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Showing posts from June, 2024

Using USDA's Web Soil Survey

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My personal review: A tool for Professionals and Land Owners/Land Managers Web Soil Survey is an incredibly helpful and powerful tool for customized soil investigations. Whether you're a landowner planning a garden or building a shed, or a professional environmental scientist needing detailed soils data for reports, this tool offers a wealth of features tailored to your selected location. Starting is straightforward: You select your "Area of Interest" by either uploading a shapefile or navigating to your area and draw a bounding box for investigation. For this exercise, I chose to investigate my own property.  I used my property as my "Area of Interest"  Once you've chosen your location you can start exploring all the features and really "digging" into the soils information. The tool allows you to explore the physical properties of soil in great detail, providing valuable information about flooding frequency, landforms, drainage classes, depth to w...

Climate Links for the Southeast

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To understand the biodiversity in the Southeast, and to gain insight into the threats to biodiversity there, one needs an understanding of climate changes and current conditions. These are a few resources I found to be helpful: Southeast Regional Climate Center (SERCC) Image from SERCC, accessed 6.27.24 The Southeast Regional Climate Center has a ton of climate resources, and is a user-friendly and informative site established by UNC Chapel Hill. This site has a broad collection of climate data focused specifically on the Southeast.  Their " Climate Perspectives Too l" is interactive and allows the user to look at different variables across the region on specific dates, both observed and predicted.  This is really a one-stop shop for the Southeast climate data. It also includes links to other data sources, and most of its maps are provided by NOAA or are made from data extracted from NOAA. It was interesting to look at the precipitation maps and compare them from 2002...

Exploring Mapping Tools

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Google My Maps - A Brief Review I'm a pretty experienced cartographer, and I've been using ArcMap desktop since 2012, and ArcPro since about 2019. I was interested to hear about Google's new mapping tool, Google My Maps, and was intrigued to give it a try. Specifically I wanted to find out whether or not it would be something I'd find useful at work for making quick maps. The interface is really user friendly, and for anyone who has even a little experience with Google Maps or Google Earth - using it comes rather naturally. I like a few things about this tool.  First, I like how quickly you can open it and get your map started. Unlike ArcPro, it's easy to make a new map without having to go through the whole "start a new project" process. I also like that you can tie your points of interest to photos easily - easier than in ArcMap in my opinion, and I like the functionality when you click on your point; just like in Google Maps/Earth, you see your descript...

Ecology in 30 Minutes - An Introduction

So I put together a quick set of slides to introduce the basics of ecology. Enjoy!