GPS units, field notes, and the Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team

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What I'm working on:

One of the benefits of working with small local non-profit conservation groups is access to their data resources.

Recently I've been working with the Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team, a loose coalition of Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts residents who certify vernal pools in the area.

A while ago, I took home their two GPS unit to download the dataset of the vernal pools they've visited and certified over the past decade or so.

What a treasure trove!

The organization's two principal pool certifiers, Rick Roth and Nick Taormina, who work in the building trades, spend early spring afternoons seeking out the vernal pools located in the state of Massachusetts sdatabase of potential vernal pools.

The two guys aren't very savvy with digital tools. Their gps units contained a few hundred waypoints that hadn't been transferred to a database or uploaded into Google Maps.

And that's what they were: latitude and longitude data points.

The real records were in their handwritten waterproof field notebooks.

Here are the steps I took to help them digitally preserve their: I downloaded into Excel the waypoints stored in their gps units and imported the waypoints into Google Maps and Google Earth using comma-separated values.

All well and good. Google Maps created a large dataset in just a few moments:



These are my next steps:
  • add to Google Maps captions that with Nick's and Rick's handwritten field notes, species observations, and digital photos
  • add to those Google Maps the field notes the state requires to certify a vernal pool
  • create data layers which reveal, over time, how many vernal pools the Cape Ann Vernal Pond team has examined, photographed, and forwarded to the state since the team began this work in 2009

I use professional-grade UAV systems to create, manage, and render GIS imagery and maps for Massachusetts nonprofits and municipalities.

 If you think your organization would benefit from this sort of work, please get in touch. 

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