Geo Leah

For my GIS Day event, I attended a meeting for a local OpenStreetMap group called MapRVA that is working on mapping the sidewalk network in Richmond. (Here is a link to their project: https://tasks.openstreetmap.us/projects/438 ). We didn't actually do any mapping, since this was an informal social meetup at a brewery instead of a mapping session. There were four other people there with various backgrounds in GIS and mapping and various OSM projects they were working on. One of the regular members was working on mapping bike trails in addition to the group sidewalk project. Another member worked in traffic engineering and contracted with the city to design some sidewalk projects, so it was interesting to compare notes with him about working on city sidewalk projects from a different organization and with different methods, funding, and goals. We talked about comparing city-owned sidewalk maps with the OSM map they're creating, and I'm trying to figure out if there is a way ...

Recently I've finally been starting to explore the GIS part of my job more. I attended a training led by our GIS team for Cityworks, a GIS platform for service requests, inspections, and maintenance. I also talked to the GIS team about their systems and goals within our department and how I can be a part of that. They showed me a lot of very useful city maps in ArcGIS Online of existing sidewalks, planned federally- or state-funded large sidewalk projects, and sidewalk condition ratings. I’m currently testing a new method for drawing sidewalk plans using feature classes instead of graphics, which would make it easier to integrate updated sidewalk designs into the existing feature class mapping all the sidewalks in the city. The GIS team suggested this method to me, and I was excited to get to do more with GIS instead of just drawing shapes on a map with graphics. However, I’m having some difficulties reconciling the way sidewalks are drawn and divided into features in this layer wi...

When looking on the City of Richmond jobs website, I found a posting for Planner - Equitable Development (https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/richmond/jobs/4154375/planner-equitable-development?keywords=plan&pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs ). This position develops neighborhood and redevelopment plans, analyzes and presents data with ArcGIS and other applications, reviews budgets, and amends zoning and other city codes. The minimum qualifications listed are a bachelor's degree in urban planning, civil or environmental engineering, landscape architecture, etc. and three years of experience, although a combination of training and experience can be used to meet these qualifications. ArcGIS Pro is a preferred qualification, along with a master's degree and a certification as a planner. I would have to work in my current job for a few years in order to meet these qualifications, and possibly take on higher-level responsibilities in my job in order to get more experience with pl...

For my internship credit this semester, I will be counting the GIS work I do as part of my new job as an Engineering Technician in the Sidewalks division of the City of Richmond Department of Public Works. A major part of my job is conducting site visits of sidewalks that need repair and evaluating what degree of repair is needed and the level of priority given its condition and external factors such as surrounding land use and pedestrian volume. I will be designing plans for full-block sidewalk repair projects and identifying project specifications based on the existing sidewalk, landscaping, utilities, and environmental constraints, and the desired improvements based on citizen safety, ADA and city standards, historical preservation, and project feasibility. I will be drawing up these designs in ArcGIS Pro overlaid on city parcel maps so the contractors have a visual guideline to go along with the cost estimates I will create. I'm excited about this job because I am a big fan of ...

Change in NDVI by Neighborhood in Richmond, VA from 2018-2021 Introduction For my final project, I was interested in analyzing vegetation change in urban areas in Richmond, VA. I was inspired by the article “Urban environmental stewardship and changes in vegetative cover and building footprint in New York City neighborhoods (2000–2010),” in which Locke et al. (2014) assess whether there is a correlation between the number of environmental stewardship groups in New York City neighborhoods and whether that neighborhood gained or lost vegetation between 2000 and 2010. This study used Spectral Mixture Analysis on Landsat 5 imagery from 2000 and 2010 to determine the percent vegetation change for each neighborhood. For my project, I decided to measure vegetation change for each neighborhood in Richmond using the simpler method of NDVI. Remote Sensing Imagery I downloaded imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), provided by the USDA-FSA Aerial Photography Field Office. T...

In this week's lab, we performed both unsupervised and supervised classification in ERDAS. For the supervised classification, we created spectral signatures both by digitizing polygons and by region growing from seed (given a set of points representative of different land cover classes). To avoid spectral confusion, we looked at the histograms and mean plots for spectral signatures. The three bands with the least overlap between classes were chosen to display the classified image. Based on our spectral signatures, we ran a supervised classification with the maximum likelihood method and recoded to merge like classes. We also looked at the file of spectral Euclidean distance to determine where there were pixels with the greatest distance from the spectral signatures, indicating likely misclassification. The classified raster (along with the areas of each class in hectares) and the distance file for an area comprising Germantown, Maryland are shown in the map below.