Minutes of the 42nd Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on November 12, 2019, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm at the University of Utah - Gardner Commons (260 Central Campus Dr) in Salt Lake City. There were about 100 people in attendance today.
Business
Adrian Welsh, SLUG Board
Welcome to the Gardner Commons at the University of Utah. Thanks to the University of Utah Digit Lab for hosting and sponsoring the lunch.
This meeting’s lunch was sponsored by University of Utah Digit Lab. 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 Neal Fraser, SLUG Board member.
Phoebe McNeally, DIGIT Lab
The next UGIC Conference will be May 4th through the 8th 2020 in Bryce Canyon at the Ruby’s Inn.
Presentations
Patrick McGranaghan – Harris Kocher Smith from Denver
Patrick runs a popular map forum, which has over 800,000 subscribers, where they have map discussions and can get help with finding maps they are looking for. Patrick talked about four different map themes: natural science, political alignment, language, and history. Here are links to Patrick’s website and twitter.
Neal Fraser – Gateway Mapping
Neal talked about data accuracy and the implications that can come from the precision of data being off. He reminded us that we are professional modelers of the earth and we need to be conscientious in our work.
Yangyi Wu – PhD Student at the University of Utah
Yangyi discussed how firm suburbanization is the normal process of urban sprawl. He specifically looked at two theories to explain firm suburbanization: the neoclassical theory and the human capital theory.
Patrick Sullivan – 2nd Year Master’s Student at the University of Utah
Patrick talked about the methods he used to model wildland firefighter travel rates. He collected firefighter GPS points that he was able to calculate slope and travels rate between. He plans to continue building models to compare firefighter travel rates to known travel rate functions.
GIS Humor
Zlatko Grebenar - SLUG Board
The next meeting will be February 2020, more info coming soon.
If anyone is interested in being on the board please reach out, we do have some board members who will be stepping down in the near future. 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!