Project management and teamwork are fundamental aspects of work in GIScience. For this project, students formed teams of no more than four students. The teams worked together to answer a series of questions about a subsection of British Columbia\u2019s Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) by applying the GIS analysis techniques that they learned in the course. The students formatted the answers to these questions as a final written report with maps and delivered processed data (a final shapefile). The teams planned an implementation strategy including identifying required data, assigned responsibilities, performed GIS analyses, and managed group time over two-three weeks of implementation.\u00a0Some of the central questions included:<\/p>\n
Below we provide an outline of the project process from the standpoint of the staff.<\/p>\n
For this project, the students were encouraged to identify their own open data sources and shown ways to access open data. However, the students were\u00a0provided with shapefiles of their area of interest (AOI) subsections (open data) and access to two proprietary data sets which are further explained below.\u00a0Some preparation of both open and proprietary data was required before distributing to students.<\/p>\n
Due to the number of student teams, we needed\u00a0over twenty\u00a0AOI subsections within the ALR. Though the ALR has six official regional panels (management areas for the ALC)\u00a0these were not numerically sufficient for the number of student teams. Luckily, in BC, the provincial regional districts align with Canadian census subdivision geographic areas. So, we used 2011 census division geographic boundaries (open data) to clip\u00a0the entire ALR shapefile into\u00a028 smaller subsections that allowed more focused analyses. We hoped that this would have the added bonus of giving the\u00a0students the ability to more easily extract census dissemination areas that may be entirely in or overlap with the ALR boundaries in their AOI subsection. By the way, there are\u00a0actually 29 census divisions in BC<\/a> \u00a0but the Stikine does not have any\u00a0ALR so we had 28 subsections (a pdf map of the regional districts \/ census subdivisions<\/a>). Shapefile overviews of the entire ALR and for each team’s\u00a0AOI subsection were provided to student teams.\u00a0These open data files\u00a0can be downloaded on this website under downloads.<\/a><\/p>\n We encouraged students to explore provincial, federal, and other open data resources to identify the best data for their AOI subsections. Yet, the student teams were also provided with access to two proprietary data sets available to the Department of Geography via licensing agreements obtained by UBC. Beyond the importance of open data, it is important that students know how to work with both of these data sets in the BC context as they will often be exposed to them as professionals.<\/p>\n The data below was not provided, rather it is part of a list\u00a0of\u00a0recommended open data sources for the project that were given to the students during the project process.<\/p>\n The deliverables that each team was to make for the\u00a0project included:<\/p>\n Templates for the proposal and final report were prepared by staff and provided to students.\u00a0The\u00a0report template includes all the questions that students were required to respond to for their report text and maps and thus indicates what type of analyses the student teams might pursue. Copies of these templates\u00a0can be downloaded below:<\/p>\n Stepwise Summary of Student Activity During the Project<\/strong><\/p>\n Below is a general summary of the steps students were encouraged to take\u00a0during the project\u00a0(a checklist for teams).<\/p>\n Project management and teamwork are fundamental aspects of work in GIScience. For this project, students formed teams of no more than four students. The teams worked together to answer a series of questions about a subsection of British Columbia\u2019s Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) by applying the GIS analysis techniques that they learned in the course. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32305,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-56","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32305"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alrmap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nhttp:\/\/ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca\/pub\/geobase\/official\/lcc2000v_csc2000v\/doc\/GeoBase_LCC2000V_Harmonization_Legend.pdf<\/a>A short description of the data, mentioning how it was made using Landsat and providing lots of links:
\nhttp:\/\/ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca\/pub\/geobase\/official\/lcc2000v_csc2000v\/doc\/Land_Cover.pdf<\/a><\/li>\n
\nAlways good to start here:
\nhttp:\/\/catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca\/<\/a>
\nFor example if you search for \u201c\u201dparks\u201d\u201d you\u2019ll eventually find this:
\nhttp:\/\/catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca\/dataset\/bc-parks-ecological-reserves-and-protected-areas<\/a>
\nThen press \u201cexplore\u201d and \u201cGo to the resource\u201d, it leads you here:
\nhttps:\/\/apps.gov.bc.ca\/pub\/dwds\/viewOrder.do?orderId=1587872<\/a>
\nYou should submit an order there (for free) they will send you a link to download within an hour or so, like this:
\nftp:\/\/distribution.data.gov.bc.ca\/dwds\/BCGW_78757263_1448596566877_7288.zip<\/a>
\nThe above link to the data may may expire, so you may have to do it yourself. However, you should end up with something called \u201cTA_PEP_SVW_polygon.shp\u201d that has all the BC provincial parks.<\/li>\n
\nIt is always good to start with Geogratis:\u00a0http:\/\/geogratis.gc.ca\/geogratis\/en\/search<\/a>
\nSearch parks, you\u2019ll find:\u00a0http:\/\/geogratis.gc.ca\/api\/en\/nrcan-rncan\/ess-sst\/9246a40d-8cca-5b55-9e89-9175e6490197.html<\/a>
\nThe download link for all federal parks is at the bottom of the page.<\/li>\nProject Deliverables<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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