Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

One of my favorite sets of GIS videos has long been the Geospatial Revolution set from Penn State for clearly explaining what geotechnologies are and why they matter.  One of the forward looking segments in those videos was a demonstration of someone walking around their community, pointing their phone at cafes and other parts of the built environment, obtaining attributes in real time about those features.  I always looked forward to the day when I and other educators could actually do this in an instructional setting.  Now, 11 years after these first videos were produced, that day has arrived! One innovator in the augmented reality space is Argis Solutions.   Argis Solutions is a GIS consulting company, offering help to project managers from the medical, city, county and federal sectors, bringing  products and services to market by harnessing the power of cutting-edge technologies like computer vision, 3D rendering and image recognition, and applying it to geospatial data analysis.   Argis Solutions is a Esri partner network silver member.  One of the things that the Argis staff created that I am most excited about is their augmented reality solution, Argis Lens.   Similar to other partner solutions I have written about in the past, such as conducting fieldwork with Mapillary, I am excited about the education potential for Argis.  I believe that students and instructors at the secondary and university level could make meaningful and extensive use of the Argis Lens.  This essay and guidelines explains why I am excited about this and how you can use it in your own educational setting.   I also provide it in the following videos: 1.  How to set up Augmented Reality for Education in GIS and mapping. 2.  How to find Spatial Data to use with Augmented Reality with GIS and mapping. 3.  How to use Augmented Reality in mapping and GIS with Existing Features. 4.  How to use Augmented Reality in Mapping and GIS with Features Collected by You or Your Students. Since all of us in geospatial technology love visuals, the best way to help you understand what the Argis Lens does is to compare these two pictures that I captured below on a school campus.   What are the differences between the left and the right picture?   The picture at right gives me the attributes of the features that I see on the ground on the school campus!  How is this possible? Consider the following:  We are all familiar with examining data on maps using GIS tools, such as this accident data over a span of a few decades, shown below in ArcGIS Online: But what if you could be on the ground, inside your study area on the above map, and just with an ordinary smartphone, examine that same data, seeing exactly where that data or phenomenon occurred?   Below is a screen shot from the Argis Lens app on my phone, after I walked to the intersection that I was examining above.  Here I am examining the accident data, at the locations where the accidents occurred!  Each point shown in the image represents an accident, and inside the boxes at the bottom of the image are the attributes.  The uses of Argis in government, industry, academia, and nonprofits for Argis are many; one of the chief uses is for organizations to “see” what is underground in a specific area—water, electric, and gas lines; utility and fiber optic cables, and much more.  See this video from Argis Solutions for a demonstration.  The field app, the Argis Lens, overcomes the barriers of two-dimensional mapping technology, bringing GIS data into the three-dimensional world in which field crews work, giving them superior knowledge of what is underground before they dig.  Imagine the safety enhancements, plus savings in time, energy, and costs that could result by using this smart solution!  In fact, the CGA 2019 DIRT Report revealed that $30 billion in utility damages were incurred just in that single year, from people digging in the wrong area and not understanding what lies underground, with an estimated 532,000 damage-causing incidences occurring that year in the USA alone.  In an educational setting, examining the living and built environment in an augmented reality setting is a powerful way of understanding the way the world works, what is mapped, why and how it is mapped, and why it all matters.   How can you take advantage of these exciting capabilities? Setting It Up First, as explained in more detail on the Argis Solutions site, you need three things to activate the Argis Lens:  (1)   Access to an ArcGIS Online organizational subscription.  If you are at a university or a school, you should already have access to ArcGIS Online; if not, let my Esri education teammates or myself know.   (2)  An Argis Client login on the Argis administration Console.  (3) A subscription to ArGIS.   For (2) and (3), contact the good folks at Argis Solutions. Then, what you need to do is: (1) Choose a study area in which to work.  It could be your local wetland, an urban greenway or trail, a stretch of riverbank or shoreline, a historic district in your community, a public park, your own school or college campus, or somewhere else. (2) Find GIS data to be viewed with augmented reality (AR) as a feature service.   Since you will be in the field examining this data, you will need to go to your local city, county, or other organization who might be hosting data in the public domain that covers the area in which you will be working.   Since you will likely be accessing your study area on foot, choose layers that have a fairly high density of coverage in that study area.  Otherwise, you will be walking hundreds of meters or more between each feature, which will add to the time required to examine the data and to teach the concepts that you wish to teach.  How can you find these data layers?  Fortunately, we are firmly in the era of data-as-services, which are becoming more and more common as communities realize the value of open data that allow people to make wise decisions.  See my detailed guidance below these steps. Fun and important note:  You can also collect your own data and examine it as well!  More about that later in this essay. (3) Log in to the Argis Console to create a list of servers that are housing the data that you choose to examine.  Enter the REST Endpoint URL into the Argis Console to securely access this data.  My servers are mostly from my own city government and my county government’s open data portals.   Yours will cover different areas of interest but the idea is the same—find data providers that host data covering your study area.  I recommend focusing on point data, such as light poles and storm drains, but include at least one line layer (such as streets), and at least one polygon (such as ponds, or parcels). To find the REST endpoint requires a bit of digging:  You typically need to go beyond the data portal’s front page to the list of data layers.  For example, Jefferson County Colorado’s front GIS data pages look like this:   But if you dig deeper, you will find metadata pages like the ones shown below where you can obtain the REST endpoint address of the layers.  Your goal is here is that you don’t want PDFs, or online mapping applications, but rather, the feature service addresses themselves.  This is what can be mapped in ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, other GIS software, as well as the Argis Lens.  Shown below is just a fraction of the layers available from my own local city and county government agencies (thank you, folks!).  These include trails, parcels, fire districts, light poles, storm drains, traffic accidents, and much more.  Choose carefully, keeping in mind issues of bandwidth and pulling up these layers on a phone in the field.  More is not always better!  The URLs for the layers that you are seeking can be obtained from these pages.  For example, here is the layer for one of the layers I am interested in examining, the motor vehicle accidents layer (named, appropriately, “crash”).   The metadata for the layers will help you choose which layers that might meet your needs. The REST endpoint of my own data layers came from my own ArcGIS Online organization’s server.   I entered this REST endpoint in the Argis Console through the Add Server function as follows: When done, make sure you can view the list of your servers in the Argis Console, as I show below: (4) Once you have created a list of servers from which you will obtain data from, create and build at least one Argis data scene.  A data scene is what the Argis mobile app uses when you are in the field:  You will be viewing a data scene.  As you create data scenes, you will assign viewing privileges for your field users (students and other instructors). A view of one of my data scenes is shown below.  You know you are on the right track if you can zoom to your study area and see features there, such as my assortment of signs, traffic lights, and storm sewers. You can set up more than one data scene.  In my case, I created several data scenes, one for a few things in the built environment, such as light poles, signs, and storm drains, one for the accident data, and one combining my own data with data that local governments had created.  Some are shown below. (5) Before you go into the field, test to make sure your data layers will be visible once you are there.  To do so, adjust your “current” coordinates by clicking on the Location button on the app’s left side and entering the longitude/latitude of a point inside your study area.  One easy way to determine a suitable latitude-longitude point is to open up ArcGIS Online (www.arcgis.com), panning and zooming to your study area, and using the position location tool under the measurement functions and taking note of that latitude and longitude.  Enter these values as shown below.  (6) Now you are ready to go into the field!  Once there, you will pull up the Argis Lens app and view your desired data scenes.   More extensive help exists on the Argis website, but in brief:  On the Argis Lens app’s interface, you will see the layers that you have loaded in your scene at the right, with the layers currently visible with the “eye” symbol, as shown below.    As you walk the landscape, you will see the points, lines, and polygons appear as you approach them.  In the image below, you see one polygon and a set of points as red dots.   You can set the tolerance of when they appear, such as “show when I am closer than 75 meters from the object.”  While in the field, ask your students about the patterns that they notice about the features you are analyzing, why and how such features are maintained in the field, and by whom (say, the light poles vs the storm drains), and the advantage to your government agency or other data provider to map and maintain all of these features in the first place.  Include some of the teachable moments that I describe below, such as about spatial accuracy and attribute completeness. On the app, you can select by clicking on any of the features, and their attributes will appear.  Below, for example, I see point data for accidents (on left), and I can click on each of them to obtain their attributes (right).    I recommend that you examine some point, some line, and some polygon features to foster geospatial literacy and to keep things interesting!  In the scene below, the traffic signals are points, and the streets are the thick blue lines. Selecting the light pole reveals the attribute table, part of which is shown below, including the owner (Xcel Energy), watts, type of light fixture, and more. How can I find local data for my study area? Thanks to the open data movement and the advancement of data sharing formats and standards, a growing number of portals and servers exist containing spatial data.   These layers are often easily ingested into ArcGIS Online and hence, the Argis Lens.  Where can you find these data portals?  Start with my guidelines, Modern Strategies for Finding Geospatial Data.  In short, the Living Atlas of the World is an excellent starting point (https://livingatlas.arcgis.com),  Many of these portals use ArcGIS Hub technology, and searching these hubs is another fruitful method.  Another method is to search on <your city or county or your community or region’s name> plus the phrase “open GIS data” or “open data portal” or “GIS Department”.  Our Spatial Reserves data blog also provides essays that can be used for discussing related societal issues such as location privacy, spatial accuracy, and the pros and cons of charging a fee for data.  An increasing number of these data portals allow you to visually inspect the data on web maps to help you decide whether or not you want to use the map or map layer.  For example, while I liked the idea of using the floodplains layer in my own county (below), I could not use it in my study because it did not overlap with my study area.   But it would be useful for other areas in my region. My county has a ArcGIS Hub here and my city also hosts GIS REST services.   Did they have everything I wanted?  No; I wanted a tree layer, for example.  But there was enough data here for me to use.  One useful layer is the traffic signals, especially relevant to route and slow traffic around schools and university campuses: Students may not be initially excited about storm sewers, manholes, and drains, but choosing this type of layer may be fruitful because (1) they are relevant to mitigate floods, and therefore relevant to discuss, and (2) they are of sufficient density to be fairly numerous for wherever your study site happens to be (see below). Examining traffic accidents is not only interesting to students, but can connect well with drivers’ education programs in secondary schools along with alcohol awareness and prevention efforts, and at the university level, connects well with community safety and criminal justice programs.  I can ask students:  How many accidents are in the database?  Does this number surprise you?  My county alone had 55,839 in the database, spanning only a 5 year period; therefore, over 30 accidents occur on average, daily.  What is the pattern of these accidents over space, time of day, day of the week?  My study area contained several accidents near the school campus and especially down the street along the north-south state highway (below).  You can also, through many of these portals, see the attributes available for each layer.  In the case of the accidents data, plenty of attributes exist, including the weather at the time of the accident, time of day, day of the week, how many vehicles and injuries were involved, whether anyone was impaired, age and gender of those involved, and much more, as shown below.  Investigating and understanding these data layers is an important step in the decision-making process.    How can you tap into these tools? Argis Solutions offers an education bundle for colleges and universities that includes the Argis Lens for use within GIS departments and facility management, as well as admissions tours.   Contact a representative (scroll to the bottom of this page) to create a tailored-made solution to meet your campus needs.   I have gotten to know the Argis staff over this past year and they are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about education. Adding and Analyzing your Own Field Collected Data Let’s say you used the above workflow and viewed some data collected by local governments and other organizations in the field.  These organizations serve their data openly; therefore, you can view it in the field with the Argis Lens app.  But now let’s say you want to dig a little deeper by collecting and examining your own data.   Not only can this be done, but it can be done easily, thanks to the existence of data-as-services.  Data you collect with the ArcGIS platform is stored in the same type of format as that served by your local government or other agency.  In this way, GIS is becoming the “common language of the planet”.  Collecting and examining your own data adds additional skills, teachable moments, and another immersion into the world of geotechnologies.  You can also combine your own data with data from your local government and other organizations for the best of both worlds.  The easiest and most straightforward way to add your own data is with Survey123.   Survey123 is a field data collection tool from my organization (Esri) that allows you to quickly set up, gather data into, and map and analyze the results (hence the “123” part of the name).  In my example, I set up a Survey123 to collect point features on a campus, such as trees, recycling bins and trash cans, parking bumpers, fences, and other objects.   These are easily observed and collected on any campus.  Decide what attributes about your points you would like to collect.   In my surveys, I find it instructive to include one attribute that is a number (such as a height, a temperature, a circumference or something else), one attribute that can be ranked on a Likert scale (such as condition ranging from very poor to excellent), along with some nominal data such as type of feature.  My survey, located here (https://arcg.is/0eHOLe), contains 5 questions.  Once a person answers the “living/non-living” question, the survey expands to ask “what type of living” or “what type of nonliving” object is it?  … with a small list of choices to pick from (tree, shrub, flower, for living) (light pole, sign, fence, electrical box, parking object, for nonliving), with the last option under each, for “other”.  Once my survey was constructed, tested, and shared, I wrote down the URL for the survey.  I then went into the field with the Survey123 app on my phone and collected my desired features, answering the survey questions so that the attributes would be attached to each feature.  I took a photograph of each feature, and while I was filling out the survey, my ground position was being recorded and mapped. The resulting feature layer is named Campus Living and NonLiving Infrastructure.  Next, I set up a map in ArcGIS Online so I could see my point features.  The resulting layers, survey, and map in my ArcGIS Online organization are shown below.  Of course, a better workflow instead of you, the instructor, collecting data into the survey, would be to have your students do this!   Below is a map of my collected points on the campus.   I got a little excited and collected over 250 points, but you’ll be fine as long as you collect more than just a few points.  :- )  Each of my points contains 6 attributes:  Living or nonliving, type of object, condition (from very poor to excellent), the height (in meters) of the object, position (collected automatically), and photograph.  I recommend starting with points, and as you become more familiar with these tools, include lines (such as sidewalks, powerlines, and the running track at the fieldhouse or stadium), and polygons (such as buildings, parking lots, football field, and so on). If smartphones for students are not available or if there are challenges to getting into the field to collect your own data, another way to add data is to do it in ArcGIS Online in your own classroom or in virtual classrooms (i.e. the students can do this in their homes).  To do this:  Go to ArcGIS Online > Add Item > Add a feature service, say, a point layer of trees > Open that layer in ArcGIS Online Map Viewer > Zoom to your desired study area > using a satellite image base, add trees wherever you see one on the satellite image.  Be sure to save your map and layer when you are done adding features and share it. Alternatively or in addition, do the same thing for light poles, crosswalks, or anything else you want to collect.  Each feature can be in its own feature layer, or you can combine features into one layer.  In my case, to keep it simple, I created one layer called “campus living and nonliving infrastructure 2021”.  This layer contains, as the name implies, trees and shrubs, but also litter, fences, curbs, benches, objects on the football and baseball fields, bike racks, signs, drains, cable boxes, and much more.   Now, with my own data collected, I added it to the layers from the local government agencies, again, for the best of both worlds. Now in my Argis Lens app I can see my own points, and the points mapped by others.   It is extremely gratifying for students to see data that they actually collected themselves, as real scientists.  Why These Tools Are Useful in Education I believe these tools are incredibly useful in education from the middle school level, through high school, and on to higher education, in geography, environmental science, mathematics, engineering, and GIS courses.  The first reason why is that these tools connect well and seamlessly with the ArcGIS platform from Esri.   Using the tools helps solidify what I want students to know about in GIS data—servers, feature services, maps, layers, and their attributes, and in GIS access—sharing, groups, and so on.  More broadly, students learn about types of spatial data—point, line, and polygon—and how it is stored, symbolized, and represented.  The second  reason that I believe these tools are useful in education is that they allow students to “touch the future.”  Using these Argis tools touch on many of the key trends impacting geotechnologies, including data-as-services, IoT feeds with real-time data, artificial intelligence machine learning, 3D analytics, and augmented reality.   Students can do more than just read about these technologies, they can actually engage with these technologies as real scientists with the Argis tools.  The tools illustrate the value of 3D and an immersive experience, with data fed from a variety of organizations that are all kept up-to-date.  Perhaps most importantly, with Argis Solutions, students interact with augmented reality (AR).   AR will only grow in importance over the coming years:  Soon, seeing attributes with smartphone cameras will be commonplace, from ratings of and hours for stores and cafes, to weather happening right now or forecasted tomorrow, to the type of animal or plant species that one observes.  In fact, two years ago I began using the PictureThis AI app to identify plant species from my phone:  It is amazingly accurate and as its name implies, uses Artificial Intelligence as its engine and becomes more accurate over time as the community uses it.   Looking forward, we will move from obtaining attributes from a hand-held device to having this information on glasses that we can wear, and someday, perhaps as contact lenses or even corneal implants.  And the students can look back at what they do today with Argis and say “I was on the ground floor of all of this!” The third reason I love these tools is that they offer another opportunity to conduct field work.  As I have written about here on the Esri Community, in dozens of my own videos, and in other articles, field work offers a myriad of advantages in education:  It connects students to issues in their community, involves them as citizen scientists, uses their powers of observation and all five senses, combats “nature deficit disorder (per Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods), and is essential for fostering sense of place.  See the image below:  You might find interesting things in the field; some may only be temporary! The fourth reason I love these Argis tools and workflows is that they offer teachable moments (see below) including fostering discussions about spatial and attribute accuracy. Teachable Moments Teaching with GIS always involves higher goals.  It is never just about learning about tools and data.  Here are a few higher ‘teachable moments”; others exist as well. 1.  Spatial accuracy.  Notice above where I said you are “seeing exactly where that data or phenomenon occurred.”  Well, most likely, not exactly.  The spatial accuracy of the positions that I was examining, and that you will likely examine, depend on several factors.  First, the GPS accuracy of a smartphone is nowhere near as accurate as those collected with a high end GPS receiver.   I can sometimes get within 2 meters of what I consider to be my “true” latitude and longitude, as based on a satellite image (which themselves are only representations of reality and have their own tolerances), but with a Topcon, Trimble, Leica, or other survey-grade equipment, sub-centimeter accuracy is possible.  Second, the features that I was examining, and that you will likely examine, such as the light poles, accidents, and storm drains, were collected by different crews, in different conditions, and with different equipment.  The accident positions, for example, might be collected with an ordinary smartphone in the field by the police officers or sheriffs.  Some storm drains might have been collected by a field worker marking a paper map with a pen 25 years ago and then digitized, with a consumer-grade GPS 20 years ago, and with a survey-grade GPS in more recent years.  Even so, you may be surprised by the spatial accuracy of some features; see below.   The point feature representing the “Bump – 25 mph” sign is actually sitting right on the sign post! 2.  Attribute completeness and characteristics.  Another discussion should be about attributes:  How descriptive are they?  What units are the measurements in?  Being aware of the strengths—and limitations—of data, is a key part of building data literacy and fluency.  3.  Public information.  What information is public, and what is not?  In most communities, land ownership is public information.  I loaded my county’s parcel layer from the assessor’s office into an Argis scene, and lo and behold, as I walked the landscape, could view all sorts of information about who owned each parcel, when it was purchased, and other information about it.  I tested it with my very own residence (which is not shown below, but others are shown).  This is already available by visiting the GIS layers on city and county data servers, but seeing it in the field as you are walking by vacant lots, schools, businesses, and houses somehow makes these discussions all the more relevant and timely.  Who decides what information should be public?  How does this information improve decision making? How might some object to certain information being public?  How does information access vary among countries of the world, and why?  How does changing technology and societal needs influence information policies?    4.  Connection to existing programs.   As I touched upon above, certainly a higher goal is to raise awareness of driver safety and drug and alcohol awareness and prevention, and examining the accident data in web maps and in the field would truly help drive these points home.  In addition, it could save precious student lives.  I can't think of a more noble goal than that.  5.  Augmented reality and technology in society.  How do technologies such as augmented reality and GIS affect human behavior today (such as encouraging exercise via fitness apps, finding your way through a campus or through a city, and much more)?  How will they affect human behavior and society in the future?  I highly recommend that you use these tools and through their use and ensuing discussions, foster spatial thinking and critical thinking.  ● ... 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Join me for a Facebook Live event for Earth Day 2021!  https://fb.me/e/8GWk36B9D Thursday 22 April 2021 - 5pm Eastern / 2pm Pacific Time - Earth Day Digital Mapping and Analysis  UPDATE:  The event went well and I appreciated seeing all the attendees.  Did you miss it?  No worries - here is the story map I showed that contains all the content: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c1b5e0114052405c8748baf420e4406c Here is the video I captured of the entire event.   Why participate in this event?   Earth Day is the perfect opportunity to explore and better understand our home:  The Earth.   Who's it for?  Students of all ages, instructors in schools, tribal, technical, and community colleges, university instructors, youth leaders, and anyone interested in learning more about our world. Our blue-and-green oasis of life in the solar system has been the subject of poetry, music, novels, scientific investigation, and—maps.  For centuries, maps have stirred imaginations, inspired explorations of the unknown, and helped us understand our planet.  Far from the static documents of the past etched on clay tablets, wood, film, and paper, today’s maps are interactive and digital.  Today's maps can be combined with charts, satellite images, databases, photographs, videos, and other data to help us make sense of our world.  They help us navigate to the library or to grandma’s house on an everyday basis, help us understand our communities and our world, and how to build a more sustainable and resilient future.   These maps have become ubiquitous—on our smartphones, computers, in our vehicles, in trains and airplanes, and just about everywhere we turn, particularly upon the advent of the COVID pandemic.  These digital maps and the everyday activities that depend on them are possible because of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and other technologies:  Remote sensing, computer science, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS, or more broadly, Geographic Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)) to name a few.  However, people make these technologies effective, applying them to solve problems.  People using these maps and tools cultivate a spatial way of thinking, looking at the world from a geographic perspective, examining patterns, relationships, and trends, making wiser decisions about the future. These decisions include planning urban greenways, mitigating invasive weeds, locating the optimal site for wind energy, studying groundwater withdrawal impact on aquifers, and many more, from local to global scales. For 60 fast-paced minutes, we will: Explore fascinating maps and satellite imagery in 2D and 3D to learn about biomes, ecoregions, oceans, urban growth, energy, river systems and watersheds, weather and climate, landforms, and other fascinating aspects of our planet!  This 60 minute journey will include some fun geo-quizzes using ArcGIS Online and other GIS tools, plus a geo-crossword puzzle, and a few geo-songs as well! You will come away amazed at the power and ease-of-use of these tools, and be empowered to use them in your own teaching and learning! ... View more

With the attention on the 2021 landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars, and continued exploration, you and your students can explore the Red Planet with powerful yet easy to use 2D and 3D mapping tools powered by ArcGIS from Esri. Explore Mars is a 3D mapping and exploration tool where you can investigate landforms on Mars, including the landing sites of all previous and current rovers, craters, volcanoes, plains, the polar areas, and more.   The tool is based on the ArcGIS API from Esri and runs completely in a browser with nothing to install and nothing to log into.  This Mars 3D viewer can be used to teach topics such as scale, regions, and more, in geography, technology, mathematics, astronomy, and other classes, from primary to university level.  I can attest that I have used it across those educational levels throughout the past year with great engagement and success.  For more, read this essay from my Esri colleagues and see it in action via my video. Ideas, approaches, and questions to pose to students for hands-on work are given below. I welcome your comments and suggestions for how you use these tools in your own classrooms! 1.  Use the measure tools to measure the diameter of the entire planet.  How does Mars compare to the Earth's diameter?  Measure tools allow you to easily create 3D profiles and measure height, length, area, and depth (see image below, for example).  Next, use the tools to measure the size of the Jetzero Crater, where Perseverance landed, the cliff escarpment leading up to the shield of the Olympus Mons volcano, and other features.  How does the Olympus Mons escarpment compare to the escarpment at Niagara Falls, or the north face of K2 in the Himalayas?  2. Scale sometimes is a concept that is challenging to help students understand.  Mars may be smaller than Earth but does include some mighty big features, some of which are the largest in the solar system.  Compare the size of the country or USA state of your choice to by placing countries and states "on top of" Mars.  Try it with Olympus Mons--it is as big as New York State!  Place the Grand Canyon or Mt Everest on the amazingly deep and wide Valles Marineris.  If this doesn't make your students say "wow", I don't know what will!  Truly amazing tools.    3.  Explore the Mars North Pole area and the South Pole area.  What differences do you observe?  Do additional research and explain these differences.  What differences do you see in terms of physical features in the polar areas versus elsewhere on Mars? What are the differences between the poles on Mars and the poles on Earth? 4.  I am proud to have worked at the USGS for many years, and my colleagues there created the following geologic map of the Jezero Crater and the Nili Planum region on Mars, around which they have wrapped interactive mapping tools, so you can use it as well to teach with and learn from, here.   For more layers to examine, examine this article Explore Mars with GIS from my Esri colleague and this amazing story map.   5.  Note the latitude and longitude values in the 3D Mars mapping tool as you are exploring.  How are these values determined on the planet Mars?  How are these values determined on other planetary bodies?  That is one subject that the International Cartographic Association Commission on Planetary Cartography deals with, along with many others, here.  Ask your students:  Why is there no 'east and west' longitudes on Mars?  Unlike on Earth, the longitude values increase from 0 to 360 on Mars.  Where is the Prime Meridian on Mars and how was it determined?  Read this to find out.  Determine the latitude-longitude location of your school on the Earth.  Determine where this latitude-longitude location would be on Mars (accounting for the longitude differences as described above).  Refer to this USGS Mars map with the latitude-longitude lines on it.  If your school in Denver Colorado was at 39.7 North and 105 West, in what feature would your school in the equivalent Mars location be (at 39.7 North, 180+(180-105)=255 East)?  In the case of Denver, the "equivalent" location on Mars is on the Alba Patera plateau, which looks a bit like a kneecap (!), below (with a blue dot for 39.7 North 255 East). 6.  Examine other celestial objects via maps.  The USGS planetary mapping group out of Flagstaff Arizona have been mapping the Moon, Mars, Io, Ganymede, Mercury, the Sun, and other celestial objects for a long time, that you can examine via searching the USGS online store.  7.  Compare and examine the many craters on Mars.  One of my colleagues placed some tiles and maps in ArcGIS Online, here and shown below. Where are the largest 3 craters and the deepest 3 craters on Mars?  Sorting the table of data, zooming to each feature, and using the measure tools build students' GIS and investigative skills.  These are the same tools and skills that they use for Earth observations and thus are easily transferred to Mars investigations.  How do these craters compare to the shape and size of Meteor Crater Arizona, or other craters on Earth?  8.  Dig deeper!  Give the students a list of, say, 3 latitude-longitude coordinates.  Of these 3 locations, which would be the best location for a new Rover based on a small set of criteria, such as slope (flat), no ice, and no sand?   Then show them the landing site for the 2021 mission, the one eventually determined to be optimal:  https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/science/landing-site/.   Was the 2021 site flatter or more rough than previous landing sites?  Why wasn't an even flatter location chosen, such as the vast lava fields, the maria, or other sites?  Perhaps they were not deemed as interesting?  Could a future rover tackle the Valles Marineris or Olympus Mons? 9.  Investigate ancient oases on Mars by reading this article https://www.usgs.gov/news/new-usgs-maps-mars-reveal-ancient-oases - and then using this map:  https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sim3359 and the 2D and 3D mapping tools described above. 10.  An encouragement and a warning:  Enjoy teaching and learning with these amazing tools, but a friendly warning:   These tools are addictive and make wonderful tools for teaching and learning!  My favorite area on Mars?  Check out the convoluted set of canyons intersecting at right angles at the east end of the Valles Marineris.   Fascinating! ... 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Esri has been a supporter of the remote sensing community and of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) for many years.  Joseph Kerski of Esri will be presenting at the 2021 ASPRS conference with a focus on Challenges and advancement in Global GIS Education.  For more about this year's conference, see: http://conferences.asprs.org/asprs-2021/sessions/).   I can make this presentation available after the conference for anyone, upon request, who may find it useful--slides and the complete narrative.  I have placed a video of this presentation here.    My session will take place at the following time: 10:15am Pacific Time - Friday 2 April 2021 Challenges and Advancement in Global GIS Education Link:  https://conferences.asprs.org/class/1283/ Author Affiliation(s): Esri and University of Denver Session: RESILIENT GEOSPATIAL EDUCATION IN THE COVID19 ERA AND BEYOND Why and how is the university community of practice in GIS instruction adjusting and reinventing and redefining geospatial education in these disruptive COVID times? This adjustment includes considerations of data sources, instructional approaches, virtualization, portfolio and other assessment instruments, field work and development of web mapping applications, including including challenges and successes. This presentation will also discuss the expansion of geospatial technology to other disciplines and areas on campus, such as in campus facilities, and in data science, digital humanities, business, health sciences, planning, and civil engineering. This presentation will highlight the implications that these changes will have on student learning, instructor engagement, the health of programs in academia, and on society. Title slide of my 2021 ASPRS conference presentation.   ... View more

In this playlist of 10 videos, plus 1 "outtake" (see if you can find it!), I created and wear a Map Man costume to explain some reasons why maps are fun, relevant to the 21st Century, and encourage you to use the ArcGIS system to use, create, and share your own maps! The videos included in the playlist are: Maps Tell Stories Maps are Hi-Tech! Maps are key to 21st Century Decision Making Maps make you smarter! Maps are 2D, 3D, and 4D Maps are Fun Maps are Enterprise Assets Maps can be shared Maps can be crowdsourced Maps are for exploration. One of my aims in the videos is to help people realize that maps are not just reference documents telling us where things are, but they are analytical tools helping us understand the whys of where.  As an example, going beyond "where are the Rocky Mountains?" to "why does the conductivity and sulfates downstream from certain areas in the Rocky Mountains exhibit certain characteristic patterns?"  Another aim is to point out that all of our key 21st Century challenges, from agriculture to climate, from the economy to energy, from water to health, from transportation to habitat, are spatial in nature, and as such they can be understood and solved using these maps powered by GIS (Geographic Information Systems).  And in education, maps are fun to use and can even make you smarter! Why the costume?  Why not?  As a geographer, I thought on one Halloween that it would be fun to be inside of a set of maps.  And then I thought, "what better suit to don to make a set of videos than the map costume to get students' attention?"    Students, faculty, and others:  I encourage you to use this ArcGIS system, including www.arcgis.com, story maps, field tools such as Survey123, dashboards, infographics, and more, to explore your community, your region, your country, and your world--and all that is in it.  And then don't stop at exploration--use your newfound knowledge to take action and make the world a better place to be. One of the videos in the Map Man series.   Enjoy! ... View more

It is still one of the clearest memories I have of any of the hundreds of work trips I took over my career:  My colleagues and I, along with over 10,000 others, had just arrived in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association.   It was the evening of 11 March 2011.  As the night wore on and we were setting up our Esri space in the exhibit hall in a very large convention center, reports began flowing in about the terrible events that were currently unfolding in Japan:  The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.  It seemed almost too horrible to believe.  Even though all of us staffing the Esri exhibit had been studying and teaching natural hazards for years, the photos we saw of cities besieged by waves (this was before streaming video on phones was common) were heights and extents far larger than we had ever seen before.  Suddenly, all the challenges I was experiencing in life seemed to pale in comparison to what people were dealing with on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.  When all was said and done, Tōhoku was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the 4th most powerful in the world since modern record keeping began in 1900.  According to some estimates, 20,000 people were killed or were missing, and close to 500,000 people were forced to evacuate. In addition, a nuclear power plant meltdown triggered a nuclear emergency.  The economic loss from this event was estimated at $360 billion, easily making it the most costly natural hazard the world had ever experienced.  On that night, none of us knew these figures yet, but our hearts went out to the victims.  And, we immediately shifted the main focus of our Esri exhibit to show educators how they and their students could use GIS to examine this and other devastating natural hazards in science education.  We believed that spatial thinking and analysis through GIS was a method that could be used to study any aspect of our dynamic Earth, at any scale, and across any temporal span.  The same is true a decade later.  We used what we had available to us in 2011--real-time feeds through the QuakeFeed app on the phone (which still exists and is still excellent) and mapping the USGS real-time spreadsheets of earthquake epicenters, magnitudes, and depths.  And in terms of software, since ArcGIS Online was just coming into existence, we were able to show a few of these layers using this new tool, and also in ArcGIS Desktop version 9.  Even then, educators were amazed at the capabilities at their fingertips.   I wrote about these tools upon my return to the office, in this article in ArcWatch.  Fast forward 10 years:  Educators and students now have an even more amazing variety of 2D and 3D mapping tools, such as ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Earth, ArcGIS Pro, and the 3D scene viewer, data sets (such as the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World), tutorials, and lessons online.  They can use these tools and data sets to examine what has transpired over the past decade in the affected areas, and in areas impacted by other natural hazards around the world.   In this video, I describe some of these ways focused on Japan.   These include the use of  wide variety of base maps in ArcGIS Online, including oceans, satellite imagery, street maps, shaded relief, and others, to examine changes at a scale from northeast Japan to local neighborhoods.  The measure tools in ArcGIS Online can be effectively used to teach about scale and distances, for example between the plate boundary and the coast and the area of the city of Rikuzentakata that was one of the most devastated communities. The Wayback imagery app focused on the latitude and longitude of the bay in which this community exists can be used to assess the reconstruction in coastal villages from 2014 to the present, as I share here, clearly showing massive amounts of earth moved in to raise the coastal area of the city before reconstruction even began.  The ArcGIS 3D scene viewer can be used to assess the precarious position that the city occupied at the end of the narrow bay.  The same tools can be used to measure the distance from Rikuzentakata to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma where the tsunami caused the nuclear disaster, the total area occupied by this massive power plant, the changes on the plant grounds and surrounding community between the time of the earthquake and today.  You can add layers to these maps and scenes, such as ecoregions, land use, earthquake epicenters before and after 2011, nearby volcanoes, and human-built infrastructure such as buildings, roads, and dams.  Why?  To detect patterns, relationships, and trends.  The above studies can be done without signing in to ArcGIS Online, but if you do sign in, you can do even more:  You and your students can save the maps that you create, and share them with each other, with your entire school or university campus, or with the wider community.  See the map I have shared here and shown below with selected layers indicating population density, purchasing power, average age, and historical and current satellite imagery.  You can use the over 40 spatial analysis tools in ArcGIS Online to determine, for example, all the land in Japan within 100 km of the plate boundary, the population living within 5 km of the coastline, the land use change in communities over the past decades, pre- and post-earthquake, and much more.  You could create a mean center and standard deviational ellipse of recent earthquakes there.  You can also create multimedia story maps from those maps that show the results of your analyses and that tell a more complete story of the human suffering and resilience of the people in the area.  You can bring the layers you create into ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Insights for further analysis.  The Living Atlas of the World, other layers in ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Hubs and open data portals can be queried to bring in other hazards data.    But using GIS in education has always been about far more than the tools and data layers alone.   First, GIS is used far beyond education:  GIS is being used in everyday life by a wide variety of organizations, helping with warnings, evacuation, rebuilding, and resilience efforts in all forms of natural hazards, but may be especially pertinent in something as devastating as an earthquake and tsunami.  Second, the GIS tools and data in the above examples can be effectively used to teach the higher and greater educational objectives:  These include fundamental concepts about the patterns of natural hazards.   And, discussions about:  Why do people live in hazardous zones?  How can communities be made to be more resilient?  Ask students to research the earthworks and other efforts in Rikuzentakata and elsewhere in Japan--are these efforts bearing fruit?  The 2011 earthquake shaking occurred over a few minutes, but its effects will last for many generations.  What are the short term and long term impacts on people's lives, on communities, on the country?   What are the efforts that other communities have made to be more hazard-resilient?  What hazards are most common to your own community and to your own region?  What efforts has your own community made in response to these hazards?  Resources such as the Esri Disaster Response zone can be used to teach about the dynamic planet that we call our home, and the variety of hazards in terms of temporal and areal scale, timing, and relationship to other hazards.  You could start with this dashboard updated in real-time, shown below.  For further investigation, you could use lessons such as this one on plate tectonics or others in the GeoInquiries collection or these hazards lessons in the Learn ArcGIS Gallery.  These resources and others can be used to investigate the impact that hazards have on human lives, property, wildlife, ecoregions, and, in the case of the Tōhoku earthquake,  even the shape and size of the Earth, due to movements that occurred on that fateful day in March 2011.    Analyzing affected communities in Japan over space and time using the swipe tool in the Wayback imagery app.   Studying coastal communities in Japan using the ArcGIS Online 3D scene viewer, here, the community of Rikuzentakata.  Population and demographic data, historical imagery, and current satellite imagery saved in an ArcGIS Online map, here. You can do the same thing with these tools, or start with the map that I created and customize it for your own use. Real-time earthquake dashboard made with ArcGIS tools.  You can start with this dashboard and revisit it each day or each week in class, and you and your students can make your own dashboards, too (lesson here). ... View more

Are maps "old school"?  Were they only relevant in the age of traversing the ocean on exploratory ships, and outdated in our digital age?  Are they only important when you were memorizing place names when you were a primary or secondary school student?  As a passionate geographer, educator, and GIS professional, one of my aims is to help people in all walks of life to see that yes, maps are still relevant.  I would contend that maps are more relevant now than ever.  I also want people to see the value of the spatial thinking and the smart decisions that maps enabled by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can help foster.   Each year I therefore write articles, give presentations, and teach courses for the general public and others about these topics in the hope that maps and geotechnologies will be understood and supported by a broader spectrum of society.  In keeping with this theme, I have recorded a series of videos from a short course entitled Why Maps Matter, which I am sharing here.  A total of 8 videos exist in this playlist, covering a total of two hours of content.  The course and videos show that maps are more than reference documents (what's where?).  They are analytical tools critical for understanding our world (why is it there?).  They are tools for taking action (why should we care?).  In so doing, maps and GIS enable us to build a more sustainable and resilient future. This set of videos will help you understand why maps matter--yes, even in our digital age, now more than ever.  The videos will also empower you to use these modern interactive maps, powered by web based Geographic Information Systems.    Tools used in these videos include ArcGIS Online, web mapping applications such as dashboards and story maps, field tools such as Survey123, data libraries such as the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, and other mapping and visualization tools such as GapMinder and WorldMapper's cartograms.  Scales covered range from local (urban greenways) to global (Human Development Index, population change, plate tectonics, and more).  Topics covered range from land use, human health, energy, water, soils, natural hazards, population change and demographics, ecoregions, transportation, and many more. Themes covered include the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and crowdsourcing, but again, from a non-technical standpoint aimed at the general public.  Therefore, these are quite suitable to share with your friends who wonder why you get so excited about maps and GIS.  These videos will also enable you to create your own maps on topics that you care about, even in your own community! Why Maps Matter--series of videos and course.  ... View more

We have frequent discussions with the worldwide education community about the modern approach to teaching GIS.  By “modern”, I refer to GIS as a system which provides a foundation to build upon and a variety of points at which to access.  Items that you can build include technical components (such as web mapping applications, models, field surveys, dashboards, and more), and scaffolded instructional approaches (such as problem solving, critical thinking, and spatial thinking).  The "modern GIS" paradigm includes creating and using crowdsource-able field apps, rigorous consumption and creation of web maps and mapping applications such as story maps, coding and building expressions, performing spatial analysis, and other components of the web infrastructure as enabled by SaaS (Software as a Service) tools and data as services.  As part of this ongoing discussion, I would like to share a course that I created in geovisualization and cartography that serves as an introductory GIS course that embraces these elements.  The entire contents of the course are available here.  The course could serve as one model for a first course in modern GIS in higher education and to foster conversation about approaches, tools, data, and hands-on problem-solving activities.   The course contents could also be considered an e-book, as over 350 pages of readings and hands-on activities are included, as described in this video.   A key advantage of serving this entire course is that the readings, activities, videos, and quizzes are all scaffolded; each builds on other components in a sequenced way designed in tandem with vetted learning theory. My goals in creating and providing this course are so that (1) anyone can take it without the need to access a Learning Management System (LMS) or any other system; (2) instructors can use components of this course for their own instruction (or the entirety of the course) at their own college or university.  Feel free to use this course however you see fit under a Creative Commons CC by 4.0 license. This course is aimed at university students who have not had prior experience using GIS.  This course is 7 weeks long, but enough content is included so that it could easily be taught during an entire 16-week semester.  Each week, students work through the following components:  Readings, videos, and hands-on activities using interactive GIS tools (ArcGIS Online, web mapping applications, field surveys, and selected other tools such as WorldMapper cartograms and ColorBrewer).  They take a short quiz, reflect upon their learning in discussions, and share the results of their investigations.  I also provide the quiz answers, although when I teach the course, the answers are not provided.   This course has been successfully reviewed by Quality Matters, and I have successfully taught it with real students for 3 years; updating it each term. I migrated the course from a Learning Management System (LMS—in this case, Canvas) to the resources you see here so that everyone can view and access.  I created a story map for each of the four modules that comprise each week of the course:  (1) Readings and discussion, (2) hands-on activities, (3) quizzes, (4) the quiz answers, and (5) the final week contains one additional assignment where students are asked to outline an implementation plan.  This plan includes a description of how they will use data and GIS tools to address a problem, issue, or topic of concern to them.  The plan thus both personalizes the learning and is action-oriented.  I then linked and organized all 32 story maps using the ArcGIS Experience Builder.    ArcGIS Story Maps and the Experience Builder are two ways to present web content and course materials.    Consider using Story Maps and Experience Builder for content that you would like to build in the future! Front matter for first course in Modern Web-based GIS. Weekly content in first course in Modern Web-based GIS. I look forward to your comments about the effectiveness of Story Maps and the Experience Builder to present the content, and even more so, about the content itself:  What do you include in your introductory courses?  How have your courses changed recently with the emphasis on teaching online?  How do your courses change with the rapid evolution of modern GIS tools, data services, and workflows?   ... View more