Latest Contributions by KevinButler

I haven't seen imagery for Santa Rosa yet... I'd reach out to the county and see where they're at. In future offerings we'll look more in depth at how to work with drone imagery in ArcGIS Pro and the rest of the platform. There's a bunch of stuff in development that's not quite ready to be highlighted.  ... View more

Hey Sabit, Udemy is working on fixing the certificates. Just to clarify how this works, Esri makes the content, but Udemy issues the certificates. They were very receptive to all of the emails that they received from the students in the MOOC and hopefully will be sending out certificates that reflect the work that you all have done. ... View more

Hey Tianjiao, Just to add on to Nick's response, I came in with a specific background kind of like you do. While Esri has a team that focuses on hydrology, we also have a lot of people that are hydrologists that don't work on that team. What I'm getting as is that you'll have a better shot if you can present yourself as someone who is comfortable working directly with hydro-related applications, or as someone who can take what they've learned from hydrology and apply it to other applications.  Also, if you have an aptitude for python, you should look into javascript too. It seems like that's where a lot of stuff is moving towards nowadays.  ... View more

Ugh... radar is tough. I'm taking a MOOC now on it to get a better understanding of it... Echoes in space | EO College  In general, radar is going to tell you the day when snow turns to water, so you can figure out the date when that happens. It struggles to tell you how much melt there is though.  ... View more

Yeah, you want to use something like Esri's elevation services. I'm not sure what google uses under the hood for their elevation data. I think if you have an organizational account with Esri, then you have access to the elevation services. We used them in the agriculture exercise to find slope and aspect. https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=58a541efc59545e6b7137f961d7de883  ... View more

Thanks Mark--anything you would liked to have seen that we can add for the future? ... View more

Hey Robert, congrats on the career transition. My advice is to think of GIS as a story telling tool. Look for resources that focus on data visualization as well as geospatial analysis. I would think that most publications are going to want to someone who can work with all kinds of data formats and GIS will be one part of that.  You can also keep an eye out for the Cartography. MOOC that's coming up next year. It's still in development, so I don't have a launch date for you, but I think it would be perfect for someone on your career path. Here's a link:  http://arcg.is/2teM7VN   As for working with drones, start with something you can afford to crash . Once you get the hang of it, then graduate to something more professional. Depending on where you live, there might be meetup groups where you can geek out with other enthusiasts. Also, be wary of buying drone packages. If you search online, you can find youtube videos of people who DIY a drone setup that can collect geospatially-enabled imagery. ... View more

That is so cool! How do you feel about the presentation? Need any technical questions answered? Now's a good time--there's a bunch of us here answering questions! ... View more

Hey Jesus, In terms of how you can take the exercise a step further, the first thing that comes to mind is to have a system that is fully automated. We've talked a lot about drones, aerial imagery and satellite imagery in this course, but one think we didn't touch on is wide angle motion imagey (WAMI). These are stationary cameras that are mounted on buildings usually. So, you can imagine installing them on top of utility poles and collect imagery that way. Then, you could use the unsupervised image classification (ISO Cluster) to idenfify vegetation. In theory, you could have a lidar sensor on each camera, although that could get expensive.  I'm not sure if I've answered your question, so please follow up if you need more of an answer. ... View more

Hi Sarah, I know that we're working on getting Sentinel-2 up as an image service in the Living Atlas. Not sure when the exact date is for launch, but it's coming soon. As for an app, I'm not sure if it would be Sentinel-2 specific or if it would be aggregated with the Landsat data. ... View more

Hi Francis, It doesn't look like the county has anything up yet... You can see historical aerial imagery from the past decade here: Search | Sonoma County Open Data  Esri has a good relationship with them, so when it does come out, that will be the place to look. They're pretty savvy about how they manage their data, imagery etc. Stay tuned. ... View more

Hey Unashish--great question. Glad you liked the course... There's been a shift in climate research over the past few years. It used to be that you could just publish on how the climate is changing, but as the impacts become more apparent, it's kind of imperative that you tie it into how it affects vulnerable populations. Here's a good article I was reading the other day: We Should Be Talking About the Effect of Climate Change on Cities  My advice is to focus on something specific that you are interested in and passionate about. Maybe it's cities, or marginalized groups in India. In the same way that we think about GIS as just a tool, you can also think about climate research as a tool. Which is to say that if you're not thinking about how this stuff fits into a broader context, then your research won't be as effective. ... View more

Hi Mark, Can you point me to the paper that you're referencing? ... View more