Minutes of the 33rd Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on August 9, 2017, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm at the Department of Natural Resources (1594 W. North Temple) in Salt Lake City. There were about 96 in attendance.
Business
Tom Toronto, SLUG Board
Welcome to DNR. Thanks to DNR for hosting and UGIC for sponsoring the lunch.
This meeting’s lunch was sponsored by UGIC. 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.
Thanks to Ray Montgomery for being on the board since the beginning. We have a new board member, Zlatko Grebenar from Sandy City. Kaitlin Marousis is also leaving the board; thanks to Kaitlin for being on the board and all her efforts. Her position on the Board is now open. If anyone is interested in serving contact the SLUG group at saltlakeusersgroup@gmail.com.
Bert Granberg, AGRC
Status of some GIS legislation in Washington, D.C. One specific bill would be improving COGO.
Dave Henrie, UGIC
UGIC Conference 2018 will be held in Vernal. More details to come.
Presentations
Mike Maynor, Light Pollution
Various studies have been conducted on light pollution over the decades. It started as mainly research in the field of astronomy, but has expanded to studying the effects of light pollution related to ecology, environment, economy, crime and geography. Light pollution is very localized and solutions can be found at the local level. Mike mentioned North Fork Park just outside of Ogden, which is very accessible yet, provides a unique dark sky experience for people living along the Wasatch Front. Through education, the effects of light pollution can be solved and studies found that people accepted dimmer lighting after learning more about the different options and it’s effects.
Ryan Cosby, Gateway Mapping, ArcGIS API for Python
Ryan talked about the ArcGIS API for Python and the ability to access ArcGIS Online content and users in the scripting environment. A good code editor to start with is Jupyter Notebook and a great resource for API references can be found HERE. Showed several examples like generating a map on the fly, query specific feature classes and display in table. The API can also be utilized to count # of layers in feature service, check how many credits an organization has left among many other possibilities.
Buck Ehler, – Utah DNR, Brian Head Fire
The Brian Head Fire burned more than 71,000 acres and cost $33 million to fight. It burned for 6 weeks and was contained by late July. Incident command post was in Parowan where four GIS specialists worked and produced maps 16 hours a day. Buck showed daily progression maps of the fire and how Survey123 was used to collect and display fire data. In the end, there were no fatalities or injuries due to the brave efforts of many firefighters.
GIS Humor
Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board
Ellen meets a 5-Year-Old Geography Expert. You can see this clip HERE.
Thank you to our presenters and our venue. If you have any ideas for a presentation or any other matter, please contact a SLUG board member. We appreciate your interest and support!