GIS Project Ideas for Student

[Huntnfish89]

Good evening everyone. In addition to my hunting and fishing "problem" I am also a student at the University of Idaho working on my History degree. I am currently enrolled in an intro to GIS course and trying to come up with some ideas for a final research project that seeks to answer a specific question. I am drawing a blank right now as to ideas, so I figured I would check on here, see if anyone has more experience in this field than me, and hear some ideas of what would be an interesting project for a complete neophyte when to comes to GIS mapping. I am looking for something that would be interesting, but also manageable as far a scope. Basically something that would be relatively approachable for someone at my level.

Some ideas that I have been kicking around are:
Snowpack changes over that past 5 or so decades.
Drought and related changes in plant life (What plants seem to fare better than others etc.)
Maybe something with CWD spread in the West.
Bark beetle infestation and wildfire (compare and analyse?)
I thought doing something on thermal cover would be interesting, but I don't know about that finding datasets that would support this.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone had some thoughts, thanks in advance.

Eddie

 

[bozeman]

What about standard deviation of temp changes or wind direction changes on north facing vs southern facing slopes? Or maybe the same deviation of when thermals change direction during the day (what time). Just something I’ve always thought about…….best of luck

 

[Clarktar]

Good evening everyone. In addition to my hunting and fishing "problem" I am also a student at the University of Idaho working on my History degree. I am currently enrolled in an intro to GIS course and trying to come up with some ideas for a final research project that seeks to answer a specific question. I am drawing a blank right now as to ideas, so I figured I would check on here, see if anyone has more experience in this field than me, and hear some ideas of what would be an interesting project for a complete neophyte when to comes to GIS mapping. I am looking for something that would be interesting, but also manageable as far a scope. Basically something that would be relatively approachable for someone at my level.

Some ideas that I have been kicking around are:
Snowpack changes over that past 5 or so decades.
Drought and related changes in plant life (What plants seem to fare better than others etc.)
Maybe something with CWD spread in the West.
Bark beetle infestation and wildfire (compare and analyse?)
I thought doing something on thermal cover would be interesting, but I don't know about that finding datasets that would support this.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone had some thoughts, thanks in advance.

Eddie

Put together a project quantifying land locked public lands in Idaho. Then you can try to prioritize those areas based on some sort of characteristics......

Could be a great project to help local NGOs or other groups who address public land access

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[ewade07]

An interesting project would be to look at winter and summer ranges of game (deer, elk) and compare it to urban expansion (IE habitat loss). Then find data on what the deer/elk numbers are in that area. Would be an interesting correlation.

 

[S.Clancy]

An interesting project would be to look at winter and summer ranges of game (deer, elk) and compare it to urban expansion (IE habitat loss). Then find data on what the deer/elk numbers are in that area. Would be an interesting correlation.

Thats more like an MS project because you would need a way to qualify habitat. Just because its land doesnt mean animal utilization is high.

 

[ewade07]

It would be a broad scope obviously. Depending on where he did his work, there may be readily available data that may help qualify the type of habitat. Some states are better than others when it comes to readily available data.

 

[S.Clancy]

Good evening everyone. In addition to my hunting and fishing "problem" I am also a student at the University of Idaho working on my History degree. I am currently enrolled in an intro to GIS course and trying to come up with some ideas for a final research project that seeks to answer a specific question. I am drawing a blank right now as to ideas, so I figured I would check on here, see if anyone has more experience in this field than me, and hear some ideas of what would be an interesting project for a complete neophyte when to comes to GIS mapping. I am looking for something that would be interesting, but also manageable as far a scope. Basically something that would be relatively approachable for someone at my level.

Some ideas that I have been kicking around are:
Snowpack changes over that past 5 or so decades.
Drought and related changes in plant life (What plants seem to fare better than others etc.)
Maybe something with CWD spread in the West.
Bark beetle infestation and wildfire (compare and analyse?)
I thought doing something on thermal cover would be interesting, but I don't know about that finding datasets that would support this.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone had some thoughts, thanks in advance.

Eddie

How many hours are you looking to put into this project?

 

[Clarktar]

An interesting project would be to look at winter and summer ranges of game (deer, elk) and compare it to urban expansion (IE habitat loss). Then find data on what the deer/elk numbers are in that area. Would be an interesting correlation.

What is going to be the metric for urban expansion? Difference between two points in time of some level of housing density?

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[Dos Perros]

You could try to determine a factor that private access to public land impacts private land valuation.

Hypothesis: private land with exclusive access to public land is worth more per acre than private land with no exclusive access.

Then, (and people here will hate this), you could quantify the additional property taxes paid by these private landowners based on increased valuations.

 

[Bighorner]

There was a lot of beatle kill data out there 15 years ago. You could take that and overlay the last five years worth of "large" fires and see how they correlate.

 

[lak2004]

Something that has been done on a small scale that is a great answer to the conundrum of development of trails is critical habitat areas for different species and where development should be avoided, considered, is ok etc.

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[LongWayAround]

As someone who was pretty terrible at GIS in college...

I think the challenge is finding the data to make your conclusions relevant.

Beetles and wildfire is a cool idea. Wildfire is definitely quantifiable. I personally haven't seen a good quantification of beetle kill, but I've never really looked either. Maybe that can be tracked with LIDAR?

I know OnX has been working on landlocked public land. That to me seems like a good place for a novice project because it would be fairly straightforward to quantify. There's a known amount of public land and a certain percentage is either landlocked or not.

 

[Huntnfish89]

What about standard deviation of temp changes or wind direction changes on north facing vs southern facing slopes? Or maybe the same deviation of when thermals change direction during the day (what time). Just something I’ve always thought about…….best of luck

This is along the lines of what I wanted to do initially, It sure would be helpful, but I think that finding that relevant data is going to be an issue. Maybe for a very specific area though?

 

[Huntnfish89]

How many hours are you looking to put into this project?

To be honest, right now it takes me a few hours just to complete a lab. (I am getting better though) My hope would be to find something that is pretty straight forward and not too difficult, but also interesting and actually worth doing.

 

[Huntnfish89]

It looks like there is a significant amount of data on beetle kill and wildfires so I suppose I would use that to see if there is any correlation between the two and to what extent.

@Clarktar I really like the idea of doing something the landlocked public lands. Now what would a characteristic be that I could use to prioritize them? Maybe distance from an existing/potential access point (most cost effective?) Size?

 

[.204smokechaser]

Trails and wintering grounds, especially focus around boise foothills.

Fire and the amount of trails impacted by fire in say the selway and frank.-I’ve done this before on my own time and for rec analysis and has been helpful. There’s a big GIS data base that’s public.

Burn severity and vegetation impacts on treated VS untreated landscapes (Previous fire, burns, logging)- you can get all the information you need to do that from GLOVIS and google.

Unless you’re in a non CNR GIS class, most instructors want to see effort and something that they can tell you learned stuff out of it. Don’t devote your the rest of the semester to this project as many of friends I went to school with tried to go above and beyond for projects like this and in the long run stressed themselves out over it.

Oh. And the GIS people were helpful with questions too.


Good luck!

 

[Pony Soldier]

I would check with the agencies and see what is available. I Montana, the State library has a lot of the coverage- Idaho should have something similar. Design the project around what is available.

 

[Huntnfish89]

Trails and wintering grounds, especially focus around boise foothills.

Fire and the amount of trails impacted by fire in say the selway and frank.-I’ve done this before on my own time and for rec analysis and has been helpful. There’s a big GIS data base that’s public.

Burn severity and vegetation impacts on treated VS untreated landscapes (Previous fire, burns, logging)- you can get all the information you need to do that from GLOVIS and google.

Unless you’re in a non CNR GIS class, most instructors want to see effort and something that they can tell you learned stuff out of it. Don’t devote your the rest of the semester to this project as many of friends I went to school with tried to go above and beyond for projects like this and in the long run stressed themselves out over it.

Oh. And the GIS people were helpful with questions too.


Good luck!

Thats been my pattern (going way above and beyond) in the past, which has been fine. However, this is what I'm trying to avoid to an extent. I'm also working in my hist. capstone paper so I'd prefer to be able to focus on that as much as possible.

 

[mtnrunner260]

Go to the game and fish office and see if they have a question you can answer. Maybe they would provide some access to collar data?
Work with FS or BLM to identify unauthorized routes.
Run different buffers on roads and trails in a herd unit or winter range.

 

[BuzzH]

Conifer encroachment. Find some historic and current aerial photography of the same geographic area and use gis to map the changes. I did a similar study about 25 years ago on a major drainage in western Montana, right as gis was starting to gain steam...lots of thing I would have liked to explore further. I wish the gis technology field would have been further advanced instead of spending 100s of hours delineating 2 sets of photos by hand under a stereoscope.