“ES/GE 217 - MAPPING AND GIS” AT BATES COLLEGE

ES/GE 217 is taught jointly in the Environmental Studies Program and Geology Department at Bates. We use the ArcGIS platform and the text Mastering ArcGIS (Price, 2008). Homegrown labs focused on geological and environmental topics in Maine form the core of the course and are described below. "Mapping Wildlife Habitat" introduces students to clipping, buffering, calculating statistics, and displaying existing habitat and hydrology layers for a Maine county of their choice. The "Landscape Analysis" lab starts with converting, assembling, and visualizing DEM tiles from Baxter State Park, which are then illustrated in a fly-by made using ArcScene. Landscape geomorphology polygons and bedrock lineaments are delineated on hillshade maps, overlain on a bedrock geology layer, with statistical comparisons between the polygons made via a series of maps. In the "Land Cover Analysis and Soil Concentrations" lab students draw landscape unit polygons "freehand" and compare them to classifications done using the Spatial Analyst tools. The soil analysis portion introduces importing GPS located soil chemical data tables from Excel into ArcGIS using join/relate functions and comparing these to soil maps. For the "Cliff Island Project" students collect GPS located strike and dip data in the field and make a bedrock geologic map. This introduces topology tools, including drawing shared boundary polygons using snapping and constructing solid and dashed lines from polygons. The map is made by plotting and labeling strike and dips symbols in symbology, exporting the map to Illustrator, and including outcrop photos and text for the legend. "Delineating Watersheds and Analysis of their Properties" is a project on the nearby public water supply, Lake Auburn. The project introduces multiple tools in the Spatial Analyst Tools > Hydrology menu including Fill, Flow Direction, Flow Accumulation, Stream Link, and Watershed. Students ultimately make several maps of the local watershed. The course ends with each student completing a five-week independent research project with poster presentation at a college-wide research symposium. These projects have included earthquake/volcanic hazard maps, IPCC sea level rise maps on Maine beaches, determining optimum locations for wind power turbines, and DEM-based glacial flow line maps.