If someone told me I spent 30 hours on this project I would not be surprised. I made a lot of mistakes but learned a lot. I really wanted to get it finish before my kids went on fall break so I spent up to 6 hours a day working on it to try to get it done in one week. It really was a little of everything that we learned throughout the semester. I think my biggest takeaways were:
1. How to use StoryMaps. I wasn't sure if I'd use this method versus a PowerPoint. I really wanted to since I hadn't done it before and I'm all about learning new programs when I can. I found it very intuitive and easy to use.
2. Make ONE layer and use the field mode to differentiate. I knew how to do this. I don't know why but when I dove into the project I was a little overwhelmed and not quite sure what I was doing. I told myself "just take a tiny step forward, what is the first step you need to take" and that led to me trying to build a map of the conservation lands and wetlands within the corridor. I knew to use select by attributes and I just got a little click-happy with the "export features to new layer" button. I should have used the "set field to..." option under the field calculator more often to keep my layers together. I was drowning in map layers!
3. You can't perform a union on point data. There may be a workaround. But when I went to perform a union on a layer I made the above mistake with I got the notification that my features had to be polygons to run that tool.
4. The amount of things I can do with python are seemingly infinite. While trying to correct mistake #2, I discovered a youtube video that helped me reclass one of my layers using python after a union. There are so many options! Definitely looking forward to learning what other tools I have at my disposal with coding.
The link to my StoryMap is: StoryMap
I also created a transcript to go along with my StoryMap with significantly more detail: Transcript
I spent 40 hours on the final project the last week alone, and was surprised at how much time investment it involved! I finally wrapped things up at 9:20 that Friday night. Totally agree with you, it was a very good learning experience
ReplyDeleteAlso nice job on the Story Map! Prior to the start of the project, I thought doing a Story Map would be a good way to get introduced to it, but by midweek, I knew there would be no time.
It’s definitely been a lot more time intensive than I had anticipated, although some of that is on me- I had a hard time coming to a stopping point with last weeks land classification exercise. I chose to do the undergrad certificate since I hadn’t been exposed to GIS before but I still sort of want to do my own project for the Remote Sensing instead of the given one. But also am a bit hesitant knowing it’ll be so time intensive during the holidays. Will be interesting to see what everyone chooses to do!
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