Our final project “Is Vancouver Truly Ready for the Big One?” looks at the safety measures currently in place in our city and discussing new ways to protect schools and population from the expecting earthquake.
We created 3 maps, one based on the geology of Vancouver, one that mapped out each school in Vancouver and their respective safety level and lastly, one that showed potential areas for new disaster safety hubs in addition to pre-existing ones.
Through doing this project, I feel that I have grown not only academically but as a person as well. Of course, I improved my skills in work ethic and application of GIS but working in an amazing group showed me the importance of group cooperation and chemistry. We were able to split our work and report evenly and everyone specialized in a different section. I think one of the greatest tools in a good group project is getting to know your group members and being comfortable so every member can provide their ideas and criticisms.
I learned a lot about data acquisition and manipulation. For example, a problem our group never really thought we would have with our data is having our dataset much too large. So large that ArcMap would not even let us use analysis tools to join, query nor clip. I think if we did not use trial and error to try and solve this problem on our own, we would not have learned the importance of selecting data that fits the scope of our project.
Overall, I am very proud of our project and the work I did in this course. I feel prepared and confident in my entry-level GIS skills. Our project is very real-world issue based, and we combined many different areas of study to create a multi-dimensional project that illustrated the importance of GIS in everyday life and safety.
