Minutes of the 48th Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on November 17, 2021, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm virtually via Zoom. There were about 55 people in attendance today.
Business
Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board
Happy GIS Day and welcome to SLUG’s fourth 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.
We are hoping the next SLUG meeting might be in person, sometime in February but more to come in the new year.
Save the date for the next UGIC conference which will be in Vernal from May 9-13, 2022. Check out their website for more information and updates about the conference.
Presentations
Siona Roberts – University of Utah
Siona talked about how she used Survey123 to help Carlton County with Covid-19 vaccine distribution. Carlton County had a drive through Covid-19 vaccine clinic and with the help of Survey123 the volunteers were able to easily check people in. To go with the survey, Siona created a dashboard that was able to be filtered to keep the list of people checking in as clean and precise as possible. Siona learned through this project that having GIS staff presence on an incident command system is very valuable and the collaboration was key for this project to be successful.
Patrick Sullivan – University of Utah
Patrick discussed his methods for finding methane plumes in remote sensing data. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that has a warming potential that’s more powerful than CO2. Patrick was able to incorporate deep learning which is a form of machine learning that is inspired by our brain’s neurons. Deep learning will help in the future to find where methane point sources are imaged. Looking forward, Patrick is hoping to train on the permian dataset for much longer as he continues his research.
GIS Humor
Zlatko Grebenar - SLUG Board
Josh Carrell – Utah State University
Josh did a lightning talk on his master’s research at USU. Josh's research looks at the importance of ensemble species distribution models in conservation planning. Josh used a few different types of modeling (such as species distribution modeling and predictive modeling) which helped him to understand that models have bias and predict differently. And how the mean averages show spatial relationships among models.
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!
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