[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome back.
In this lesson, I'm going to introduce a project we'll be working on throughout
the rest of this course.
Each week, we'll go through a portion of the project together in the videos.
From project conception all the way through analysis.
If you've taken the previous courses, you've done some of this already, but
we haven't formalized it and walked through it together.
And we also haven't gone through the thought processes and
what you should be looking at during each phase of the process.
With this project, we'll do all of those steps together on video, but
then each week I'll give you some things to think about.
Whether it's how we might approach the problem, where to get the data, or
exactly how we might analyze it.
There won't be anything to turn in, or
even a tutorial to follow aside from the videos.
We're just trying to get you thinking about spacial analysis problems from
start to finish.
For those of you who want to think about and
work on these problems in earnest, you can participate using discussion questions.
We're structuring it as a problem we solve bit by bit each week for two reasons.
First, that's how problems are often solved in the real world.
You don't have the data given to you and
you have real problems that may not have a definite answer.
So, you need to be able to conceptualize the whole process start to finish and
then break it down into chunks that you can achieve right now.
The classic difficulty I see with new GIS analysts and
new programmers is trying to tackle a program all at once.
I fall victim to this pattern too, sometimes.
The more you can turn a problem into smaller tasks that are easier to
understand and troubleshoot, the better you'll be able to handle GIS projects.
Now, because it's how projects tend to actually work, it's also how our capstone
project is structured for those of you who are taking the whole specialization.
That project will be bigger and designed by each of you,
but we want to make sure you have practice building a project from the ground up
before you get to the capstone, so that you can be more successful there.
Okay, so, now that I've laid out the mechanics, let's talk about the project.
Since I haven't gone through this fully on my own yet, we'll truly be in it together.
I'd like to know what agriculture is occurring on floodplains in California?
For those of you who don't live in wet climates, floodplains are the natural
places that rivers spill out onto when too much water fills the river's main channel.
Growing crops in the flood plains presents opportunities, both for habitat and
nutrients, as well as economic hazards from disasters.
And this information would be useful to planners, researchers,
and emergency managers.
Again, since I haven't gone through this yet
I'm not positive about what data is available and what my end result is yet.
While I know that I ideally like a summary table of some sort,
maybe grouped by county, or crop type, or region, and some resulting maps,
I won't settle on an end product until I really know what data is available for
me to start with sometimes you know where you need to end up, and
have to work backward instead.
But, in this case, we'll aim to summarize crop types in flood planes and
we'll figure out what options we have once we see the data available and
can plan our analysis.