2021 Updates

Even though it has been quite some time since we have had an update, the PLS data entry continues to plug along! The transition to working remotely during the worst of the pandemic was difficult. However, the outstanding students, Annie Pappas, Ian Shuman, and Kyle McAvoy who have been working on the PLS project since the fall of 2019, we were able to set up a new organization system for entering and tracking data and the students transitioned to using the opensource QGIS compared to ArcGIS that we originally used in the lab. Since the fall of 2019, Annie, Ian, and Kyle have entered data for 144 townships in Illinois and Indiana. We are currently in the process of working through our QA/QC process which will be followed by georeferencing the checked data to add it to our current datasets for each state. You can find the archived data entered and georeferenced to date here for Indiana and Illinois. Over the last year we were also able to work with Lindsay Darling, a graduate student at Purdue University who has connections with Marlin Bowles and the Morton Arboretum. Lindsay helped us access and understand PLS township data from northern Illinois that Marlin had previously entered. The students have double checked the PLS data from 77 townships from Marlin and we are currently in the process of formatting the data so it can be seamlessly incorporated into our current dataset.