Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

During this week as I spend time with 18,000 people at the Esri User Conference and at the Esri Education Summit, several themes have become evident.  First, the GIS education community has enormous energy--they are enthusiastic about the new tools and data at our fingertips, yes, but more importantly, about the task of educating primary, secondary, community college, and university students about how to use GIS effectively to tackle a wide variety of problems.  Second, they are dedicated--many are new to the field, some are 30 year veteran educators, but all are willing to invest the time needed to learn the most effective ways to teach with GIS and teach about GIS.  They see the enormous return on investment--student engagement, job opportunities, community connection, and a wiser, more informed populace.  Third, they model what it is to be a lifelong learner--willing to teach each other and learn from each other in our rapidly changing field and in our rapidly changing world.  At the conference, we heard many inspiring stories and were presented with many models of the use of geotechnologies in the areas of natural hazards, population change, energy, water, health, business, and other application areas that we can use in our instruction.  For example, at the Education Summit keynote, stories were shared about the progress of GIS in education in the UK and beyond, about how the University of Southern California is understanding aging in the community, and how an innovative masters degree among three universities in Europe was conceived and implemented.  We learned about new imagery, layers in the Living Atlas of the World, new capabilities in field apps, in ArcGIS Pro, in Community Analyst, and in ArcGIS Online that we can use.  We learned about new books such as Cartography and Getting to Know Web GIS, new resources such as the new Esri Training site and the Learn ArcGIS library, that can be accessed again and again.   Our community is faced with an enormous challenge--to increase the spatial literacy of our students, and by extension, all of society.  But we have excellent tools, excellent data, and most of all--a wonderful and diverse community of people, to meet this challenge for a brighter future.    Learning about new tools, resources, and people at the Esri User Conference plenary session. One of the Esri Young Scholars.   They came from all over the world and were truly were inspiring.  Learning and growing at the Esri User Conference Expo.  ... View more

The Living Atlas of the World is a growing, curated, authoritative set of map content for your projects.  Here are 7 free lessons that use the incredible Living Atlas of the World - http://esripm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?adbid=6362634088096108544&adbpl=li&adbpr=5311&adbsc=social206763…    These lessons cover a diversity of tools, such as ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online,  ArcGIS Earth--even Adobe Illustrator!  They cover a variety of themes, such as poverty, open space, public safety--even Chinese food delivery!  They cover scales from local to global--electronic stores in Manhattan, child poverty in Detroit, the Vietnam War, aquaculture in Thailand, and more.  Give these lessons a try as a way of understanding spatial problems, GIS, and data--for yourself, for your students, or both. One of the lessons in the set of 7 free lessons that use the Living Atlas of the World. ... View more

Like many of you reading this, I love to teach, and every year look forward to teaching hands-on workshops at the Esri Education GIS Summit.  It brings me joy to help educators advance in their GIS journey, and also it is extremely valuable to hear about their concerns, challenges, questions, and success stories.  This year I am serving as a teaching assistant in the story maps workshop and in a GIS for Beginners workshop.  I am also leading two workshops--Spatial Analysis in ArcGIS Online, and Survey123 for Education.  I also have been asked to give a presentation for the Esri Young Professionals Network on GIS in education.  Recognizing that not everyone can attend these sessions, I wanted to make the slides and the hands-on activities available to all via the attachments to this blog.   1.  GIS for Beginners.  Slides. 2.  GIS for Beginners.  Activities. 3.  Spatial Analysis in ArcGIS Online.  Slides. 4.  Spatial Analysis in ArcGIS Online.  Activities. 5.  Survey123 for Education.  Slides 6.  Survey123 for Education.  Activities. 7.  My notes for my presentation about GIS in education to the Esri Young Professionals Network.  I look forward to your feedback below, and I hope these resources are helpful. ... View more

The rapid advancement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) data in society and in programs at universities and even in some secondary schools has led to some amazing tools and data with which to analyze the world.  Esri has a new UAV partner, the good people at Hangar, which operates a very innovative service to fly areas that people request them to.  Hangar recently flew across Kilauea Hawaii and have compiled their 360-degree immersive UAV imagery into a story map.  This makes for an incredibly engaging and rich tool for use in instruction, about human-environment interaction, impact of natural hazards, plate tectonics, current events, and much more.  As an example, see the image I posted here:  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgI567QVMAI1bbW.jpg or below.  I highly encourage you to take a look at this story map, paying particular attention to the house being engulfed in photo # 11.  But that's not all.  Another recent advancement is the announcement of the new Sentinel-2 imagery in ArcGIS Online.  Sentinel-2 is part of Copernicus, the world’s largest single Earth observation program directed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency. Esri makes the multi-spectral data quickly accessible using ArcGIS Image Server and publishes an image service through the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World (Living Atlas), hosted on the Amazon Web Services Infrastructure. The service includes all Sentinel-2 imagery going back 14 months, enabling change to be easily reviewed, and is updated every 5 to 7 days.  Incredible! Image analysis can be run directly on the service to create indexes displaying properties such as vegetation health or soil moisture as well as quantifying the changes over time, for better understanding of the environment.  I added the Sentinel-2 data from ArcGIS Online, zoomed to Kilauea, and rendered the image as Geology with DRA (Dynamic Range Adjustment) which makes use of the SWIR (ShortWave Infrared) bands 1 and 2 – along with blue in the third band.  This only took a few minutes and now I can measure the length of the new lava from that day (in yellow), and make use of the Imagery with Labels or Open Street Map basemaps to determine the homes that are affected.  My students could investigate further to determine exactly which of the homes are shown in the UAV images in the above story map.  The results are shown in the image below.  For more information, see my video on the Hangar Esri UAV story map and my video on the Sentinel-2 data. A video showing blue flame from methane in this exact rift zone is very compelling and makes for an excellent supplement for the above two resources that I described.  The video is here:  Hawaii volcano: blue flames burn in streets as methane escapes - YouTube .   In addition, this web map contains multiple renderings from a DigitalGlobe WorldView-3 collect on May 19, 2018.  Leveraging the Near Infrared and Short Wave Infrared wavelengths captured by WorldView-3 can not only help to define the lava flow extents but also identify hot spots.  The infrared imagery also helps to peer through smoke that may otherwise occlude the ground. Update May 2020:   The Kilauea eruptions are now over 14 months old.  Because the image service at present only contains data for the past 14 months, you will need to query on a more recent image where an eruption has occurred somewhere in the world.  These could include the following eruptions: 3 Nov 2019  Kikai, Japan 30 Sep 2019  Shishaldin, Alaska 13 Jan 2020  Fernandina, Galapagos 14 Jan 2020  Reventador, Ecuador 28 April 2020  Krakatau, Indonesia 28 April 2020  Rincon de la Vieja, Costa Rica For more eruptions, examine the Smithsonian Institution's Volcanism Bulletin.  Note further that the Sentinel team at Esri is seeking to add all of the archive to the service, not just the past 14 months, so stay tuned on this point.  Sentinel-2 imagery rendered as Geology with DRA and filtered for 23 May 2018 in ArcGIS Online.  ... View more

This year, we will be streaming the world's largest GIS gathering, the UC Plenary live on Facebook. This will be an incredible way for you to tap into the energy and atmosphere of this international event of 18,000 even if you cannot be physically at the San Diego Convention Center during the event.  The plenary will take place on Monday 9 July 2018 from 8:30am to 3:30pm Pacific Daylight Time.  This all-day Plenary Session starts off with Esri’s vision, software roadmap, demos of winning workflows, transformation stories from peers, and inspirational keynotes.  If you’re unable to attend Esri UC in person, click the “Going” button on the Facebook link to receive updates and be a part of it.  Check out the plenary agenda starting here: https://userconference2018.schedule.esri.com/schedule/438070734  and follow us here: https://www.facebook.com/esrigis/.   If you can attend in person, we have thousands of hours of workshops, sessions, and demos lined up to help you improve your skills and stay on top of evolving technology. More than 300 exhibitors will share the latest software, hardware, and solutions.   Register Here:  Registration Rates and Details.    ... View more

Ever since Rajinder Naji, Dr Dawn Wright, and my other Esri colleagues announced that elevation services were in ArcGIS Online, I have been wanting to use them in Pro not just for visualization, but analysis.   More than elevation services are now available--land cover, for example, is another.  I recently began using these services and am quite pleased with the results.  I am using them in some lessons I have written where students analyze wildfires in grasslands, the optimal site for cell phone towers, and suitable lands for specific types of agriculture. Moreover, I believe this advancement represents an excellent example of the paradigm shift that GIS is in the midst of, namely, from desktop to cloud, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Data-as-a-Service.  No longer do you need to follow the standard workflow of the past two decades, where you download data that you need to your local device where you then perform the analysis.  You can access the services online and use them inside ArcGIS Pro.  Advantages are many:  You do not have to spend your valuable time searching for, downloading, clipping, and reprojecting pieces of data, which took many steps as shown in our exercises associated with the Esri Press GIS Guide to Public Domain Data book.  Furthermore, you do not have to store large data sets on your local device.  Rather, you can stream the data in for your desired study area and thus have more time for investigating, analyzing, concluding, and publishing your results.  Elevation data supports numerous GIS applications ranging from deriving slope and aspect, stream delineation, cut and fill analysis, viewshed analysis, orthorectification of aerial photography or satellite imagery, rendering 3D visualizations, creating relief maps, and for various types of analysis and visualizations.  The elevation and land cover services are available for use within the ArcGIS Online platform, and are part of the Living Atlas. You can access the entire collection of layers along with geo-processing tools from within the Elevation Layers Group on ArcGIS Online.  Access to these global layers is free and does not consume any credits; all you need is an ArcGIS Organizational account.  The "old paradigm" of downloading and using data locally still has its place, and it will be around for some time to come.  But that's not the only option these days.  Moreover, I suspect that more raster data sets will be added in the future to the Living Atlas, and as it is added, the streaming method will become even more attractive in the future.   If you want to simply visualize elevation, slope, aspect, and land cover, for example, use Add Data > Portal > Living Atlas > search for these layers and add them to your map view in ArcGIS Pro.  To do analysis on land cover, elevation, slope, or aspect, you need to select such items as “terrain:  slope in degrees” – and “aspect” – not the map, but the service.  Also important is to use Environments in the raster calculator (or any other geoprocessing tool that you are using) to set the analysis extent to your display, a watershed, or some other specific area so you’re not analyzing the whole country or the whole world!.  See screens below (my study area is the wonderful terrain in western Colorado).   The results of my raster calculator on streaming terrain--the thin yellow areas are where the slopes are greater than 50 degrees. Results after Raster Calculator analysis was applied to the streaming NLCD Land Cover data, with shrub/scrub land cover shown in yellow. Searching for Terrain Slope in Degrees and Terrain Aspect (direction of slope) from the Living Atlas, using the Add Data tool in ArcGIS Pro. For more details, see my video on this topic.  Enjoy the new paradigm!  Please share your reactions in the comments below. ... View more

I have used The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/about/) for many things over the years, from archiving multimedia that I created for my story maps to looking up information on historical web pages through their Wayback Machine, (as well as listening to some old wonderful sound recordings) and through those efforts became aware of the wealth of information on the site.   And when I say wealth, I truly mean enormous - 279 billion web pages, 11 million books and texts, 4 million audio recordings (including 160,000 live concerts), 3 million videos (including 1 million Television News programs), 1 million images, and100,000 software programs. But did you know that The Internet Archive also houses some geospatial data?  The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that has existed since 1996, states that its mission is to "provide Universal Access to All Knowledge," so it makes sense that some geospatial data for the public good is there. Let's focus here on the USGS topographic map data on The Internet Archive, also known as Digital Raster Graphics (DRGs).  Start here for a list of these maps by state, and then underneath each state, a variety of search options are available.  It isn't the most intuitive unless you know the specific map name that you are looking for, so a topographic map index may still come in handy; a scanned version of these is not easy to come by, but one such archive is here.  Formats include GeoTIFF, essential for use in a GIS. Interface on The Internet Archive for USGS Digital Raster Graphics.  While I still find the interface on the other main DRG archive, LibreMap, to be a bit easier to use, LibreMap is not maintained any longer, and is starting to return some errors during certain searches.  The Esri USGS Historical Map Explorer, and the USGS TopoView, which I reviewed here, is more modern approach to obtaining topographic maps, with the added benefit of historical editions.  USGS topographic maps are part of the set of basemaps available inside ArcGIS Online as data services, which is increasingly part of modern GIS workflows, rather than downloading the data and using it locally.  Still another archive is that from Historical Aerials, which I reviewed here.  A section of my all-time favorite USGS topographic map, for Mitchell Indiana, simply because of the intricacies of the depression contours and disappearing streams in this magnificent karst landscape.  ... View more

A variety of economic, geographic, and other factors influence a store chain to “stay regional” vs. going national or international.  Spatial patterns of where these regional chain stores are located often tell a story about where the headquarters is located, about population trends, demographics, climate, business tax rates, human behavior including commuting and buying habits, and much more. The patterns sometimes show that competing stores of the same type, often overlap, while at other times they are adjacent to each other.  This exercise uses a web based Geographic Information System (GIS) as an analytical tool to analyze the locations of regional convenience stores, and to site a new store in a community.    To enable students and others to dig into these issues, to encourage them to think critically and spatially, and to engage them in using GIS tools, I have created a new lesson (REVISED NOVEMBER 2019) that uses Community Analyst to analyze national, regional, and local convenience stores (ATTACHED).  The lesson uses Community Analyst, a very rich online set of tools, data, and capabilities from Esri.   Also attached are a set of slides introducing Community Analyst (and Business Analyst Web, which is essentially the same toolkit as Community Analyst), and explaining how and why it can be used in education and beyond.  With Community Analyst you can create choropleth maps on hundreds of variables for many countries around the world on demographics, health, crime, and other variables, as well as on consumer preferences and lifestyles, you can create infographics and drive/walk time and distance buffers, you can map business locations, and so much more.  These tools are part of the ArcGIS platform, so your maps can be shared with ArcGIS Online, and conversely, you can bring maps from ArcGIS Online into Community Analyst/Business Analyst Web. The lesson steps participants through analyzing the distribution of two regional convenience store chains - Allsup's and Casey's, asks them to make a variety of choropleth maps to understand population and markets, and finishes with a site selection for a new store in a community (I selected Columbia Missouri).  Concepts include understanding distributions, scales, business decisions, and site selection.  Tasks include filtering data, mapping point locations, computing drive time polygons, creating infographics, and more.  Several screen shots from the lesson appear below.   The lesson could be taught in courses including geography, business, sociology, mathematics, and GIS.  It requires two  to three class periods or can be run online.  It can be taught in a community or technical college, a university, and even in an advanced high school course.  The lesson could be run in Business Analyst Web as well as in Community Analyst.  Since both of these tools are run online, no software is required.  An ArcGIS Online account is all that is needed to acesss the tools, make the maps, and conduct the investigations.  The lessons could be easily extended to other brands of convenience stores or other types of businesses.  I look forward to hearing your reactions.  ... View more

I created a new lesson in the ArcGIS Learn Library focused on siting a wind farm using the analytical tools in ArcGIS Online:  http://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/perform-a-site-suitability-analysis-for-a-new-wind-farm/    The lesson will help you or your students build skills in these areas: Conducting a site suitability study Conducting drive time analysis Creating a web app What you will need to run the lesson:    Publisher or Administrator role in an ArcGIS organization (see this link to get a free trial) Estimated time: 1 hour.   The lesson uses tools including filter, overlay (union), proximity, find locations, routing, as well as examining symbology, classification, and tabular information.  The lesson uses some wonderfully rich wind power data from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), as well as electrical lines data, population data, and other layers.  You could run the lesson as part of your course in GIS, but also in a course on geography, energy, sustainable development, demography, or environmental studies. Because the lesson uses ArcGIS Online, you could expand the lesson by adding additional layers to consider in your site suitability analysis, and by using additional analysis tools.   The lesson uses Colorado as its case study, but you could modify it for another state by accessing another state's wind data from NREL.  I thank the Platts company for the use of their generalized electrical data and my colleague Colin Childs on the Esri Learn Team for his help getting the lesson into the Learn format. Final result after analysis is performed showing some of the layers used in the lesson.  Wind turbine.  Photo credit:  Joseph Kerski. ... View more

I wrote a review of Tripp Corbin's new ArcGIS Pro Cookbook, here: https://community.esri.com/community/education/blog/2018/05/11/a-review-of-the-arcgis-pro-cookbook  I hope the review is useful! --Joseph Kerski  ... View more

GIS Professional Tripp Corbin's book, the "ArcGIS Pro 2.x Cookbook" (2018, Packt Publishing) is new but I believe will quickly become a valued and oft-used resource. Mr Corbin's goal in writing this extensive (694 pages) resource is to help GIS professionals "create, manage, and share geographic maps, data, and analytical models using ArcGIS Pro." The audience for this book includes all who are learning GIS, or learning Pro, as well as those migrating from ArcMap to Pro. Tripp's "cookbook" theme is evident throughout the book's format, where in each section and problem to be solved, he shows how to get ready, how to do it, how it works, and ... "there's more" (additional resources). That the book is from Packt is excellent, because Packt (www.packtpub.com) offers eBook versions of every one of its books, and also offers newsletters and tech articles. That Tripp is a full time trainer and instructor is evident--he understands the challenges in learning a rapidly-changing and complex technology inherent in GIS with just enough tips to keep the reader engaged. He also encourages the reader to think about how to apply each tool and method to his or her own work. He offers the reader the ability to download the sample data for the book, and the data bundle is also on GitHub. He also includes PDFs of all images of screen shots and diagrams. I like Tripp's approach because, similar to my own instruction, he starts with data. He's not hesitant to discuss the benefits but also the limitations of each data format such as shp, gdb, and CAD files. He spends quality time in the book helping the reader understand how to convert data to the format that best fits his or her needs. His sections on linking tables from outside sources to existing data, on editing (in particular, a focus on topologies to improve data accuracy and increasing editing efficiency), and on 2D and 3D analysis are very helpful. I was pleased to see much attention to what I consider to be a chief advantage of Pro--the ability to more easily share content from Pro to ArcGIS Online and hence the wider community. Another wonderful new function in ArcGIS Pro is also included in the book--writing and using Arcade scripts, applied to symbology, classification, and analysis. As a GIS book author myself, I know the challenges faced in writing such a book--what should be included, and what should be left out? Tripp does a nice job here as well, including the fundamentals that most users will touch. The book's chapters include: 1: Capabilities and terminology. 2: Creating and storing data. 3: Linking data together. 4: Editing spatial and tabular data. 5: Validating and editing data with topologies. 6: Projections and coordinate systems. 7: Converting data from one format to another. 8: Proximity analysis. 9: Spatial statistics and hot spots. 10: 3D maps and 3D analyst. 11: Arcade, labeling and symbology expressions. 12: ArcGIS Online, 13: Publishing your own content to ArcGIS Online. 14: Creating web apps using ArcGIS Online. These chapters cover a great deal of ground. In the editing chapter, for example (Chapter 4), configuring editing options, reshaping existing, splitting, merging, aligning, creating new point line polygon features, creating new polygon feature using autocomplete, and editing attributes using attribute pane and in the table view, are all examined. The examples in the book are interesting and relevant, and not without some humor (Trippville is a community that is often studied). In my view, the book contains just the right amount of graphics. Tripp provides answers to the questions he poses, and then gives the explanation for each answer. Despite the "recipes" provided in the cookbook, not all of them require the previous recipe to be used, which is excellent for all of us in GIS who have limited time and want to select sections in a non-sequential order. I highly recommend using this book in conjunction with Tripp's other book on this topic, "Learning ArcGIS Pro." The Learning book focuses on installing, assigning licenses, navigating the interface, creating and managing projecrts, creating 2D and 3D maps, authoring map layouts, importing existing projects, creating standardized workflows using tasks, and automating analysis and processes using modelbuilder and python. The Learning ArcGIS Pro book ideally should be used first, before the ArcGIS Pro 2.x Cookbook, but if you are pressed for time, these two books could be used in tandem. Keep both of them handy--they will be very useful to you. The cover of Tripp Corbin's ArcGIS Pro Cookbook, left, along with his earlier book, Learning ArcGIS Pro. An example of the detailed screenshots that Tripp Corbin's ArcGIS Pro Cookbook contains.  Additional examples of the details that Tripp Corbin's ArcGIS Pro Cookbook contains.  ... View more