancement, Multispectral Data, and Band Indices. I've never had to alter imagery when it comes to its spatial or spectral resolution, so this was very intriguing to learn but also a bit overwhelming at times trying to take it in for the first time. I'm sure in time, as I get exposed to these concepts more, I will become more confident doing these kind of image enhancements or alterations in the future. We first began by learning how to retrieve aerial imagery. I find that this can sometimes be the hardest part of a project. Locating the data or imagery needed can truly be half the battle. I am grateful that this lab gives us those resources and walks us through how to download imagery. If we don't have the data or images needed to conduct an analysis, then accomplishing the goal or finishing a project would be impossible. I will definitely be keeping these sources in mind for future projects, including the final for this course! Addit...

Oh we meet again, ERDAS Imagine. I haven't touched that program in quite some time -- probably at least a year or two at this point. We seldom use it for work; we mostly rely on it for creating and cleaning up large mosaics, like in the countywide historical aerial initiative that the GIS team was working towards a while back. Frankly, we haven't been keeping up with that legacy project, due to the workload and overall demand for GIS support increasing; however, I will admit my time with ERDAS was not the most pleasant back then when I first joined the GIS team. Lots of crashing and confusion occurred back then, especially when compared to ArcGIS Pro, the primary program that is utilized in our workflows. Thankfully, I was grateful for the kind and easy to digest introduction into ERDAS Imagine this second time around. Taking this course, I'm definitely seeing other ways of analyzing and processing imagery through this program, which is really cool! I've warmed back up ...

If I had one word to describe Module 2's lab, it would be "restraint". Restraint because I needed to restrain myself from being a perfectionist and trying to fix every little thing I catch. I can get lost in the weeds and not see the whole forest for the trees, so to speak. So, giving myself the room to not digitize as strictly as I would normally proved quite difficult. Module 2 covered Land Use/Land Cover as well as Ground Truthing of the Pascagoula, Mississippi area. We were provided an aerial to classify the LULC codes over the entire satellite imagery. Not gonna lie, this was pretty daunting. I've never had to do anything like this -- usually it's specific areas like mining or impact areas. So to do the entire tile felt intimidating, but I was up to the challenge. I made sure to break things up by the larger areas to smaller areas, that way the larger spaces could be accounted for first and I could worry about the finer detailed sections later. Honestly, I dr...

In a blink of an eye, I have returned with new maps for my second GIS grad course! Not much of a break in-between the first course and this next one, but hopefully with the closing of the last class, I can continue the momentum into the next, which is Remote Sensing and Photo Interpretation. Module 1 covered Visual Interpretation based on 3 different parts: identifying tone and texture, identifying features, and interpreting color. For part one, we had to identify tones from light to dark and textures by how fine to coarse areas were in this USGS historical aerial from 1965. We did this by creating two separate feature classes for tone and texture, giving them both a new text field in order to name each feature record accordingly. Manually, we digitized areas they showed these variations in tones and textures. After doing so, we simply had to create a map layout, which is becoming one of my favorite parts of the map making process. The creativity aspect of it all really scratches that ...

The time has come for the final project to be completed and the class done! It's a bit wild for me to think that much time has passed where my first GIS grad course is over. Throughout the entire final project, I had a lot of fun actually creating these maps -- maybe too much since I ended up losing sleep some days because I was so in a flow state, so into just constantly trying and tweaking ideas of how the basemap should be or how the insets should look, etc. I think the biggest takeaway I have from my first grad course in a long time is that I'm way too much of a perfectionist. I even chuckled at myself how frequently I wanted to redo the recordings of my final presentation just because I didn't like how I said something, stuttered, or so on. At this point, no amount of minor editing will change my grade that drastically -- it's not worth it to mull over to no end. Ultimately, I'm still very proud of the map deliverables I created and are maps I would be content ...

It's the last module before the final project assignment -- it's both exciting and a bit nerve-racking since the deadlines are coming up so fast! Module 6 covered georeferencing, editing, and 3D mapping. Since 3D mapping was not a requirement, I didn't do it; however, if I have time later in the week, I'd like to make an addendum to this post and add my 2nd map deliverable if possible. As someone who hasn't made a 3D map, it intrigues me and would love the opportunity to finally get one underneath my belt. Since the lab assignment focused largely on georeferencing and editing vector data, we worked a lot with satellite aerial imagery of the University of West Florida campus. We had to take 2 JPEGs of the north and south sides of the UWF campus and georectify them using different transformations -- the north aerial I performed in 1st order polynomial while the south aerial I did in 2nd order polynomial. Georeferencing was one of the first things I learned at my workp...