JCocoGenitti GIS Blog

In our 7th lab, our objective was to use data downloaded from the MASSGIS website regarding land use in Massachusetts to see the changes that occurred from 1971 to 1999. I was given the town of Sudbury, MA, a town in the Eastern part of MA, just west of Boston. Using ArcMap, I created two maps of the town showing land use, one for 1971 and one for 1999. I then took the data from each of those regarding acreage of the different categories of land use and turned it into pie charts using Microsoft Excel. I found this to be very interesting, seeing how the land use changed in a time of clear urbanization. Patterns followed pretty mcuh how I suspected they would: A decrease in forest and agricultural land, and an increase in built-up land. I think it would be even more interesting to see what the land use is now in comparison to what it was 18 years ago.

For lab 6, our GIS class went outside and noted the locations of several maintenance issues around the Bridgewater State University campus. The screenshot below shows where all of our points are. Clicking on the image below will take you to the web application I have made, which will allow you to actually interact with the map and see what kinds of maintenance issues exist around BSU's campus.

For lab 5, I worked with Kathleen. We created a map showing property damage caused by tornadoes in the Gulf Coast states in 2016-2017. We got our data from the NOAA website. We used this data not only to create our map, but also to create graphs to show which states had more tornadoes and also which months had more tornadoes to show the seasonality of tornadoes. Our work showed us some correlations between number of tornados and property damage, but not enough to show that there is a direct correlation. Many of the tornadoes caused little to no property damage, happening away from structures and people. Our results showed that the damaged caused by tornadoes is completely up to chance, as they are so unpredictable by nature.

In our fourth lab session, we used data collected by the USGS in 2002 regarding the locations of Diamondback Terrapin Turtles to create maps that portray the findings of this project. The map on the left shows all locations at which Terrapin activity was recorded. The map on the right shows areas in which Terrapins were recorded at a rate of more than 2 Terrapins per 10 square meters. This data was used to calculate the destruction of Terrapin habitat based on where previous nests were and which ones are still being used now.  For access to the data used in this project and for more information about the survey, visit https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/terrapin/index.cfm