Internship Highlights

I'm almost halfway through my internship and am excited to share what I've been up to. My main goals for the semester were to create a geodatabase with historic resources and imagery for a large site recording project at my organization, create a geodatabase to use to create maps and shapefiles for recording sites, and conduct several GPR studies and organize the findings in GIS.

So far, I've been able to pull USGS maps for our project area spanning from the 1910s through the 1980s. I found a lot of these already georeferenced through the USGS topoView, so it was a matter of figuring out which quad maps I needed. I scoured these maps for cemeteries and churches, creating separate feature layers for each and digitizing the location of these sites on the old maps. I have more recent data to compare these locations to to ensure that all have been recorded in the Florida Master Site File (FMSF). I've gone through the cemeteries and have not found any new sites, but have not yet sorted through all of the churches.

I have also started to pull historic aerials from UF's Aerial Photography collections for the project area from 1943 and 1960. These I've had to georeference myself using the modern aerial imagery. It's easier in areas with roads and streets, as many of these haven't change very much in the past 80 years. However, it's been more difficult in the marshy areas of the project area. But these areas have also been the most interesting to see change through time, as you can see oxbows become cut off from the main channel, or new flow paths develop into bigger channels.

The geodatabase for recording and updating sites has been far easier and straightforward. I downloaded the current FMSF data to use in updating site boundaries and also added layout templates from my colleague for creating pdfs of the maps. I download our data layer from ArcGIS online every so often to get the points and polygons to aid in redrawing old boundaries and drawing new boundaries. I've completed at least a dozen shapefiles and maps this fall already.

As for the GPR work, I've conducted several surveys starting back in the late summer and continuing into the fall. I've created online maps from three of the sites in order to share with our community partners as well as to be able to pull them up in Field Maps while on site. We marked all of the areas with high potential for burials in two of the cemeteries. I still have another set of survey data to process, and have one more day of field work on my calendar. 

Here's a photo of our intern, Maria, working with a community partner to collect GPR data.

Over all, I wish I had more time to spend on all of these projects! I'm finding more and more how much I love GIS. I'm also thinking of all the ways we can deploy it in other projects.