Project

Identify a biophysical, human, or environmental problem that requires or would benefit from your newfound knowledge of spatial analysis using GIS. Describe the problem that you are interested in. Provide geographic context to the problem. Discuss what kind of GIS analysis you want to use and the implementation strategy you have chosen. Present simple diagrams or maps that illustrate your approach. Apply your approach to real-world data and present the results of your project in oral form. Students are also required to write a term paper based on the final project.

• The intermediate deliverables count towards 10% of the final project grade
• A presentation which will count towards 25%.
• the term paper counts towards the remaining 65%

Note: the total project counts as 20% of your final grade, see the syllabus page for more details

In order to help keep you accountable, there will be several intermediate deliverables due throughout the semester. This will be done in two stages:

A proposal: All students are required to write a proposal for the final project. In the proposal, you will describe the project you are planning to carry out, the GIS datasets needed, and GIS analysis functions may be used in the project. You will review the literature, what methods and GIS analysis functions have been used solving similar problems.

A draft of your paper: To gage your progress and allow me time to provide you feedback, you will submit a draft of your paper which should at minimum contain an introduction and methods sections.

Each student should plan on a 10-minutes presentation of your final project to the class (~7 minutes, 2 minutes for questions and a minute for transitions). This can take several forms, including but not limited to:

• A slide deck
• A research poster
• A diorama

Presentation order and grading rubric

note: The breakdown of the presentation will be as follows: 40% will be the average of your classmates grades 10% will be for correctly filling in the grading sheet (participation) the remaining 50% will be based on my grade.

The paper should be far more comprehensive than your presentation, and reflective of your college education. Spelling, grammar, and coherency are expected, and the paper should include the following sections:

• Introduction
  • The introduction should start broad and narrow in. Make sure you provide enough background on your topic so that a non-expert could pick up your paper and have enough context to understand what the problem is, why spatial analysis is needed to solve your problem. Review in literature what methods and spatial analysis have been used solving similar problems. Be sure to include a statement like “The objective of this project is to …”.
• Methods
  • Describe the strategy you solve the problem using GIS and any other necessary methods. Describe the statistic method, computer model, GIS analytic functions / operations you use in the problem solving process. Because this is a GIS class this section should include some of the finer details and methods used that would not normally be included in a peer reviewed or technical article. Diagrams are especial helpful to understand your strategy. This should include a dedicated Study Area and Analysis subsection where you describe the study area.
• Results
  • Here you present your findings, including final figures and the results (but not the meanings) of any statistical analysis
• Discussion & Conclusions
  • This portion should briefly summarize the topic and question you answered with this project, the methods you employed and what your findings are. Discuss the findings from your problem-solving process. Evaluate your methodology. Discuss the usefulness and limitation of the analytic functions in GIS. Typically, this section also contains recommendations, both for what steps should be taken and the next research questions that should be addressed by future work.
• References
  • Use whatever formatting you like. I HIGHLY recommend a citation manager (see syllabus)

These papers will be graded using the following criteria, with A-F ranges translated into their respective numerical counterparts.

Helpful? tips
One of the things that helps me approach papers like this is to find a similar paper in academic literature or a professional report and mirror it’s structure. Feel free to do the same. This should also go without saying but if you turn in a paper with screenshots and are not pointing out UI features I will automatically take 10 points off the paper grade. You are here to learn ArcMap, demonstrate you have done so.

The following are due throughout the semester (dates tentative and subject to change with notice):

Proposal (1 ~ 3 pages, due Oct 10^th)

Introduction (due Nov. 26^th)

Presentations (Week of Dec 3^rd)

Full Term Paper (6 ~ 10 pages, due on Dec 17^th)