TUgis Conference 2019

Michael Herzberger, GISP, CFM, Maryland Environmental Service; Anthony Dowell, AECOM; Patrick McLoughlin, Maryland Department of Information Technology; Christina Gladmon, Anne Arundel County; Mary Buffington, Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative; and Michael Manen, Maryland Environmental Service

This session is designed to help attendees prepare for a career as a GIS professional, whether entering the GIS profession or looking for a refresher when shifting careers. Whether you are about to graduate college, making a change in your career, or looking to apply for a new job, this session will serve as a primer for attendees attempting to market themselves to prospective employers during the conference, and beyond. The session will include:

• A panel discussion covering perspectives from numerous sectors of the GIS industry
• Recommendations on how to prepare for submitting an application and interviewing for a job
• Suggested areas to ensure you are well rounded
• Questions and answers with industry and subject matter experts
• Hands-on breakout sessions

URISA’s (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) GISCorps coordinates short term volunteer GIS services to underserved communities worldwide. Since its inception in October 2003, the Corps has attracted over 5,000 volunteers from 82 countries. To date, GISCorps has deployed hundreds of volunteers to over 200 missions. These volunteers have contributed over 15,000 working hours in emergency and non-emergency response missions in Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the United States. This talk will include information about several GISCorps’ implemented missions as well as the GISCorps volunteering process.

Speaker: Allen Ibaugh, AICP, GISP; CEO of Data Transfer Solutions, has over 25 years of professional experience in GIS, asset management, and software development. Allen has been involved in URISA for over 20 years and is a past president of the organization. He has been involved in the GISCorps Core Committee for over 10 years. Allen holds a master’s in geography and urban planning from the University of Iowa.

As the second largest agency in Baltimore City, the Department of Transportation maintains 4,750 lane miles of roadways, 248 bridges, 3,600 miles of sidewalks, curbing, and gutter, 400 miles of alleys, 20,000 linear feet of retaining walls , 26 million linear feet of conduit, 1,400 signalized intersections, 16 BCDOT facilities, 12 buses, and city wide bicycle facilities and pedestrian lighting. BCDOT is proceeding towards preparing a Comprehensive Transportation Plan for Baltimore City and has defined a three-phase process to develop the Plan. The objectives of phase I (baseline Data Collection) consisted of compiling relevant recommendations from current plans, studies, and existing conditions reports as well as coordinating with stakeholder agencies; and then reviewing the recommendations. Phase II (stakeholder/public engagement) was for elected officials and community engagement to validate the plans and establish priorities. The actual draft of the Comprehensive Transportation Plan will be prepared in Phase III (starting from winter 2019).

During phase I and phase II, GIS technology has been proven to be a very significant tool. The research materials have been complied in spreadsheets and Onbase library and lastly incorporated into various atlas maps and interactive maps. The last 10 years of transportation related recommendations have been laid out in a user friendly GIS based web application. To showcase the progression of the Comprehensive Transportation Plan, a story map has been developed to reach out to both City Council members as well as the general public. Furthermore the public meeting venues, dates and public attendance have been projected on an interactive map. By the completion of the final plan, all transportation recommendations categories will be shared with a series of interactive web maps in a gallery.

To assist the Maryland Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration in its mission to make Maryland roads safer, Coastal Resources Inc. (CRI) provided geospatial analysis support to examine wildlife-vehicle collision data, traffic data, and landscape analysis. Through data analysis and subsequent field reviews of proposed SHA projects, upcoming bridge replacements were recommended for wildlife mitigation, utilizing guidance developed from CRI’s geospatial analysis. To support future projects, a comprehensive wildlife mitigation geodatabase was developed to provide baseline analysis of SHA’s bridges, and populated with the field review results. Future analysis recommendations included streamlining roadkill data collection, rolling reviews of upcoming projects to track them within the wildlife mitigation geodatabase, and wildlife corridor analysis to examine the “natural” highways used by wildlife that cross our own highways to further reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions.

Speaker: Candice Ottley-Francois, PMP, GISP

Have you ever been in a meeting that is dominated by one person, while other meeting participants with valuable information to share stay silent? Why are some people very cautious and never speak up, while others can talk for hours without taking a breath? Are these kinds of interactions holding you and your team back? How can you encourage everyone to contribute?

Effective communication is an essential skill for everyone on a project team, and it is one that you can continually improve upon no matter where you are in your career. This talk will introduce an assessment system called DiSC, which you can use gain insight into your behavior and learn ways to adapt to others to create stronger relationships. We will discuss the traits of each type of behavior, identify potential blind spots for each trait, and outline the best ways to communicate based on traits.

Wildfire is a destructive event that has potential to occur in any region where forests exist. A natural and balanced regeneration of vegetation is paramount to forest and animal health after a wildfire is extinguished. Monitoring and understanding regeneration patterns can aid environmental professionals in promoting healthy forest regeneration. This presentation focuses on post wildfire vegetation regeneration in Glacier National Park. Multiple fire perimeters from the 2003 fire season are used to identify and map the perimeters using multispectral imagery. Cheat grass, an invasive species, and western larch, a pioneer species are identified, mapped, and analyzed using remote sensing techniques. An Object-Based Image Analysis classification workflow is presented to demonstrate how species are identified and classified. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and Normalized Burn Ration (NBR) indices are utilized to identify burn areas and new vegetation growth. The results reveal regeneration behaviors of the vegetation species and how they relate to overall patterns of burning and other environmental factors. The results will show that western larch thrived in the post wildfire regeneration period by out-competing other species to occupy larger amounts of land than previously occupied. Not much competition was found between the species as cheat grass was found to occupy steeper south facing slopes while western larch was found on flatter slopes. Western larch was found to correlate strongly with moderate burns while cheat grass is found in more severely burned areas.

Netherlands Space Office (NSO) initiated a project called Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS) for Farmers under its global initiative called Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW). Under this project a small team of Advanced Chemical Industries (ACI), in Dhaka is working to democratize spatial information to paddy farmers of Bangladesh. For the first-time farmers can now see the disease and pest vulnerabilities of their lands through smartphone. For the first time, producers, retailers and policy makers are sharing a common space where everyone is spatially connected.

In ACI, a group of analysts started this journey in 2016 with a hope to identify different stages of rice with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image called Sentinel-1, starting from its transplanting stage to harvest stage. While different pest and diseases spread with different temperature and weather condition, the idea is to develop a model to map this pattern and the places where they are probable to outbreak. With the right weather forecast, the model creates a vulnerability map for each crop stage. The crop lands of Bangladesh are fragmented, heterogeneous and sometime patternless, making the whole task even more challenging. The lands here are geographically diverse, demographically intense and economically apprehensive. Fortunately, the techniques of remote sensing kept evolving.

The ArcGIS Enterprise is currently under development to systematically manage these data and develop interactive services considering multiple end-points where users can collaborate. The database collected from the satellite image analysis will be further processed and monitored with the help of Web Feature-Services and REST API endpoints to use with smartphone app called 'Fosholi'. The dashboards created using Web AppBuilder software will help to develop a decision support toolbox for academicians, students, entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program, helps address water pollution by regulating point sources that discharge pollutants to waters of the United States. As part of the NPDES municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) permit, Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) is required by law to report stormwater management and watershed restoration activity to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Multiple agencies in Prince George’s County, supported by various consultants, work together to ensure stormwater management compliance, as well as planning and executing water quality projects to improve watershed health in Prince George’s County. As part of this program, County is required to track stormwater management facilities installed within the county.

In order to effectively coordinate between various County agencies and public stakeholders to meet permit conditions, as well as produce a comprehensive annual report, it was obvious that the County needed to develop a central Geodatabase that would support the various stakeholders workflows, standardize data collection, data entry, perform summary analytics to track permit compliance, and allow for the MDE Geodatabase to be updated on an annual basis to submit.

An Enterprise Stormwater Management Geodatabase was implemented to track all NPDES data as well as support the missions of the County departments as they pertained to stormwater. Workflow manager was used to create workflows for the entry of BMP data from developers and the inspection of BMPs. A field collection application was developed using Collector and Survey 123 for the inspection of BMPs. The application also provides summary analytics based on the condition of the BMPs. Operations Dashboard was used to pull data from ESM and give summary analytics on pollutant reduction and watershed restoration progress.

MDOT SHA once relied on Esri’s ArcEngine platform for performing storm water inventory and BMP inspections. With Esri’s decision to no longer support ArcEngine, MDOT SHA pursued the development of a new data editing solution to support MDOT SHA’s requirements. Using a combination of Collector and Survey123 for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online, and custom processing scripts, MDOT SHA has developed new comprehensive workflows for inspections and stormwater inventory updates. A custom user interface was designed and implemented to support various ETL and data verification processes to move the data from a field schema back to the existing production database. Since the production release of the new tools, more than ten different consulting firms are currently performing 3,500+ inspections and hundreds of updates to various structures and conveyance features in the MDOT SHA production NPDES database utilizing the next generation solution. This presentation will outline the new solution including platforms and specific workflows for data editing. As well, future enhancements including maintenance tracking will be discussed.