Minutes of the 51st Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on August 31, 2022 from 11:30 am to 1:00 at the Utah Department of Natural Resources (1594 W. North Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84114). There were about 50 people in attendance today.
Business
Adrian Welsh, SLUG Board
Welcome to SLUG’s 51st meeting! We would like to thank the Utah Department of Natural Resources for hosting us. And to UGIC for sponsoring lunch. We are hoping to have our next SLUG in person again in November. We will send out more information as we get closer to November.
GIS Day is coming in November and SLUG will be involved with the planning and hosting of the Salt Lake County GIS Day, most likely to take place on November 16, 2022. UGIC has agreed to help sponsor and fund this event. We are seeking someone from the SLUG community to volunteer as the GIS Day Coordinator as well as others to volunteer their time during GIS Day. We would appreciate any and all help/support that we can get for this day and UGIC will help get us started with providing contacts and other initial planning tidbits. If you are interested in any capacity (coordinator, assistant coordinator, outreach volunteer, day-of volunteer, etc. etc. etc.), please reach out to us and let us know. Since this day is approaching quickly, we would like to get started with the planning soon!
The next UGIC conference will be in May at the Zermatt in Midway, Utah. Keep an eye on their website for registration.
Maps on the Hill will be coming up on February 14, 2023! Keep an eye on UGRC’s website for a sign up for booths and applications to submit a map to the calendar.
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 a SLUG Board member.
Presentations
Jessica Shapiro and Buck Ehler - Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
At the DWR, the Wildlife Migration Initiative has been leading in GIS location tracking technology for a few years now. The DWR tracks big game and smaller animals through GPS collars and pit tags. Before the DWR migrated to a cloud native approach, they had about 2,000 collars tracked which provided 7 million locations in their database. This provided challenges to tracking wildlife which were they were unable to perform queries without long wait times and timing out. And their on premise infrastructure was not built for scale as their data grew. The DWR moved to a more modern approach of using the cloud to enhance the data they were collecting. Since moving to this approach, they have 9,000 collars with about 37 million locations. With this new approach they now have a stable, scalable, and adaptable platform which has provided their agency and their partners new insights into wildlife movements, impacts, and behavior just to name a few. To learn more about the Wildlife Migration Initiative, check out their website.
Melissa Blue - Cottonwood Heights
Melissa talked about Cottonwood Heights emergency management and what they are doing to be prepared. They have an annual shakeout drill to practice for if there isn’t any internet, phones, or cell service. By using a GIS map, they are able to see different households' statuses to see patterns and hot spots to send out resources within the first few hours after an emergency. They have volunteers that check every household in the city and send data via radio airwaves to a command center at city hall. Thanks to ArcGIS Pro, they now have one project instead of many ArcMap projects that they would have to open which saves a lot of time and keeps all the data in one spot and makes it easier for volunteers to input their data.
GIS Humor
Zlatko Grebenar - SLUG Board
Thank you to our presenters and for joining us in person. 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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