What's new in ArcGIS tutorials March 2025
Extract informal settlements with SAMLoRA
The Township of Alexandra, South Africa, contains many informal settlements. A local nonprofit needs to map the area to provide better services to the community. They plan on applying GeoAI techniques to drone imagery to extract informal settlement building footprints. However, out-of-the-box pretrained deep learning models may not be fully effective on these intricate informal neighborhoods. Another option is the SAMLoRA (Segment Anything Model with Low-Rank Adaptation) model. It is based on SAM, a multipurpose foundational model that was trained on massive datasets. It uses the LoRA approach to quickly teach the model how to identify specific features (buildings, roads, solar panels, trees, and so on) after being exposed to only a small number of examples.
In this tutorial, you'll train the SAMLoRA model in ArcGIS Pro to identify informal settlements in your imagery. You'll then apply the trained model to extract informal settlement building footprints. You'll also learn how you can use the same method to extract other features, including a wide range of building types and roads.
Create watersheds to calculate upstream area
Atlantic salmon are an important aquaculture export for Canada. In the coastal province of Nova Scotia, many dams have been retrofitted with artificial waterways so Atlantic salmon can swim upstream and access fresh water, ensuring that the salmon can reproduce. One of the dams in the Mersey River Hydro system needs maintenance work, which will cause the dam's fishway to temporarily be inaccessible. You need to calculate the area of the watershed that will be temporarily interrupted to assess the financial impact on the Atlantic salmon population.
Download census data
The United States Census Bureau collects and shares a massive amount of accurate, high-quality data about the population of the United States. This data can be combined with spatial data, such as geographic boundaries, and mapped using GIS.
In this tutorial, a health network in Mesa County, Colorado, wants to offer mobile primary care centers that bring services to residents who may be underserved. To determine the best areas to target, the network plans to map census data about age and poverty.
To help them, you'll go to the Census Bureau website, find relevant data, and download it. Then, you'll upload the data to ArcGIS Online and add it to a web map as a table. Lastly, you'll join the table to geographic boundary data and display it on the map. The final result will show areas of Mesa County with a large number of older adults who may require financial assistance.
Plan routes to optimize deliveries
Farm Collective in Canterbury, New Zealand, offers a community supported agriculture (CSA) program to deliver fresh produce directly to customers. Farm Collective's CSA program is rapidly growing and the business requires help in planning its produce deliveries. The routing functionality in Map Viewer uses the ArcGIS Routing service to find the most efficient routes for multiple vehicles based on constraints like travel capacity and stop duration. In this tutorial, you'll use the Plan Routes tool to optimize the CSA deliveries for a fleet of drivers.