Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

I think many of you in education (and beyond) can relate to this: When you embed a video in a story map or in a map note, when it is done playing, by default it shows you the “related” videos – and “related” is definitely in quotes!  Sometimes these are really embarrassing and sit there in your story map as a set of “tiled” choices, OR worse yet, are on the “big screen” when you are presenting to a group.  Here is a little tip to avoid that: So, for example, compare this embed video of mine (you can skip to just a few seconds to the end to test it): https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IoImv0SyLM?rel=0 versus this one:  https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IoImv0SyLM The one with the rel=0 does not show the “related” ones at the end!  It only shows other videos in my own channel. If you forget the ?rel=0 code, then in YouTube just go to Share, Embed, and Show More, and you’ll see the choice there that you can Uncheck to avoid the related video display. Now, keep in mind that videos, like GIS, rapidly evolves, so when you read this, the procedures might be somewhat different--but do some research and it will surely be something along the lines of adding a tag such as that above.  Thanks to Owen Evans for the information! ... View more

A theme running throughout the book I co-authored, The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data is to be critical of the data that you are using–even data that you are creating.  Thanks to mobile technologies and the evolution of GIS to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, anyone can create spatial data, even from a smartphone, and upload it into the GIS cloud for anyone to use.  This has led to incredibly useful collaborations such as Open Street Map, but this ease of data creation means that caution must be employed more than ever before, as I explain in this video. See more on: https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/be-critical-of-the-data-especially-when-it-is-your-own/ --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Dr Damian Gessler of Semantic Options recently gave a keynote address in which he stated, “transformational change is enabled as past technologies simplify.”  Immediately, I thought of the many presentations and papers where several of my colleagues and I have applied Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory to GIS in education. Rogers theory focuses on how innovations are adopted, at first by innovators and then by early adopters.  Rogers says that for real change to occur with any technology, the early majority of users, representing one standard deviation below the mean, will need to adopt the technology.  Some of us, such as in this book, are arguing that with the advent of web based GIS and the resulting lowering of technological and learning barriers, we are beginning to see an “early majority” of educators using GIS in their instruction. Gessler’s point perfectly applies to the use of GIS in education:  First, GIS has 50-year roots, so while one can argue that it is changing more rapidly now than ever before, it qualifies as a “past technology” as identified by Gessler.  Its methods and models have been tested, vetted, and refined.  Second, it has simplified in many ways–through the advent of the graphical user interface around 2000, web based services through the Geography Network of the early 2000s and on through the modern Software-as-a-Service architecture, and its ability to incorporate real-time data feeds, multimedia (via story maps and other mapping applications), and field data through crowdsourcing and other methods.  As it has become easier to use, it has simultaneously become more powerful. These two simultaneous trends are attracting people in a widening diversity of disciplines to the use of GIS.  As people are attracted to it, decisions are increasingly made using the geographic perspective, and transformational change is enabled, to put it in Dr Gessler’s words.  Nowhere was that more evident than during the COVID crisis, where thousands of Hub sites, dashboards, web maps, and infographics appeared within weeks.  In the classroom at the primary, secondary, and university levels in formal and in informal settings, the use of the technologies and methods are beginning to cause transformational change in how skills, content knowledge, and perspectives are taught and learned. Do you agree that we are seeing a transformational change with regard to the use of GIS in education?  What do you recommend that we as the community need to do in order to further encourage and hasten these developments? ... View more

Exciting news from the Arctic! Version 2 of the Arctic DEM has been released. Topographic elevation of the Arctic can now be viewed and analyzed like never before. This release extends the detailed 2 meter Alaska elevation data with additional 2m data for Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land, as well as preliminary 8 meter data for the entire Arctic.  Additional detailed 2 meter elevation data will be released in quarterly installments over 2017 until the arctic data is complete.  This is the result of a partnership between Esri, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota.   In September 2016, the US at the White House hosted an Arctic Ministerial meeting, with over 20 countries represented, where this data was showcased and new commitments on data provisions were sought.  The goal of the meeting and the new data is to help people better understand, adapt to, and address the changing conditions in the Arctic. The four key themes include: Understanding Arctic-Science Challenges and their Regional and Global Implications. Strengthening and Integrating Arctic Observations and Data Sharing. Applying Expanded Scientific Understanding of the Arctic to Build Regional Resilience and Shape Global Responses. Using Arctic Science as a Vehicle for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education and Citizen Empowerment. To access the data, start  with the NGA Arctic Support story map here and spend time on the ‘Arctic Digital Elevation Model (ArcticDEM) ’ tab.  The embedded apps provide interactive access to the elevation. The data is described in an article here from Medium.com and an article from National Geographic here.  This story map illustrates the visualizations that can be generated with the click of the mouse for any user selected area, and a swipe story map explains the background on Digital Elevation Models and compares the new elevation data to the older elevation data by providing the ability to swipe between the maps. The DEMs have been computed from high resolution stereo Digital Globe satellite imagery.   The DEM Explorer is a web app that allows the data user to zoom to any area and review different visualizations such as hillshade, slope, aspect, contours. As the data is temporal in many areas, users can see how the data is changing over time and summarize elevation change for a selected areas.  The Change Viewer is a simpler app that allows a user to click a point and graphically view the historical elevation of that location. Access to these services is also available in a wide range of applications through the Arctic DEM Group in ArcGIS Online.   Most of the apps use the polar projections to reduce distortions which would become severe in generic mapping applications.  Finally, a video tour of the story map highlights many of the above products and services.   Quite a bit of publicity and press surrounds these data sets, but all of it is good news.  Don’t let the flood of information prevent you from taking the time to investigate these resources and spend some time exploring the Arctic.  The actual data is accessible through the web services, and will be of great benefit for anyone doing research in the Arctic, as the map below should make very clear. Alaska DEMs showing the heretofore available data (left) and the new data (right). ... View more

I have written a new book about geography and geographic technologies, its foundations, and its implications, entitled:   Interpreting Our World – 100 Discoveries that Have Revolutionized Geography: https://blogs.esri.com/esri/gisedcom/2016/10/28/interpreting-our-world-new-book-on-100-revolutions-in-geography/ https://www.amazon.com/Interpreting-Our-World-Discoveries-Revolutionized/dp/161069919X  For more information, see the above and the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S_Acc0yLB0&list=UUdShBEYmIgoDn34bi1vVA9w   --Joseph Kerski ... View more

GIS GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out): 30 checks for data errors Nathan Heazlewood of Eagle Technologies wrote a very useful essay about “garbage in, garbage out” in relation to geospatial data.  In it, he not only ties this oft-heard phrase to the importance of GIS data quality, but he also details the checks that GIS analysts should go through when they are assessing a data set.  I would argue that this checklist is also useful for educators and for students as they document their own work for two reasons:  (1)  Paying attention to data quality is even more important now than ever (as I described recently in this blog), and (2) nowadays, with the advent of Web GIS, everyone working in GIS is a potential data producer. The list of 30 items is grouped under checks for positional accuracy, topological logic, geometric considerations, projections and coordinate systems, attribute and data structure checks, and attribute and data structure checks.  Extremely helpful are Nathan’s diagrams showing tables lacking null values for non-null attribute data, values outside permitted ranges, and orphan records in related tables. Nathan includes many considerations that are not often discussed but can lead to enormous problems, such as the different standards and formats of dates being used around the world, from year-month-day to day-month-year to month-day-year (which Nathan dubs the “super dumb American date format”).  Another consideration is one I can identify with that was a significant challenge for me during a GIS workshop I taught in Turkey–the numbers in my data set were formatted such as 100,000 for one hundred thousand, but the software in the university lab, given its location, was naturally configured for one hundred thousand to be coded as 100.000. How might you be able to use this data error checklist in your own instruction?  What checks would you consider adding to this list when you are teaching GIS? ... View more

There are many ways to store photographs so that you can link to them and use them in ArcGIS Online.  The most popular method is probably using Flickr, Google Plus, and other photo sharing services, as I document in the attached set of guidelines. However, either because their institution prohibits the use of photo sharing sites or for technical reasons, some educators prefer to store their photographs in ArcGIS Online.  Let's say you have uploaded some photographs to ArcGIS Online by navigating to "My Content" and then using the "Add Item" function.  How, then, do you link to the photograph once it is there in ArcGIS Online?  You cannot link to the URL that is at the top of the metadata page for that photograph.  Rather, you need to navigate to the bottom of this page to get to the actual URL where the photograph is located, as shown for a photograph I uploaded from a field trip I was on with educators in New Zealand, highlighted in yellow, below: Once you have the URL, you can create a Map Note that links to that photo (shown below and in the map linked here), you can use the photo and other similarly-linked photos in a story map or other web mapping applications, and you can use them in other ways. Hmm.. working with these images and map makes me want to take another field trip back to this spectacular landscape!  Give this photo technique a try!  ... View more

We live in a 3D world, and it only makes sense that we want to teach with and learn about the world with 3D tools.  With ArcGIS Online, 3D scenes can be easily created and used effectively to teach content.  I created a 3D scene with the last 30 days of earthquakes in ArcGIS Online, and documented my procedures with this video.  The video also demonstrates how I have taught with the results.  Many more themes and phenomena of our world can be examined in 3D using these same tools.  I look forward to your feedback! Teaching and learning with 3D scenes in ArcGIS Online can help students grasp key content, encourage spatial thinking, and obtain core GIS skills.  This video uses recent earthquakes as an example.  ... View more

Examining the locations of businesses can also foster spatial thinking and enhance skills in Spatial Technology. In the business world, location is usually the factor in determining whether it will thrive or fail.  Let’s have a coffee break.   Examine this interactive web map of Starbucks coffee establishments around the world. The map is based on ArcGIS from Esri: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=ec6fe7b6dacc4c91ba89f1eb7a9df217 Manhattan and Beyond.  The map opens with a view centered on Manhattan, one of the boroughs of New York City.  The data are displayed as points and also as a heat map.  A heat map shows the relative clustering of data, with “hot” or “bright” colours indicating clustering of a certain variable or feature, and “cool” or “green-blue” colours indicating areas containing fewer of a specific variable or feature.  Clustering.  Why are Starbucks clustered in this part of the New York City and not in other parts?  To assist your answer, use Basemap > change the basemap to Imagery with Labels.  Zoom in to Manhattan.  You can use the Show Contents of Map button to display the map layers, and then toggle them on and off as shown below (or make them semi-transparent from a menu from the (…) choice when you click on and expand the individual layers).  Starbucks in Australia.  Enter Sydney in the search box to the upper right of the map and select Sydney, NSW, Australia.  The map should look similar to that below.  Why are Starbucks clustered in this part of the city? In the search box, enter Jilliby and zoom to Jilliby in New South Wales Australia.   Would you say that Jilliby is larger or smaller than Sydney?  Do some research to back up your observation.  Why, according to this data set, are there no Starbucks in this town?  Think about specific types of business—a petrol station, convenience store, concert hall, home improvement store, airport—they all have different population thresholds that they must meet.  Some are viable in a small town or even in no town at all, while others, such as IKEA or other chains with a large footprint, need a large nearby population base to stay in business. Extend this activity.  How are Starbucks distributed in other major cities around the world?  Shanghai?  Chicago?  London?  How does the type of product influence where it expands globally?  The headquarters of Starbucks is in Seattle Washington in the northwest corner of the continental USA.  How does the location of the headquarters of a chain influence where, how, and the rate at which it expands?   Name 2 other factors that influences if and when a business could expand.  What 2 factors influence Starbucks expansion?  Name 2 other chain businesses that have spread regionally, 2 that have spread nationally, and 2 that have spread globally.  Which of these chains have you visited? By examining these other questions, you can begin to see that Spatial Technology can serve as a springboard for inquiry, for critical thinking, and for thinking across disciplinary boundaries. The activity above, for example, touched on geography, but also sociology (consumer preferences), and economics (prices, personal income, global trade).  Think outside the box!  You can map the location of any business as point data in ArcGIS .  Think about mapping two types of businesses in your community, for example, car washes versus antique stores.  Why do the exhibit different spatial patterns?   Be critical of data—including maps.  In this and other GIS-based investigations, always investigate the source of the data.  Where did it come from, who created it, at what scale was it created, is it curated, is it trustworthy?  These are elements of what we call metadata, which is especially important in mapping.  In this case, the Starbucks metadata does not contain much information, but there is some information here:  http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=33f0d1a9b4d6453e8f6110c9eb2c36d5   What is the date of the Starbucks data?    Think about which data you might want to map where having data 10 years out of date is OK (such as geologic strata of Turkmenistan) and when even 1 day out of date is not OK (such as mapping current wildfires in Australia). Thus, be critical of the data.  Make sure students question all data on the web, including maps!  Maps have an aura of authenticity and are often taken as “the truth.”  Nowadays, anyone can make a map and post it to the web.  That is wonderful, and empowering, but also requires you to be a critical consumer of data.  All maps are inaccurate, because they are representing the oblate spheroid that is the Earth on a 2D or even projected 3D image on your computer screen.  Furthermore, maps, including satellite imagery, are only representations of reality—and hence, are symbolized and generalized and processed in various ways.  There are many maps that show false information, and also, many maps that may be useful but contain no metadata.  Despite their limitations, maps are incredibly useful.  But to make effective use of maps, make sure you understand their limitations and encourage students, coworkers, and others to be critical of them.  ... View more

Examining Ocean Currents:   Limitations of Static Maps.  One of the advantages to using Spatial Technology in education is that you and your students have the capabilities of interacting with mapped data.   Let’s say you are teaching about ocean currents at some point.  Examine this ocean currents map from Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current#/media/File:Corrientes-oceanicas.png.  It is fairly clear, not overly detailed; unfortunately Australia is off on the side, as often happens on world maps.  Examine this ocean currents map from NOAA:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current#/media/File:Ocean_surface_currents.jpg  Again, it is OK, Australia is now nearer the center but the arrows are shorter and a bit more difficult to interpret.  Neither of these maps is a vast improvement over the one created by the US Army in 1943, here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current#/media/File:Ocean_currents_1943_(borderless)3.png; in fact, the US Army’s choice of symbology actually make it more useful in some ways than the more current maps.  You also may use maps on the wall of your classroom or in a textbook.  These maps may be wonderful as well and be useful to you. But all these maps have limitations:  You as the educator are “stuck” with the projection chosen, the symbology used, and the scale.  They are all snapshots in time and cannot be updated.  You cannot add additional information to it and you cannot interact with it.  Printed maps can tear or be spilled on.  Wall maps or printed maps might require a lot of space.   By contrast, you will examine a 3D scene of ocean currents. Enter the world of maps from Spatial Technology.  The advent of web based Spatial Technology has enabled a variety of different map and imagery layers to be combined in what are called web mapping applications, including this one on ocean currents.  Elsewhere on www.arcgis.com, you can explore and build some web mapping applications, including story maps (http://storymaps.arcgis.com).   A 3-D map of ocean currents.  Right now, let’s start with this 3D Globe of world ocean currents: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webscene/viewer.html?webscene=e4dd788f56f5487eb671a58c9b9d2ed9 Pan the map to Australia.  Note the navigation tools to the left of the map and experiment with them.  On the right side, make all of the layers visible.  Your map should look similar to that below. Make the legend visible.  Based on this map, one question you could post to the students is:  Say you want to find a swim beach.  On which coast(s) of Australia are being fed by a warm current and therefore, on which coasts would you find warmer water (north, east, south, or west)?  What is another question you could pose to the students based on this map? Changing the map.  You can see that not only is the map rendered as a 3D globe, you can examine the topography (called bathymetry) of the ocean floor, turn layers on and off, change the basemap, change the sun position to today’s date and time, examine the difference in the Coriolis effect in the northern versus the southern hemispheres, and more.  You can measure distances and areas on land and in the water, and since you are working with a 3D globe, your measurements will be more accurate than measuring off of a 2D map.  (Not perfect, but more accurate.  See documentation on the Esri site about map projections, accuracy, and scale).  You can even share the map as a URL.  When you do, the person you send the link to will be able to open the map in the exact spot you desire and with the layers, basemap, and sun angle all set to the way you set it.  Floating on the High Seas.  In addition, since Spatial Technology is now a platform, you and others can build on top of it.  Let’s use one educational and fun example.   Looking at the ocean currents, you may have been thinking, if I dropped a bottle, or set off on a raft, off of Australia, where would the bottle or my raft float to?   Go to the Message in a Bottle web mapping application, below.  This is based on the same data you have been observing with one additional wonderful capability: https://maps.esri.com/jg/MessageInABottle/index.html Again, pan and zoom to Australia or another area of interest to you.  Set the number of days to 250 and the buffer distance to 25 km.  Take the default of today’s date.  Hypothesize about the direction and distance a bottle or raft would float in 250 days off the north coast and off the east coast of Australia.  Then, click on the map to drop 1 point off the north coast of Australia, let the tool run, and observe the result.  Drop 1 additional point off the east coast of Australia, again letting the tool run and observing the result.  The results will look similar to that below: Are the results (direction and distance) consistent with your hypothesis?  Why or why not?  Extend this activity.  This web mapping application could therefore serve as a useful tool that can teach that the ocean currents move in different directions, but they also move at different rates of speed.  And they also move differently depending on the time of year.  Change the time of year from today’s date to six months ago and observe any differences.  Why do the differences exist? ... 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Examining neighborhood change with historical high-resolution imagery. The Wayback Image Service.  Over 80 different dates of historical imagery for the past 5 years now reside in ArcGIS  via the World Imagery Wayback service, as described here: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/imagery/wayback-81-flavors-of-world-imagery/ .  The best place to start for educators is the World Imagery Wayback app.  In the app, https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wayback/, an incredible resource for examining land use and land cover change, changes in water levels of reservoirs, coastal erosion, deforestation, regrowth, urbanization, and much more, covering the entire globe, is at your fingertips within a simple web browser.  The app begins with Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.  You are welcome to stay here awhile and examine the massive amount of urban sprawl occurring here.  Zoom out and take note of the region in which Las Vegas is situated.  What’s wrong with this picture?   Do you think a city in the desert is sustainable over the long term?  Examine the water level of Lake Mead, a reservoir to the east of the city, over time.  What is happening to the water level?  In part to divert water to Las Vegas, but in part due to long term drought, the water levels in the reservoir are clearly dropping. In the upper right of the map, in the search box, enter Casey Hospital, Kangan Dr, Berwick, Victoria, 3806, AUS.  Then to the left of the map, click “only updates with local changes” to just display imagery where changes have been noted, as follows: Select different images to the left of the map to display them at right.  Did the hospital exist in 2014?  Note the hospital’s proximity to the Princes Freeway and to the city of Berwick.  Why do you think the hospital chose to locate here? Zoom out a bit to determine where in Victoria this hospital is and where Berwick is, noting its proximity to Melbourne.  You can use the + and – buttons in the upper left of the map, or Shift-Drag Box to zoom in on the box you draw, or Control-Shift-Drag Box to zoom out on that box.  Why do you think this area is experiencing urban growth?  What do you think it will look like in 10 years?   Examine your own community using the Wayback image service.  Examine your own community or even your own school or university campus grounds.  What changes can you detect?  Why have those changes taken place?  What will your own community look like in 10 years?  In 50 years?  As an example, search for and find Melbourne Grammar School.  What changes took place on the southeast corner of one of the fields on the school grounds, on the northwest corner of Bromby and Domain Streets? However, in keeping with the theme that is important in teaching with GIS of being critical of the data, caution is needed.  The dates represent the update of the Esri World Imagery service.  This service is fed by multiple sources, private and public, from local and global sources.  Thus, the date does not mean that every location that you examine on the image is current as of that date.  You may observe construction in your local neighbourhood, for example, but the construction does not appear on the satellite image.  Or, you may find imagery that has a wintertime date in the Southern Hemisphere but the leaves were clearly on the trees in the image.  The images could have been taken during the summer before, or even from the summer before that.  Therefore, as always, know what you are working with.  Despite these cautions, the imagery still represents an amazing and useful resource. Extending the lesson.  Note that after you select "only updates with local changes", you have the option of opening those images with changes in ArcGIS .  Why would you want to do this?  Because if you bring them to ArcGIS , (1) you can add other data to these historical images, such as the OpenStreetMap layer, or layers on land use, hydrology, natural hazards, population change, and more; (2) you can save and share those maps that you create; and (3) you can make story maps and other web mapping applications from the maps.  ... View more

Investigating world landforms.  Studying regions is a key topic in geography, environmental education, biology, and other disciplines.  Let's use ArcGIS  and examine a key way of studying regions—through landforms. Investigating world landforms with ArcGIS .  Open a new tab in your web browser and access the following web map:  http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?useExisting=1&layers=3760a3c1b848410e974f35eea533d9e8    Pan to Australia.  To the left of the map, use Content to turn off all layers except Divisions: Show the Legend.  Click on each of the three divisions covering Australia, noting their size and location. Access the popup, which reflects the attribute table behind the map (the “I” or information part of GIS), noting the information about each landform region. To the left of the map, go to About > More Details, and examine the metadata for the map (http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=3760a3c1b848410e974f35eea533d9e8).  This map contains contains layers of systematically compiled named physiographic divisions, physiographic provinces, and landforms.  The features are attributed and named based on the work of Professor Richard Murphy, Department of Geography University of New Mexico, and Professor E.M. Bridges, University of Wales, Swansea, UK.  Go back to your map (by using the “Open in Map Viewer” button in the upper right of the metadata page, or by accessing the above URL for the map again. Make sure only the Divisions layer is visible again; if not, turn that layer on and turn the others off.  Open the table for the Divisions layer > click on the shape_area field > Sort Descending.  Which are the 3 largest landforms divisions according to this data set?  Scroll down the table and note that the Australian Shield is, according to this data set, ranked 17 th in area.  What states in Australia are totally or partially in the Australian Shield? Zoom to Victoria by searching for it in the upper right search box, or by using the + and – navigation tools, or by using control-drag box.  Use the transparency tool underneath the Divisions layer to estimate how much of Victoria falls in the Eastern Highlands region and how much falls in the Sedimentary Basins region.  Change the basemap to Terrain with Labels and compare the terrain to the landforms region “boundary”, noting that the landform region boundary is generalized and continental in scope.  One of the themes running through the use of GIS in education is that scale matters.  Some geographic themes such as hydrologic units and landform regions, nest within each other, visible as the scale increases (to larger scales showing more detail).  On your map, use Content > and turn on the provinces and structural character layers, noting how these nest inside the “divisions” that you examined a moment ago. Examining Landforms by Named Province.  Make the Landforms by Provinces layer visible and turn the others off.  Make the Legend visible.  Note that there are hundreds of named landforms.  Click on the ones covering Victoria and name the 5 that cover the state.  In which one do you live and work?  Which landform region covers Sydney?  Adelaide?  Perth?  Kuala Lumpur?  Tokyo?  As you search and find each city, you could add a map note to each, and using your new Spatial Technology skills, you could log in to ArcGIS , save this map, and share it with your class as a World Landforms map or some other similar name.  Examining Landforms by Structural Character.  Make the Landforms by Structural Character visible and turn the others off.  Make the Legend visible.  Note the presence of isolated volcanic areas in New South Wales and Victoria.  Change the basemap to Imagery with Labels and make the Structural Character layer semi-transparent.  Does the imagery give evidence for these areas?  In some places, yes, but in others, the land use and land cover obscures the volcanics underneath.  Change the imagery to Terrain with Labels and pan around the rest of Australia.  Where do isolated volcanic areas exist around the rest of the country?  Pan to other locations around the world, naming 3 areas where isolated volcanic areas occupy a large part of the landscape.   Other questions to pose with this data set and these tools at your fingertips are:  Which landform regions in Australia support the most agriculture?  Why?  In which landform regions are the largest cities in Australia?  Which landform regions support and encompass the world’s largest cities?  Using the measure tool, measure the area for selected regions, such as the Australian Shield, or the Himalayas, or the Gobi Desert.  Which is the largest?  What questions would you like to pose to the students using these data layers? Examining Hydrologic Features.   Rivers, river basins, and watersheds are another way in which to understand the world through regional analysis.  To the upper right of your map, use Modify Map > Add > Search for Layers > world hydro > select “Esri hydro reference overlay” > Add to map, as follows: Go back to your Contents for your map and note that you now have a hydro layer showing rivers and tributaries.  Turn all of your landforms layers off.  Change the basemap to Terrain with Labels.  If you have ever wanted a map of just rivers of Australia, or any continent, now you have one! If it helps visualize the political boundaries, feel free to change the basemap to National Geographic or another basemap.  Which direction do most of the rivers flow in Victoria? Why?  What is the nearest river to your school?  You’ve done a lot of good work in this map, so it is a good idea to save it so you do some analysis on it now and return to it later.  Use Save > Save As, which will prompt you to log in to ArcGIS  if you are not already logged in. Give your map a suitable title, tags, and a summary.   Tracing water as it flows downstream.  Now that you are logged in, a simple but powerful tool called Analysis now appears to the upper left of your map: If Analysis does not appear, then you need to contact your administrator for your ArcGIS  account and make sure that you are granted “publisher” permission.    Publisher permission allows you to create map layers including through the Analysis functions and via other means.    Because you have Spatial Technology at your fingertips, let’s do some analysis and determine how water flows from your school or another location.  This is part of the analysis tools, which allow you to overlay map layers, compute spatial statistics, interpolate surfaces, and much more.  For now, we will focus on 1 analysis tool—Trace Downstream.  Use Analysis > Find Locations > Trace Downstream, as follows: Use the tool as follows.  For #1, click the placemarker and drag it to the point on the map that you want to trace downstream from.   It should drop the point on the map and you will see it.  For #2, make the maximum distance 5000 kilometers.  For #3, give the resulting map layer with your stream trace a suitable name.  Do NOT check the “use current map extent” box.  (Conversely, zoom out until you see all of Australia, and then it would be OK to check the box).   When done, > Run Analysis.  Be patient while it considers elevation and stream hierarchy and flow to compute the trace. When done, examine the spatial pattern of your result, noting direction, cities and landform areas that the water passes through, and the location where your water enters the ocean.  Use the measure tool to measure the distance.   To see your stream trace more clearly, change the style to red or orange and increase the thickness of the line symbol; example below.  In this example, why does water take such a long journey to the ocean, when the distance to the south of the point is so much less?  Use the Measure tool to measure the straight-line distance from your point to the nearest ocean shoreline. Open the table for the trace layer.  Note the value in the Length Kilometers field.  How many kilometers did water from your point need to reach the ocean?  How much more in kilometers and in percentage is this from the straight-line distance you measured above? Save your map again. Extending the lesson.  There are several ways to extend this lesson.   Because GIS technology is an open problem-solving toolkit, you are not confined to doing only what is outlined in this activity.  First, you could perform trace downstream from other locations around the world, as well.  Second, you could add a real-time weather layer to your map and discuss how river flow would be affected by a large rain event or typhoon, and which cities might need to be placed on alert.  Third, you could add stream gaging stations and real-time water flow to this map, and examine their values in relation to the rivers and watersheds, investigating the effect of snowmelt or rainstorms on the stream gage, the location of the stream gage within the watershed, again using ArcGIS . Fourth, you could investigate another area of the world entirely.  Congratulations!  You have investigated world regions using GIS Technology.   You have opened maps and built your own maps.   ... View more

Examining Regions with ArcGIS  Maps and Google Street View.  At times, geographic learning is enhanced with photographs taken on the landscape you are studying.  Fortunately, photographs are a standard part of today’s Spatial Technology. In the following activity, you will study regions through an interactive map and on-the-ground photographs. Examine a world ecoregions and population density map.  Access the map of World Ecoregions and Population Density, in ArcGIS , here: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=07820fa6b81e4b2b996c394bf76d63ea To the left of the map > Content > Turn off population density and turn on ecoregions, as follows: On the map, click on one of the ecoregions.  You might have to use the > next button in the popup until you get “past” the continent and country information to the ecoregion name.  The map will look similar to this: Compare the ecoregions in eastern Australia and central Australia.  Or another region of the world.  Based on the descriptions, what do you predict the landscape will look like on the ground in those locations?  What landforms, trees, and shrubs will predominate?  Will you see any evidence of water?  What will the evidence of humans be on land use?  Toggle the population density layer on and off, noting the patterns that you see in helping you answer the following question when you go to Street View for a chosen area:  Will you see any towns or cities? Examine on-the-ground photographs from Street View. To test your hypotheses about the characteristics of the ecoregions, go to Google Maps:  https://www.google.com/maps  Search on Australia.  You will likely see a 3D scene zoomed to the scale of all of Australia, as below, particularly if you have enabled the Google Earth plugin to your web browser.  Drag the Street View icon and hover it over the continent of Australia.  Before dropping it on the map, note the amount of blue on the map.  This reflects how many roads exist, and also the extent that the Google cars have traveled with their 360 degree cameras (which in turn reflects some socio-political geography as well; that is, where the cars are allowed in specific places around the world and where they are prohibited—another good topic for geography class discussions!).   Now, drop the Street View icon on a region in Australia corresponding to one of the ecoregions you investigated earlier.  What do you predict you will see?  For example, compare the location in Queensland, at left, to the location in Northern Territory, at right: What do you predict the land will look like in a taiga ecoregion?  A chaparral ecoregion?  Compare your predictions against a street view image. Extending the activity:  Use GeoGuessr quizzes about the Earth.  Another method of helping students to think spatially about cultural and physical regions using street view images is with GeoGuessr (without the “e” in the last part of the word):  https://geoguessr.com/   In this quiz, a player (or competing against another player, say, another student in your classroom), guesses the location on the map, and the points depend on the speed at which the student responds and the distance “off” from the true location of that image.  Excellent connections to fostering spatial thinking in geography include considerations of the landforms, climate as reflected in water or vegetation types, driving on the left or right side of the road, languages visible, land use, housing type and construction material, and other objects on the physical and cultural landscape.  ... View more

Some educators I know use Google Street View images to verify student hypotheses of what the land in each ecoregion would look like.  This is a valuable activity.  But, the limitation is that Google Street View images do not exist everywhere on the planet, and where it does exist, it is constrained largely to streets and a few trails and not the areas away from human habitation.  But what if there was a regular sampling of points across the planet, from which you could see what it looks like from each point? Such a project does exist, called the Degree Confluence Project.  This project is crowdsourced, created by a citizen science set of volunteers who set out to photograph all of the full-degree latitude and longitude intersections on land (and in oceans just offshore of land) in the world.  In other words, where 30 Degrees South and 140 degrees east longitude cross in Australia or where 43 North latitude and 25 degrees East Longitude cross in Bulgaria.     Above, the landscape as it appears at 30 South Latitude, 118 East Longitude, in Western Australia. Begin degree-by-degree exploration by examining latitude and longitude lines. Discuss with your students how the shape of the Earth, as an oblate spheroid, affects the spacing of the one-degree grid.  You can use the Add button in any ArcGIS  map you are working in to search for graticule and select the 1-degree grid from maps.com_carto, or simply open the following map that contains the Equator, tropics, Prime Meridian, and other lines, as well as the 30, 20, 15, 10, 5, and 1 degree latitude and longitude lines for the world (called “the graticule”), here:  http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=0e6eb80d7a9849cf948c57828b7a85be Use Bookmarks to zoom to Australia (or another place of interest to you).  Zoom in further to Victoria or another state.  Use the measure tool to measure the length of 1 degree of latitude at selected locations.  It should be the same no matter where you measure, at around 111 km.  Then, measure the distance between each degree of longitude.  As you move south, the distance should be less as you approach the South Pole.  For example, the distance between 145 East and 146 East along 40 South Latitude is around 87 km, but between 145 East and 146 East is around 92 km as measured along 36 South.  Again, map projections matter!  The distances look the same, but they are not.  In fact, observe the size of the 1 degree-by-1-degree rectangles as you pan from south to north across Australia.  They should approach being squares as you move toward the Equator, and are longer and longer rectangles as you move south toward the South Pole. Use the Degree Confluence Project site to examine the Earth’s regions. Use the Degree Confluence Project in a similar way as I described how Google Street View images are used:  Use map resources in conjunction with photographs.  For example, use the photographs to verify student hypotheses about what they think that the following biomes will look like:  The chaparral biome in southern California USA, polar regions in Nunavut, tropical rainforests in Costa Rica, or grasslands in the USA.  You could also use a sample set of images from the site, and ask students to guess, based on image clues, in which biome or country the images were taken.  Navigate the project’s website by country or by compass rose:  You can start at the east coast of Australia, for example, at 30 South 153 East, and navigate to the west along 30 degrees south latitude by one degree of longitude per stop, all the way to 115 East.  Along the way, ask students:  What changes do you detect to the landforms, land use, climate, human impact, water, housing type, and in sky condition, as you move across the country?  Which are the primary forces—water, humans, natural hazards, something else—acting on the landscape?  Would you say this area is changing more rapidly or more slowly than your own community?  What will this landscape look like in 5, 10, or 50 years’ time?  You could repeat this process from north to south or choose another line of latitude or longitude.  You could also use the “antipode” function under the compass rose to find out what is on the opposite side of the Earth.  Teaching Notes about Degree Confluences, and Digging Deeper.  Ask students to be geographic detectives and determine the time of day and season of the year that the images were taken.  Some points have been visited more than once. Ask students to identify at least two changes that have taken place between selected visits to the same location. Besides the site’s regular sampling of the Earth’s surface, two additional advantages exist with using this site versus random mining for images from Google, Flickr, or another source:  (1) This project is focused on documenting the landscape, so the images are primarily about the land, taken in the four cardinal directions from the point and sometimes in additional directions as well; (2) The images are all vetted, curated, and protected; nothing objectionable exists in these photographs (unlike what you could find in a general Google search).  If you want to dig still deeper, an additional crowdsourced set of “street view” images is from Mapillary, and you could also use this tool to take your own images-tied-to-maps.   ... View more

Examining Ecological Land Units of the World.  In this activity, let’s conduct a regions investigation, this time with a different definition of region:  A combination of bioclimate, landforms, rock type, and land cover. What are Ecological Land Units?  Ecoregions, like cultural regions and other regions in geography, are in part a human construct—one of the techniques that we use to understand the world.  The boundaries of ecoregions are not universally agreed upon, in part because they depend on what variables are used to define them, and furthermore, are usually not sharp.  A new attempt to define regions is that represented by Ecological Land Units (ELUs).  Examining Ecological Land Units via a Story Map.   Access a map of ELUs here:  https://story.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=dc91db9f6409462b887ebb1695b9c201&webmap=dd6f7f93d54341a69a47002696cf5744 This map was produced by a team led by the US Geological Survey’s Land Change Science Program. It represents a mosaic of almost 4,000 unique ecological areas called ELUs, based on four factors that are key in determining the makeup of ecosystems. Three of these—bioclimate, landforms, and rock type—are physical phenomena that drive the formation of soils and the distribution of vegetation. The fourth, land cover, is the vegetation that is found in a location as a response to the physical factors. You can read more about the research here. This particular type of web mapping application is called a story map.  A story map can incorporate audio, video, text, photographs, charts, and interactive web maps.  They can be used in education for presentation of a region, a theme, a process, or a current event, for assessing student work, and for presentation of an investigation that you or students have conducted.  You will make your own story map in the next component in this module.  Use the navigation buttons on the right side of the map to move to different ELUs around the world.  Select three ELUs and contrast them.  How do humans use the land in each of the ELUs you chose? Deeper Investigation into Ecological Land Units.  Another way of exploring the ELUs is via this interactive web map:  https://ecoexplorer.arcgis.com/.  Using this map (which is another type of web mapping application), pan to Australia.  When you click on a location in Australia, you will see the bioclimate, landforms, rock type, and land cover for that location.  Furthermore, as you expand each of those 4 components of ELUs, you will see all of the other places in Australia and around the world where those characteristics exist.  In the example below, the 4 component maps, when expanded, will show all of the locations around the planet that are warm and wet, contain high mountains, are underlain by mixed sedimentary rock, and are covered with broadleaved evergreen forests.  This is an excellent tool for teaching about the complex nature of regions—how to define them, and how they are distributed across the planet.  It is also an excellent tool for helping students think about “Which areas around the world are similar to my own?”, “which areas are different, and why?”  Note that you can change the basemap on the right from ecological to dark gray, imagery, or ocean, as you examine the 4 ELU components around the world on the left.  Explore!   ... View more