Blog

Mapping Mush-Ko-Se-Day Park

Working with the Town of Koshkonong, our drone and GPS mapping crew, Hanan Ali and Kristen Barman, has collected differential GPS information on the park’s trails and points of interest along with conducting the largest set of drone flights we’ve ever done. Stay tuned for a more detailed view of their results.

Draft UWW Maintenance Reporter

We’ve been exploring the power of ESRI’s Survey123 tools and developed a quick demonstration of how the system can be used to quickly collect information from the general public and incorporated into a maintenance system for campus. The demo includes a public reporting tool, a public map to view the status of issues, and a backend map to moderate, update, and finalize reported issues.

Here are the publicly viewable tools:

• UWW Maintenance Reporter
• UWW Maintenance Map

Let us know if you have any thoughts on how to improve this demo.

WICCI Geospatial Working Group

Dr. Compas has joined the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts‘ Geospatial Working Group. He’ll be working with other GIS leaders throughout the state to help share GIS data relevant to climate change analysis and impacts and to support other working groups as part of the initiatives. In particular, he hopes to help the Climate Working Group make their down-scaled climate modeling data available to GIS practitioners and researchers across the state.

Aerospace Jam Competition

Working with the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium, the GIS Center along with Carroll College are organizing and running a state-wide drone competition for high school team. Inspired by the Artemis NASA mission to the moon, teams are building sensor platforms that will be mounted on a drone and used in the competition to sense and measurement a simulated lunar environment. The competition will take place in the Fiserv Forum in April 2022. All teams will attend the Milwaukee Bucks game the same day as the competition with the winning team getting to watch from a Skybox!

Check out the website for the competition.

Drone video: Adam Birding Conservancy

One of our UW-Whitewater alumni, Dave Adams, purchased a federally protected wetland in 2015 just north of campus. He’s christened it Adam Birding Conservancy and has generously allowed the public (after signing up at his website) to hike and observe birds and wildlife on the property. He’s also allow us to conduct test and research flights of our drones on his property including testing our mapping capabilities, testing the use of drones for mapping the exotic plant, Arundo phragmites australis, and creating aerial videos of the property. Here’s one of our attempts at a scenic tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRVNHhWhunQ

Interactive map for WSFCA

We’ve finished an interactive map for the Wisconsin State Fire Chiefs Association that highlights the link between fire districts across the state and the legislative districts. The map posed a challenge to work within the constraints of ArcGIS Online and the needs of the client, particularly viewing multiple geographies — fire districts, fire regions, and legislative districts — all concurrently. Thanks to Katelyn Waldenmaier for all her hard work!

Participating in “Research Road” event

Marketing certainly isn’t our first impulse, but we mingled at the UWW Research Road event last week. Thanks to Thor for pulling together a nice poster and for working our booth for much of the event.

Thor excited to talk with you about GIS

Upgraded GIS Center servers (move to HTTPS)

Hey, it seems like a small thing, but we’ve recently completed a substantial effort to upgrade our server environmental and migrate to HTTPS on all our operations. Everything should be up and running now. Please let us know if you find anything that’s broken 😉

2017 Region 3 Soils Competition

In early October the GIS Center was asked to produce detailed site maps for the 2017 Soils Competition in Jefferson County hosted by UW-Whitewater. These maps utilized the latest high-resolution LIDAR-based elevation models from Jefferson County which helped students better assess the types of soils at their dig sites and determine the soils’ origins.

Read more…

New project and hires

We’ve just been awarded a contract with Jefferson County, Wisconsin, to map structures in new FEMA floodplain maps.

Example of building footprint delineation

Read more…