Minutes of the 46th Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on May 19, 2021, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm virtually via Zoom. There were about 76 people in attendance today.
Business
Adrian Welch, SLUG Board
Welcome to SLUG’s second virtual meeting. The meeting will be recorded and put on youtube so if anyone who could not attend today will be able to watch what they missed here.
Presentations
Jessie Pechmann – GIS in the Humanitarian Sector
Jessie spent the last 3.5-4 years working for IMPACT Initiatives in the Middle East, splitting time across Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. By using collected data and performing analysis, this provides information on the humanitarian needs. Jessie and her team used many different map types to provide information on where people needed help. The most common of these map types were project coverage, infrastructure/reference, and population/displacement. Jessie also used remote sensing to get information and data when they could not access certain regions. Some of Jessie’s takeaways from her time spent at IMPACT were that knowing your goal and your audience helps to make good maps that allow you to inform and supplement communications.
Natalie Young – Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, University of Utah
Natalie discussed some of what’s new in Utah’s 2020 census geography and the Kem C Gardner Policy Institute created a 7-page fact sheet that touches on some of the changes. Geography is fundamental to census data and helps to give users some geographic context for the upcoming census demographic data. Some of the geographic changes that were made include boundary changes for cities, towns, and metro townships, as well as census tracts. A story map for the census tracts in Utah can be found here.
We are hoping for our next meeting to be sometime in August and will most likely be held virtually again. More information to come on this.
Check out our website for updates, contact info, or to sign up for our newsletter.
Thank you to our presenters and for joining us virtually. If you have any ideas for a presentation or any other matter, please contact a SLUG board member. We welcome short or long presentations on any projects that you might be working on that might benefit others. We appreciate your interest and support!