GIS Day Activities

I was working at my internship location as well as at least one other person in the internship program and did not get to attend a GIS day event. I don't think there were any nearby anyway. I was able, however, to lead a discussion/presentation on the current progress of the GIS project that I am doing. For the state of Arizona, I have merged crop data (location, type of crop, type of irrigation) provided by the USGS into one large dataset, to which I have added the temperature that a crop will be damaged due to a freeze (heat damage temperature is also in the dataset). The objective is to create a risk assessment that eventually can be used as part of a National Weather Service forecast. Hopefully, once a working model is developed, the idea can be pushed up the hierarchy to the regional or national level. We have had some issues getting it to work with using the proper coordinate system, but actually QGIS handles this problem better than ArcGIS, surprisingly. Additionally, we want to go that route anyway, as many don't have an ESRI ArcGIS license (too expensive and QGIS is free). The presentation on GIS Day detailed some of that and I found that the merged dataset is really helpful to the USGS community as well, as they do not have all this data in one place, which also surprised me. The data I added to their dataset (the crop temperature and rainfall needed data) came from USGS and a website I found called EcoCrop, originally developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United States. The location of crops was originally determined via satellite imagery and later double-checked by USGS personnel on the ground. People seem to be pleased with the progress made so far, and it will be up to the rest of the team to finish getting the temperature data loading properly with QGIS to finish up the risk assessment project.