08-08-2018

August 8th, 2018 - SLUG Meeting DiGISt

Minutes of the 37th Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on August 8, 2018, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm at DNR (1594 W North Temple) in Salt Lake City. There were about 87 in attendance.

This meeting’s lunch was sponsored by Nearmap. If you have any contacts that would be willing to ‘sponsor’ a lunch by providing food/ drinks in exchange for their advertising at the meeting, contact Tom Toronto, SLUG Board member.

Business:

Adrian Welsh, SLUG Board

· Welcome to Department of Natural Resources. Thanks to DNR for hosting and Nearmap for sponsoring the lunch.

Josh Groeneveld, UGIC Secretary

· UGIC looking at possible location for next year’s meeting (Park City or Midway).

Luis Farfan, Nearmap

· Luis talked about some services that Nearmap provides such as high resolution and oblique imagery. Nearmap captures imagery multiple times during the year for most of the metros in the US.

Presentations:

Eric Edgley – Utah Division of Wildlife Resources

Eric talked about different ways his division is using GPS trackers to follow wildlife migration and see the different patterns. The Division of Wildlife Resources uses a web application internally to display data from the GPS transmitters. Some of the tools in the application are the ability to add track lines and create animations. DWR also uses the data to visualize wildlife corridors to plan and prevent mortalities.

Tom Thompson, Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining

Tom showed how drone technology and remote sensing is helping the agency capture data to make better decisions. Autonomous flight software as well as photogrammetric processing software has helped capture and process images by the drones. The collection of point clouds and digital surface models by the drones has enabled advanced spatial analysis to be conducted.

Geography Humor Segment

Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board

Bizarre Borders – Canada and USA. You can see this clip HERE. You can see many of the videos we’ve shown (not including the above one) at SLUG meetings on our own YouTube channel HERE.

Lee Eschler, Utah Division of Water Rights

The Division of Water Rights has been working on checking and verifying water rights. The agency has also started to use ArcGIS online, which has resulted into using the Python language to update hosted feature services automatically.

The next meeting is on Tuesday, November 13 at 11:00 AM at the University of Utah.

Thank you to our Nearmap and DNR! If you have any ideas for a presentation or any other matter, please contact a SLUG board member. We appreciate your interest and support!