Wildly GISticulating

Well that sped up in a hurry. Quite a day today. Not only did we have quite a few lectures but the tutorials went at light speed. It was all I could do to stay anywhere near caught up. First off, Matt Becker introduced what his hydrogeology work onKauaiwould consist of, this being kayaking around and taking temperature samples of the water in an attempt to map where groundwater was interacting with the ocean water. I think the prospecting of kayaking all day got people pretty excited about his project… We then got a lecture about eCognition, a software which allows you take a remotely sensed image and classify what you see in it to make it into a more usable map. This is probably the tool I am most interested in from this program but I struggled mightily to keep up, so I’ll have to do my homework on that one. Following this, Dr. Wechsler gave an introduction to raster data, including how it works behind the scenes in ArcGis. She wanted to stress that certain aspects of it are programmed by others and their choices affect how our data comes out. Further, how grids appear is highly dependent on factors such as where they are placed. It is important, then, to make sure you look deeper at your results and don’t take them as any sort of objective “truth” as there is inherently subjectivity worked into the methods. Finally we looked how to create composite orthophotos. This was really cool. We were able to take a series of photographs and turn them into a 3D image. Rad. After learning this tool we were sent out to take a bunch of pictures of something and redo the exercise with these images. A few of us, fed up with being cooped up all day while it was so beautiful out decided to head to the beach for our picture taking. While our grand plans failed homework wise (didn’t take enough pictures maybe?) it was good to get outside and active. We (or at least I) ended up coming back to the dorms to take pictures of a simpler object for the assignment. This still didn’t work out perfectly, but hopefully we’ll get some more practice to be able to figure all this out.