Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

The International Statistical Institute (ISI) and Esri are pleased to announce and are co-sponsoring a Student Poster Competition for 2018-2019.  The competition aims to promote research, encourage spatial thinking, and inspire curiosity.  The competition details are here.   We will accept applications for the international competition beginning September 1, 2018, with the application deadline being November 30, 2018. Final judging will take place during the ISI World Statistics Congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 18–23, 2019. Cash and GIS software will be awarded to the winners.  Applicants to this Contest must be enrolled as full-time students at a university.  All Applicant entry(ies) will be submitted to an international panel for selection.  Recommended application areas include, but are not limited to, economy, environment, crime, transportation, climate, urban planning, land use/land cover, sustainable development, health, and disasters of all kinds. Resources have been posted on the site to help you get started on your integration of statistical methods and GIS applied to a problem or issue you are concerned about.  ... View more

Are you an educator using Story Maps in your classroom?  If so: 1. That's awesome, keep up the great work; and 2. We want to make creating and using story maps in the classroom even easier, so we've added some resources to our website specifically for you. Explore this "If you are an educator" section here: http://p.ctx.ly/r/8f15 --Joseph Kerski Maps  ... View more

As I recently wrote in the guidelines and essay, More Power for Your GIS Analysis through Joining Features to ArcGIS , the paradigm that GIS users have been operating under for decades is being challenged in new and exciting ways.  One way, as I wrote above, is the standard workflow of "downloading data > joining the attribute tables of two data layers > performing analysis."  I demonstrated how you can join your data to layers in ArcGIS, and specifically, the Living Atlas of the World, an authoritative rich body of content, and thus bring that diverse content to bear on the analysis of patterns that may be inherent in your data. Let's take another, related standard workflow--spatial joins.  A spatial join is a GIS operation that affixes data from one feature layer's attribute table to another according to its location. Spatial joins begin by selecting a target feature and comparing it spatially to other feature layers.  Spatial joins have been used for years, for example, to determine how many water wells are in a drainage basin, or businesses in a census tract, or the number of earthquakes that fall within specific countries over specific time periods.  Let's take this last example and apply it to the rapidly advancing web GIS paradigm.   Let us say that I want to determine how many earthquakes occurred in the past 30 days according to the USGS National Earthquake Information Center.  The way I have done this for years in ArcGIS Desktop was to gather two data layers - a point layer for earthquakes, and a polygon layer for world countries, and perform a spatial join.  Nothing is wrong with that method, and it continues to work well in ArcGIS Pro, for example.  But let's say I want to do that in ArcGIS , and I don't want to download anything.  This is accomplished with an analysis tool in ArcGIS --Join Features.  To use the analysis tools, you have to be signed in to ArcGIS  and have a publisher role.   To begin, I start with my web map:   http://denverro.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=63a6261d7afa48878a52a4c7127f624e - the  Earthquakes starting point map.  It contains data layers that are streaming from the USGS earthquake center, in my case, the last 30 days of earthquakes.  Once the Join Features analysis tool is engaged, I find World Countries (generalized) in the Living Atlas of the World.  This is my target layer, so named because my goal or "target" is to create a choropleth map by country polygons.  The layer to join to these polygons is my earthquakes layer that is streaming from USGS.  My type of join is "intersect"--if an earthquake is inside or "intersects" the country polygon, I want it to be considered. Here is how I found the Living Atlas content, after searching on World Countries, I selected the generalized data set: I filled in the remainder of the Join Features dialog box as follows:  I chose the one to one operation; I added statistics so I could determine average magnitude and depth by country, which I thought would be interesting (always be curious! This drives you forward in your use of GIS as I explain in this video); I named my resulting layer and I unchecked "use current map extent" just in case my current extent happened to be cutting off any outlying islands in the South Pacific, for example, and then > Run Analysis: My results are below, with all countries defaulting as single symbol.  I will change the style shortly, but before I do, let's examine the new table of data.  The "join count" field contains the number of earthquakes by country: The average magnitude and average depth have been saved as fields in the new layer: Next, I used Change Style to symbolize the countries on Join_Count, as follows: Because the USA contains so many earthquakes, the default Counts and Amounts symbology lumps most countries into one category.  The reason why is in part because the USGS earthquake center is in the USA.  It is in Golden Colorado; I used to give tours there as a USGS employee; a fascinating place that I recommend highly for you to take a tour in next time you're in Colorado.  The earthquake center receives transmitted signals of information from the global seismic network, but it also senses ground motion from nearby earthquakes in the western USA.  So, it senses more small earthquakes in the USA than it does for other countries, resulting in a higher number for the USA.  This is all a critical part of knowing your data, as I write about weekly on the Spatial Reserves data blog.  So, under Options, I changed the classification to Quantile with 5 classes, as follows: The result is below.  Now I have a better sense, with a choropleth map, of the frequency of earthquake by country.  Given a ocean polygon layer, I could even map oceans by earthquake frequency. I would like to make just a few adjustments.  Because over the last 30 days, according to the USGS, earthquakes had occurred in only 42 countries, and 254 polygons exist in the generalized world countries data set, countries with no earthquakes have no symbol or color:     This looks a bit odd.  My goal is to show countries with no earthquakes over the past 30 days with a pale yellow color.  This is easily remedied with a few keystrokes.  The easiest way to do this is to use the Add Data button, add the generalized world countries from the Living Atlas of the World, and change its style to pale yellow with a yellow outline.  Once done, I moved its position to be located underneath my joined earthquakes layer.  I also moved the earthquakes to the top of the contents so that my map users could more clearly see them.  I also labeled the countries with the number of earthquakes that occurred within each one.   The resulting map is here.  Try the Join Tables to ArcGIS  on other data sets.  It can be accomplished in just a few steps but the results are powerful.  Think of ArcGIS  and the Living Atlas as a vast storehouse of data that you can join your own data to for rich analysis. ... 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The Delaware GIS Day event is a great example of collaboration among different organizations to celebrate and educate about the value that GIS brings to education and society.  The Delaware event will be held on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at the Air Command Mobility Museum in Dover. Approximately 300 students plus the general public attend this event from around the state, traveling through 18 stations to learn how GIS is used in different industries. There is even an enormous Earth balloon!  The content of these stations is tied to the 5th grade state curriculum.  Delaware Geographic Data Committee partners with several organizations to host this event.  They have even created a wonderfully detailed story map, here.   For more information, see the event website: http://www.mygeoworld.org/delaware-gis-day-2018/    If you are looking for ideas for your own GIS Day event, I invite you to examine the plans that Delaware has, and be encouraged and inspired! The first section of the wonderfully detailed Delaware GIS Day story map. ... View more

My new article in Geospatial World magazine is entitled Why GIS in Education Matters.  My goal was to reach a global audience of readers through this magazine with a message that they would be able to take to their own communities, schools, colleges, and universities to encourage the deepening and widening of spatial thinking through GIS in those educational institutions, and beyond those institutions, to libraries, museums, and after-school clubs and university clubs.  I begin the article with a reminder and a brief history of why mapping has long been valued.   I then discuss the chief reasons why GIS merits inclusion as a framework and a toolset, not just in GIS programs, but in sociology, mathematics, geography, engineering, health, business, environmental, planning, and other programs and subjects.  I focus on how using GIS as an instructional tool opens the door to inquiry, content, skills, and perspectives.  After reviewing the progress of how GIS is used in education around the world, the article returns to the essentials:  GIS is a powerful tool for analyzing the whys of where, and for understanding our changing Earth:  Students use GIS to understand that the Earth is changing, think scientifically and analytically about why it is changing, and dig deeper:  Should the Earth be changing in these ways?  Is there anything that I should be doing or could be doing about it?  This captures the heart of spatial thinking, inquiry and problem-based learning.  It empowers students as they become decision-makers to make a difference in this changing world of ours. It is my hope that the article will be useful to many throughout the educational system, to geomentors, to GIS professionals, and beyond.  All photos by Joseph Kerski. ... View more

I recently co-conducted a series of GIS workshops for educators online and recorded much of the hands-on work for the purposes of (1) illustrating what and how these types of events can be structured and taught; (2) showing how you also can use these easy to use yet powerful web based tools such as ArcGIS Online and web mapping applications for enhanced teaching and learning.    1 of 4:  Introduction, Sports,  Business, Health, Geopolitics, and Natural Hazards:  https://youtu.be/OadFsk0OIlk   2 of 4:  Urban Comparison and International Migration. Hands-on work with data, tools, and instructional approaches. https://youtu.be/JVS_ncVjc6w   3 of 4:  Location privacy, data quality, lessons, remote sensing, landslides, land use, and human-caused hazards. Hands-on work with data, tools, and instructional approaches. https://youtu.be/qI_-NbEqEok   4 of 4:   Population change, historical topographic maps, student work examples: https://youtu.be/NdpP3K1Nl0E I hope these videos are helpful. --Joseph Kerski  ... View more

I wrote an article for Geospatial Solutions about why GIS in education matters, here: https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/why-gis-in-education-matters/ With my thanks to the Geospatial Solutions staff in India for being so receptive! ---Joseph Kerski  ... View more

Folks: Pace University is offering a free 12-week Desktop ArcGIS course this fall.  It starts on August 27th and ends before Thanksgiving. The syllabus for the course can be seen here: http://webpage.pace.edu/MMinnis/GISSyllabus/  There is a FAQ at the bottom of the Syllabus. To enroll in the course, go here: http://OpenEducation.Blackboard.com/PaceUniversity   Electronic badges can be earned (bronze, silver and gold) at milestones along the way. People who finish the course receive a certificate. The instructor is:   Peggy Minnis  ([email protected]) Pace University - Pleasantville, NY ... View more

"Web mapping? Sure, I use digital maps!" is a statement I hear fairly often. On the surface, it seems that these two concepts are the same. Indeed, for nearly 20 years, since the 1990s with MapQuest and in the 2000s with maps on mobile devices, interacting with maps in digital form rather than paper has been the more common everyday experience. But I submit that "web mapping" is not the same as simply using maps on the web, whether in health, energy, city planning, or, as is the focus here, in education. In my view, using maps on the web includes looking up a place name, examining thematic maps such as ocean currents, world biomes, or demographic characteristics by neighborhood across your city, finding the distance between two points on a map, finding the route between two points, mapping locations that you have visited in the field, and so on. Nothing wrong with any of those tasks. Using maps on the web focuses on the "What's Where?" question. But web mapping's purpose is for examining patterns, relationships, and trends. It examines change over space and time at a variety of scales, and across themes. For example, what is the relationship between the location of mines and water quality across a mountain watershed, or between median age and median income across a city? How does the land use change across a region over time, or the precipitation across a mountain range? All of these questions end with, "And why?" Charles Gritzner wrote a great article about geography being about what is where, why there, and why care.  Web mapping focuses on the "Why there"? and "why care?" part of Gritzner's framework.  To summarize in tabular form: Maps on the web Web Mapping Tasks:   Tasks:              Navigation        Navigation              Visualization        Visualization        Analysis        Creating web mapping applications        Collecting and exploring field-collected data Questions: Questions: Where are the field sites I visited? Why does the water quality vary across the field sites I visited? Where are the younger and less affluent neighborhoods in this city? Is there a spatial and attribute relationship between median age and median income in this city, and if so, what is the relationship, why does it exist, and does it change over time? Where is the mountain range in a region and what is the precipitation regime across them? How and why does the precipitation regime change across the mountain range? Using maps on the web is a stepping stone to web mapping, but is not exactly the same as web mapping. They are not exactly the same thing, but there is overlap between them to be sure. In short, web mapping uses the concept of GIS as a platform, including web, mobile, and desktop, with its analytical, multimedia, and application ability, to its full potential.  The educational implications of this are many.  How do we teach in this new paradigm of web mapping?  What concepts should we teach, and what skills should we seek to foster?  What tools and data sets should we use?  How should we incorporate new field techniques and apps?  How should we assess student work given the ease of creating web mapping applications such as story maps?  How should our primary, secondary, community college, and university courses and programs change to encompass this new world?   In addition, Web GIS is not just "more and better" GIS, it also requires new ways of managing GIS.  All of this is part of the continued shift from desktop-only GIS to web GIS.  This shift involves the movement: from software products to platforms and APIs, from client/server to web services and apps, from standalone desktop to connected devices, from print maps to web maps and data visualizations, from static data to data services, streams, and big data from custom applications to interoperable packages and libraries from a single all purpose application to many pathways and focused apps from proprietary data to open data and shared services. If all this seems like mere semantics, this is why I believe this matters: Like all of you, I care deeply about meaningful student learning with geotechnologies. To foster spatial and critical thinking with geotechnologies requires more than looking up place names on a map, or routes from a certain point to another point. It requires that we be purposeful about using maps as the analytical, exploratory tools that they are. Using the Web GIS paradigm in education and society offers a brighter future for students and the entire planet. ... View more

I taught a story mapping workshop and a growth in tribal GIS colleges workshop at the Society for Conservation GIS conference, and have attached the slides and activities for these workshops to this essay.  The story mapping workshop covered why to use story maps, how to use story maps, and how to create map tour, swipe, series, map journal, and other types of story maps.  The tribal GIS workshop covered the application of GIS to teaching and learning in Tribal Colleges, the recent 2nd edition of the Tribal GIS book published by Esri Press, and other related topics.  I created these materials for the annual conference of the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS).  SCGIS is a non-profit organization that assists conservationists worldwide in using GIS through communication, networking, scholarships, and training, and it was a pleasure working with the participants.   The themes, tools, and approaches in these materials will be useful to other communities, and I hope you find them useful, too! Site of the SCGIS conference - Pacific Grove, California, and its unique coastal ecosystem.    ... View more

Last year I wrote guidelines on how to go beyond the standard base maps available in ArcGIS Online to access others that are now available.  There's plenty to love about standard base maps - satellite imagery, OpenStreetMap, National Geographic, and others, and for the USA, the USGS topographic maps.  But the ability to easily access the unusual and fascinating ones such as Colored Pencil and Antique Modern is interesting and useful in many ways, such as integrating Arts into your STEM instruction (thereby creating "STEAM"), for discussion about cartography, to lend interest to your maps, analysis, and story maps, and much more. There are additional ways to access these maps over and above the ways I described in my previous essay.  One way is to access a map that contains a set of new custom vector tile base maps, on http://esriurl.com/vectortilebasemaps.  Change the base maps simply with the base maps tool.  Grab the URL for the base maps that you are interested in and use it in your own maps - many are listed here:  http://urbanobservatory.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=4009a9901e0c4f778b77c99f4a42ba41   The newspaper base map, showing central London, but available globally at multiple scales.  Since ArcGIS is an integrated system (web, desktop, field, enterprise), you can also access these base maps in ArcGIS Pro.  To add one of these base maps to your ArcGIS Pro project, click on the View Tab > Catalog Pane, > Living Atlas > Search 'vector tile basemap', as shown below.  Adding one of these fascinating base maps to ArcGIS Pro. Now challenge yourself and your students to go the extra mile. Now that you are using a variety of different base maps, discussing the merits of each cartographically and artistically, a logical next step is for you and them to create your own base maps.  That's right!  As my colleagues describe in these guidelines, you can edit everything from fill and text symbols to fonts, halos, patterns, transparency, and zoom level visibility!  This is a great way for you to enhance your GIS and cartography skills but also to tap into your creative, artsy side!   For more information, read the GeoNet blogs about vector base maps.   Happy mapping!  I confess, my favorite is still Colored Pencil.  What's yours?  ... View more