Today marks the launch of the new Everglades Foundation website, featuring a web map I developed on the front page. Visit the new site, and click on the “Everglades Action Map” to check it out!
Florida Everglades
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Jan 10
Mapping Phosphorus in the Everglades
Phosphorus and the Everglades
In the 1880s, a real-estate developer named Hamilton Disston bought four-million acres in Florida for $1 million and began what would eventually develop into a network of 2400 km of canals and an extensive water management system. The establishment of the canal system, in conjunction with urban and agricultural development, reduced the historic Florida Everglades over time by 50% and introduced a variety of nutrients foreign to the ecosystem, including phosphorus. Large-scale efforts to sustainably manage what’s left of the Everglades involve an amalgamation of efforts from scientists and policymakers to understand, monitor, and direct future drivers of environmental change. One of these drivers is phosphorus, a nutrient that previously did not exist in the region and which has immensely altered the ecosystem.
13
Oct 09
The Everglades Explorer
The Everglades Explorer is an interactive web map I’ve been developing through my internship with the Everglades Foundation, a non-profit environmental organization based in Palmetto Bay, Florida. The map, developed using ArcGIS, Adobe Flex, ActionScript, Illustrator, and the Google Maps API for Flash, is meant to communicate geographic information about the Foundation’s projects to a variety of audiences. You can check out an early draft of map-in-progress by clicking on the image above. Feedback is always welcome!
1
Oct 09
The Historic Everglades
During my internship with the Everglades Foundation, I worked on a variety of GIS and mapping projects, including a historical ecology analysis of the Florida Everglades. In collaboration with the senior GIS Scientist at the Everglades Foundation, Rosanna Rivero, and Noosha Mahmoudi, a PhD student at FIU, a vegetation map of South Florida produced in 1913 was transformed for GIS compatibility using ArcGIS, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop. The final result is a polygon shapefile (illustrated above) that will be applied toward land cover change analysis and assessment of historical environmental conditions in the Everglades. The project was presented in the form of a poster at the 2009 NACIS conference in Sacramento, California, as well as the 2009 South Florida GIS Expo, where it won first place in the poster contest.
16
Sep 09
Synthetic Aperture Radar and the Florida Everglades
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active remote sensing technique in which microwave signals are emitted from a transmitter toward a subject area, reflected by the features of that area, and returned to a sensor. SAR is recognized as a valuable and effective tool in mapping and monitoring wetland ecosystems. This study examines three different SAR platforms (ERS, Radarsat, and JERS) in terms of their usefulness in monitoring the changing hydrologic conditions in a region within the Florida Everglades known as the Shark River Slough. A synthesis of methods and techniques is used to evaluate the hydrology-backscatter relationship and to assess the capability of SAR data in hydrologic monitoring, including regression, profile analysis, neighborhood statistics, and zonal statistics. The objective of this study is to contribute to the foundation of knowledge surrounding the relationship between SAR and wetland hydrology and to advance hydrologic monitoring techniques. Continue reading →