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Geographic
Information Sciences (GIS) |
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website describes GIS
facilities, research, faculty and education at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Wisconsin's urban university |
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My student assistantship at the 2007 ESRI International Users Conference in San Diego was an absolutely incredible experience. I didn’t really know what to expect going in, but a number of past attendees I spoke with assured me that I would have an unbelievable time - and they were dead on. Despite my high expectations, I was still completely blown away by the sheer enormity of the event and the degree to which conference attendees dominated downtown San Diego. If you were to strike up a conversation with a random person on the street about GIS, the odds would be overwhelmingly in your favor that they would know exactly what you were talking about and you would end up exchanging business cards with them. During the week of the conference, the City literally becomes a haven for GIS junkies. The majority of the
week I spent working with and getting to know the other 50+ student
assistants.
All of us (including the organizers) adopted
a work hard/ play hard attitude. During the day, we rotated working on
a number of tasks to make the conference go as smoothly as possible.
We were also given plenty of time to explore networking opportunities,
attend workshops, and I even had the opportunity to present my research
at the map gallery. Despite the fact that we were all complete strangers, we evolved into
a pretty tight-knit group by the end of the week. When the conference
ended and we said our farewells, we could hardly believe that we had
only known one other for just one week. Many of us have remained in touch
both personally and professionally and there is already talk of having
a reunion at the AAG next year. Anyone with a passion for GIS should
apply for this assistantship next year. Not only is the conference a
great place to network with those in the GIS industry that share your
similar interests, it is also a whole lot of fun.
I am working on a joint project between the National Park Service and the Ecological Forecasting Lab here at NASA. The Ecological Forecasting Lab uses MODIS sensor's LAI (Leaf Area Index) product as an input to their TOPS (Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System) Model. The TOPS model provides ecological fore-casts and now-casts for park managers. Even though there has been extensive validation on the MODIS sensor, by large teams of scientists with months of field work, the NPS wants to further increase their confidence in the MODIS LAI product over Yosemite's steep topography and heterogeneous landscape. Our
team conducted two weeks of field work in Yosemite. We are using a 2007 Landsat image to produce a Reduced Simple Ratio vegetation index map of Yosemite. That RSR image will be run through a regression analysis with LAI ground-measurements to produce a ground-truthed LAI map of Yosemite that will be re-sampled to 1km MODIS resolution. The ground-truthed LAI map and the MODIS LAI product map will be compared. We are still processing our data. In the next two weeks, I have to fly down to Langley, VA to give a presentation on this to the director of Earth Sciences at NASA. Little more intense than Geog 600… =) Dusty
In
MUP and Certificate student Mike says his internship project "was a brownfield site in Milwaukee that needed to be excavated to be in compliance with residential soil standards. We used a GPS to collect topographic data on the site as well as manage the depths of the excavation. We used GIS to manage the GPS data collected on site, identify coordinates to stake-out the excavation areas, perform cut/fill's to calculate the soil excavation, and create high quality map documents." Link
to Online Article---
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prospective students, faculty from many different disciplines, and
a number of outside public and private organizations. In that year,
two GIS courses were introduced to graduate and undergraduate students
from various academic programs at the University. As time went on
and more courses were added, more faculty and students became aware
of the vast potential that GIS technology offered in so many different
disciplines. 
At its annual User Conference in San Diego this past July (2005),
the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) named UWM’s
Department of Urban Planning as a recipient of its Special Achievement
in GIS (SAG) award. The SAG award ceremony was held on July 27 at
the San Diego convention center and presided over by Jack Dangermond,
the president and founder of ESRI. 
In
the evening, we had more than our share of fun. We checked out some local
bands and went to the beach a few times. The
instructors took us all to a San Diego Padres baseball game as well – on
their bill. 
We
laid out a sampling grids representative of 25, 28m resolution
Landsat pixels. We
sampled data using Digital Hemispheric Photography and the LAI-2000, both
corrected for vegetation clumping in coniferous tree stands with
a TRAC (Tracing Radiation and Architecture of Canopies) instrument.
Mike Kumbera's article in the Winter 2006/2007 issue of ARCNEWS,
Symbiont and the City of Milwaukee were recognized for innovative
use of geographic information system (GIS) and global positioning
system (GPS) technologies as part of a remedial excavation project
performed by Symbiont at a brownfields property located in Milwaukee.
ARCNEWS is published quarterly by the Environmental Systems Research
Institute (ESRI), and is the largest GIS publication in the world,
with an estimated global readership of more than 600,000 professionals.
