Fall NEARC 2024

This presentation explores the transformative capabilities of GeoAI and image detection tools within ArcGIS Pro, focusing on their application in urban planning, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure management. By integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), users can achieve advanced data analysis and decision-making efficiencies.

GeoAI leverages machine learning and deep learning models to analyze spatial data, automating the detection and classification of features from high-resolution imagery. This enhances the accuracy and efficiency of geospatial analysis. Key topics include:

- Introduction to GeoAI in ArcGIS Pro: Understanding the integration of AI with GIS and its benefits for geospatial analysis.
- Image Detection Techniques: Exploring methodologies for detecting and classifying features using deep learning models.
- Practical Applications: Case studies demonstrating GeoAI use in urban planning, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure management.
- Workflow Implementation: Step-by-step guide to setting up and using image detection tools in ArcGIS Pro, from data preparation to model training and deployment.
- Future Trends and Innovations: Discussing emerging trends in GeoAI and their implications for the future of geospatial technology.

Attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of harnessing GeoAI and image detection tools in ArcGIS Pro to enhance geospatial workflows and drive informed decision-making. This presentation is designed for GIS professionals, urban planners, environmental scientists, and anyone interested in AI applications in geospatial analysis. Participants will leave equipped with the knowledge and skills to implement GeoAI solutions, transforming their spatial data analysis and interpretation.

Developing GIS tools with branching workflows and multiple levels of sub-steps has become relatively easy. Writing detailed directions for how to use them, however, remains difficult. Printed directions may start out beside the keyboard for ready reference, but often get buried under desktop detritus. Paging through a lengthy paper document is inconvenient at best and unrealistic if the goal is for a user to follow them step-by-step like a pilot running through a pre-flight checklist. And sometimes that is exactly how we want users to work. Digital directions provide a modern, intuitive, heads-up alternative to instructions written on paper. Web capabilities like hyperlinks, tabs, pages, and collapsible content vastly improve the user experience by providing easy access to specific information that is needed and hiding everything else that is not. Unfortunately, that usually requires web programming skills or acquiring and learning additional software. Fortunately, Survey123 has all these capabilities and is already available to most GIS users. Survey123 was created to ask users questions and collect their answers – reversing this flow of information is quite easy. In this presentation, I will show you how I used Survey123 Connect to build step-by-step, “click-along” directions for a complicated data entry workflow.

This presentation will provide a case study in developing an enterprise-wide Sustainability Analysis application using "out of the box" Experience Builder. Strategies and techniques for developing a robust application without using the developer version of ExB will be presented. Additionally, tips for integrating custom widgets for "low code" options will be covered.

A comparative viewshed analysis is used during permitting to assess how new structures or changes to existing structures may visually impact various scenic or historic resources. This presentation will outline how these analyses are completed using two different software: ArcGIS Pro and Global Mapper. A comparison of these tools will include systematic differences, strengths and limitations in how analyses are conducted.

Innovate enhanced the geospatial products by incorporating technologies such as AI feature extraction and 3D modeling. We used geoprocessing methodologies and web-based applications to create planning decision support frameworks from a neighborhood level to the national scale. We employed server-side geoprocessing tools to further generate analytical derivatives that we then used within cartographic products, dynamic web-based and mobile applications as well as supported graphics for technical reports. Innovate used Esri’s ArcHydro software to process overland stormwater flow data from DEMs and DSMs to model how water travels, accumulates, and gains velocity over topography. The by-product of this analysis provides a municipality with the ability to identify how changing its infrastructure from impervious to more green spaces can impact the potential for flooding.

Everyone is talking or attempting to use Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or AI. Industry leaders would say that data is the most important ingredient to 'make' AI work. A common theme for the proper or efficient use of AI is a need for 'good data' or data of the highest quality. GIS Practitioners have coined the phrase 'Garbage In and Garbage Out' as a rallying cry for better data since the formation of the discipline. Most organizations have some set or repository of data they utilize for their business, and some even create their data. The state of quality of these data repositories can fluctuate from abysmal to pristine. So how can organizations improve the quality of existing data or ensure that the data being collected now, is the best the organization can make it? This presentation claims that data must be valued as highly as revenue or profits if data quality is to improve. If data are valued highly, then care is taken as it is collected, compiled, and collated, and arguably, quality will improve, and there is a fighting chance for the use of AI to succeed for whatever purposes is required.

The UVM Spatial Analysis Lab has a long history of high quality and high impact GIS work. In the last year alone the SAL has performed emergency response to multiple major flood events, taught numerous workshops for first responders, state/federal employees, and highschol students and produced tens of thousands of square miles of high resolution land cover data, mapping areas that contain more than 9% of the total US population. In addition to producing these high quality services and datasets the SAL has employed upwards of 350 students/recent graduates/new GIS professionals in the past 15 years and currently has a robust work force of 40 technicians/GIS operators.

The SAL would like to share some lessons learned and insights gained from decades of work in the geospatial field and running such a complex, flexible and high achieving organization in the rapidly changing technological landscape.

In this presentation, Brian Hebert will work through several workflows using and comparing both ArcGIS Pro and Google Big Query, focusing on classic geoprocessing tasks including import, export, append, spatial join, buffer, dissolve, intersect, etc. using high volume vector data. The full US Tiger Edges (All_Lines) polyline network and Meta (Facebook) sponsored high resolution population point data will be used to map out flood and evacuation scenarios. Arcpy and Google Big Query SQL source code examples will be reviewed. Particular attention will be given to getting data in/out of ESRI formats before/after processing in Google Big Query. This presentation would be of interest for anyone who is challenged with high volume vector data manipulation and will highlight leveraging the awesome power of big-database cloud engines for geospatial processing.

Learn how to use JavaScript frameworks, data structures, and design principles to make your own custom, reusable Esri widgets in ArcGIS Experience Builder.

Stone Environmental’s Geospatial and Data Solutions Team will share its strategies and code for customizing ArcGIS Experience Builder widgets to push your web and mobile applications to the next level. We will share our New York Geographic Information Gateway web app, which aims to democratize New York’s geospatial data for educational, recreational, and citizen science purposes. This app brings Esri mapping to everyone, regardless of experience. It was built with ArcGIS Experience Builder, but unfortunately Experience Builder did not offer the State everything it wanted out-of-the-box, and there is little documentation on customizing this state-of-the-art Esri suite.

Join our presentation as we share what we’ve learned about customizing Experience Builder widgets and how to optimize custom code in your Esri applications. We will share how JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js and Redux can integrate cleanly into your development experience. We will also demonstrate how to access and build on open-source widget code from Esri. We will share helpful tricks we discovered in our work, as well as explore principles of design and accessibility to make a sleek and stylish front-end experience. Finally, we will unpack helpful strategies for data manipulation and control within and across Experience Builder widgets which will help any GIS developer in their projects.

This presentation will require experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js, CSS, JSX, Redux, Git, and ArcGIS Experience Builder.

Co-Presenter: Andrew Flynn

Join us for a discussion on developing a comprehensive Power BI dashboard designed to report all published content on ArcGIS Portal. This dashboard, created using FME, Python, and Power BI, is an essential tool for managing and understanding your GIS resources.

The session will cover:

1. Integration and Data Flow: Learn how FME and Python are utilized to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from ArcGIS Portal into Power BI. We will explore the automation processes that ensure the dashboard is updated daily.
2. Dashboard Features: Discover how the dashboard provides a centralized view of all published services, web maps, and other content on the ArcGIS Portal. The discussion will highlight key functionalities such as:
   • Service Identification: Easily locate and identify all services and web maps published on the portal.
   • Impact Analysis: Understand which services are affected by schema changes to underlying layers.
   • Usage Metrics: View metrics to determine the most frequently used layers and services.
   • Service Monitoring: Quickly find stopped services to ensure uninterrupted GIS operations.
3. Benefits and Applications: Understand the practical benefits of having a holistic view of your GIS content. The dashboard enables efficient resource management, proactive problem-solving, and data-driven decision-making.

Whether you are a GIS analyst, data manager, or IT professional, this session will provide valuable insights into leveraging Power BI for effective ArcGIS Portal content management. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your GIS operational efficiency with a powerful, automated reporting solution

With a significant number of GIS users across our organization, our Data Solutions team encountered a challenge related to the abundance of data available on our portal. We faced the issue of distinguishing between high-quality and low-quality data, with the aim of enhancing data utilization.

Our primary objective was to optimize resource utilization by eliminating data that was either unused or of low quality, ensuring that our users have access to the best available data. To address this issue, we developed a comprehensive dashboard that provides insights into all the data within our portal. This platform empowers users to gain a deeper understanding of their data and facilitates our efforts to educate them about improved data standards.

Through the implementation of this dashboard, we have successfully directed our team and users towards a focus on data governance, data literacy, and data quality, thereby fostering an environment of enhanced data maturity.

Monitoring performance and scalability in a large, multi-server environment can be difficult. Learn how we use ArcGIS Monitor in our Enterprise GIS to identify bottlenecks and create alerts for when things don't go as planned.

Vector tiles are rapidly rising in popularity due to improved performance over raster tiles and the ability to dynamically style maps based on attribute data.

Traditionally vector tiles have required creating an entire static datset upfront before serving it. This can be quite time consuming and cumbersome -especially during the early phase of a web application build.

Recently the ArcGIS JS api has been quietly equipped with some features that allow reading of attributes from 3rd party vector tiles servers.

I plan to demonstrate how a developer can leverage pg_tileserv to automatically create instantaneous layers for any table, view or tileset returning function in a Postgis database and dynamically style them in the ArcGIS JS Api client without needing to pre-generate any static tilesets in advance.

I also plan to go over some tips for vector tile performance we've learned in recent projects at Stone.

In my presentation, I will demonstrate our python based workflow for automating setup and the publishing of Enterprise Geodatabase layers within a Portal environment.
Enterprise Geodatabase is essential for managing large scale operations. In contrast, utilizing hosted layers for publishing data is convenient, however the data store is a black box and can only handle so much. In circumstances where domains are being updated on a regular basis, this puts a huge strain on the publishing services of an ArcGIS Server instance. As well as disconnected domains from one feature service to another.
Moving to Enterprise Geodatabase helps us properly manage our domains while not overwhelming ArcGIS Server’s publishing tools, by giving us direct access to the underlying data.
This process has streamlined our data maintenance procedures, along with standardizing our schema and improving our data life cycle management.

Python and the pandas library are great for processing data, but if you're working with a large database, SQL is often faster and more straightforward. While working on a large spatial data processing project, we've replaced much of our Python code with SQL while still using Python to run the data pipeline. We store our SQL code in a Git repository and use Python to test it, modify it using Jinja templates, and send it to the database. We've worked out a system in which each language does what it does best.

As the frequency of natural and human-caused disasters increases, there is a greater need for efficient coordination amongst emergency responders, resource managers, and the public. GIS is often touted as an invaluable and underutilized tool for public safety teams. But what does mapping in near real-time entail, and is this feasible for a small municipality? This presentation will explore how the Town of Concord, MA recently embarked on answering this question using ArcGIS Online’s suite of tools.

In March 2024, the Town’s GIS team was asked to facilitate a tabletop exercise, in coordination with several other Town departments, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and students from Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s Emergency Management program. We created a web application to edit and visualize near real-time updates of an excessive rainfall/flooding event in a simulated Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

In this presentation, we will demonstrate our final application and operations workflow, which took inspiration from the Emergency Management Operations ArcGIS Solution. We will also share our thought process for selection of appropriate tools, how we customized a solution within a limited scope and timeframe, and how we integrated data collection, maps, dashboards, and live data feeds, using Experience Builder. Finally, we will share our ideas for ways to expand and improve upon this application in the future.

The use of technology is a controversial issue in many communities, and there is a growing disparity between those who want to share and those who want to maintain privacy in this fast-moving world of information. This is true globally, as we see places that we enjoy being “overloved” with activity once they are public, and conversely that communities are being underrepresented because they fear putting their “place” on a map. Using examples from mapping and engagement methods used with the indigenous Micronesian communities of the Ulithi atoll, in the Yap Outer Islands of the Federated States of Micronesia, this talk will discuss the benefits of starting an early community engagement strategy, considerations of information gathering, and the steps used to train non-users in science and technology from a modern western perspective. There are many sub-categories of learning associated with this topic, including ethics in GIS, how to capture data using offline FieldMaps technology, increasing buy-in to the planning process with enhanced transparency, and improving the results of the information-gathering process to create a more comprehensive, thorough and thoughtful GIS.

School districts often require spatial modeling for enrollment forecasting, program analysis, or school boundary changes. Providing accurate data for school districts for long and short-term curriculum and facilities planning can make a world of difference for students, enabling them to have access to a more equitable and robust education. ArcGIS spatial tools can be used in tandem with Alteryx modeling software to create custom workflows that provide data-supported answers to school district questions. Alteryx is a powerful data analytics software with spatial capabilities that allows for rapid and easily customizable model building (no coding required), while spatial data preparation, investigation, editing, and mapping are all performed within ArcGIS. This session will show several examples of how ArcGIS and Alteryx can be used together to improve workflows and perform complex data modeling and will dive into our Enrollment Modeling Application and special programs accessibility analysis. While the session focuses on school district analyses as an example, the integration of ArcGIS and Alteryx for spatial data modeling is widely applicable to a variety of topics.