Course Project Information

ENV 859 - Geospatial Data Analytics   |   Fall 2024   |   Instructor: John Fay  

General comments

You are expected to complete a course project for this class. You can envision this project from two perspectives:

  • First, it is an opportunity to address a geospatial task associated with your masters project (or any other research in which you are involved).
  • Second, it’s an opportunity to show off your ability to apply skills learned in this and other geospatial courses.

The best projects, then, are ones you benefit from and that demonstrate mastery of course materials. Of course, in evaluating your work, I’ll be more interested in the latter. But… I fully encourage you to use this project as a component of your larger research interests. Furthermore, you’re far more likely to delve deeper into a project if it’s on a topic you enjoy or are engaged in.

What is an appropriate course project?

In previous years, a typical course project involved creating an interactive ArcGIS tool, often one that called a Python script, to facilitate a certain geospatial analysis. While this certainly remains a viable course project, the tools and technology have expanded such that I want to expand the possibilities of what you can submit.

What, then, constitutes an”appropriate” course project is a fairly open ended question, and one that can only be answered through checking with me so that we can ensure that the scope, design, and feasibility of your project is in line with those of your peers.

To ensure this happens, I require a number of ‘check-ins’ reporting the status of your project. This begins with a rough sketch of what you’d like to work on, which is then shaped into a more formal project proposal, a progress report, and finally your project submission. (These will be discussed in more detail later on…) I also strongly encourage you to schedule meetings with me at any point during the semester to chat about your project should you have any questions.

Narrowing in on a course project idea

Some of you may not yet have a course project idea. Or you may have an idea, but aren’t sure whether its scope is appropriate for this class. That’s to be expected. As mentioned above, a proper course topic requires at least a few discussions with me.

However, I can’t stress enough the importance of developing a project idea sooner versus later. Talk to me. Talk with other faculty. Find a topic that interests you and we can discuss ways to mold your ideas into a workable project. A well designed project is far more likely to succeed than one put together at the last moment. GIS is as much about time management as learning and applying technical skills.

To motivate you toward this end, I require the following submissions from you (check the Deliverables Calendar) for due dates)

  • Initial project proposal - part of your course survey

    This is to initiate the conversation about your course project. Jot down any idea(s) you have in mind for a course project. Try to be as specific as you can (but don’t worry if you don’t know):

    • What question will it answer?
    • What data might be required?
    • Can the workflow be done in ArcGIS or are other technologies needed?
    • What might the output look like? Are there key assumptions required to execute the analysis?

    Feel free to be ambitious. You may only have a vague idea of a project, but take some time and reflect what’s required to get it done. The further you can get here, the more I can help and the easier things will be later on.

    Also, a big challenge is how to involve course concepts when you don’t know what those concepts are. I can provide more specific feedback with respect to that the more specific you can be.

  • Refined project proposal

    Mid way through the semester, you’ll have had more time to clarify (or completely alter) your project topic. In this refined project proposal, you’ll lay the blueprint for your work. Specifically, you’ll address the questions asked in the initial project proposal, adding a schematic of the workflow involved and a list of any potential obstacle to successfully completing your project (e.g. will you actually get the data you need? can a certain analysis be done?)

    Again, I will review your comments and help you in any way I can. This is also another spot where I can evaluate the feasibility of your project and work with you do adjust if needed.

  • Project workflow

    Towards the end of the term, I will ask you to report on progress since I provided feedback to your refined project proposal. No deduction will be made if the answer is ‘none’, but it will be taken into consideration if you failed to overcome an obstacle that could have easily been identified and beaten down in your final submission.

    You are also welcome to submit a draft of your project and I will provide comments and suggestions.

  • Final submission

    This is your final submission. We will discuss the details of how and were your work gets submitted closer to the date

Some suggestion for project ideas

Your project submission doesn’t actually have to be a start-to-finish analysis. Instead, you can focus on specific portions of the data analytic pipeline.

  • Wrangle a dataset: Take a messy dataset or multiple datasets and process these raw data into formats that facilitate further analysis. Show off your skills in wrangling data using techniques learned in class. Be prepared, however, to either provide interesting summaries of your processed data or describe what insights this processed dataset could provide.

  • Tell a story from your data: If your data are fairly clean, demonstrate your ability to extract information out of the data to tell a story. The focus here will be on visualization of the data via maps, plots, story maps, or perhaps interactive dashboards.
  • Pose and test a hypotheses using techniques learned in class. The emphasis here would be the full data analytics workflow from raw data to answering a posed question.
  • Develop a geospatial tool: Develop an interesting spatial analysis workflow that can be applied to continuously collected or standard formatted datasets, e.g. stream flow data, fishing catch data, data subset for a user-specified location. Package this workflow as an interactive tool that you or others can use to generate useful outputs for different input values.

Grading rubric

Because course projects can take so many shapes and forms, my rubric for evaluating them is somewhat dynamic. Each project should have the following components, but I leave it to you propose the weightings of each in your final submission: Minimum weightings are provided and sum weighting must equal 100…)

Overall project organization & documentation (10)

  • Does your submission have an overall professional appearance, or does it look rushed, incomplete, and sloppy. Extraneous materials removed? Files, map layers, etc. named intelligently? Does your workspace have a logical structure and are items found in intuitive locations?

Documentation (10)

  • Are instructions or other documentation clear and easy to follow? Does understanding what you did involve excessive and unnecessary effort? Do you provide adequate explanation of concepts/processes. Are assumptions of your analysis abundantly clear.

Obtaining and wrangling geospatial data (5-75)

  • What level of effort was required in obtaining your data and getting into formats that allow you to process it. For example, was it just a clean shapefile provided to you, or did you have to develop code to scrape 1000 on-line datasets, clean, and join/merge them?

Spatial data Analysis (5-75)

  • How complex was your overall spatial analysis? Are you applying a few, common ArcGIS Pro tools or have you developed an innovative and complex workflow? Is your analysis a one-time static process, or can it handle interactive inputs in a stable, robust format?

Results (5-75)

  • Are your findings presented clearly and aesthetically? What level of effort was involved: did you simply print out a table, or did you select informative and interesting plots of your results? Are they interactive? Do they answer a posed hypothesis or tell a story? Are they revealing?

Commentary/Post mortem (5)

  • Did your work go as planned? What would you do differently if you were to repeat your project? Did you learn anything unexpected that would be useful to share? Are there concepts you felt should have been covered better in the class?

Final words

A reminder that I am here to help you, and I have a sincere interest in all of you banging out some amazing work. If you have any concerns at any point, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or at TA. If you’ve been stuck on something for an inordinate amount of time, talk! Often a pair of fresh eyes can do wonders!

And lastly, don’t procrastinate too much. We all do it, but spend a few hours a week on this and you’ll be so much better off. Plus, there’s little worse than facing a GIS problem with a deadline looming – except for facing a scripting issue!