Some Coveted Programming Skills

To follow-up on an earlier post I wrote this year about GIS Skills, I recently read a story in Readwrite Enterprise outlining 15 programming skills most coveted by employers (http://readwrite.com/2013/04/09/15-programming-skills-most-coveted-by-employers). While their story was aimed at the development community, two of the 15 skills outlined in their story are definitely needed by GIS Analysts and...

A Maxent Script Tool for ArcGIS

As part of my PhD research at the University of Arizona where I study biogeography, biodiversity and macroecology, I have been part of a group looking at large-scale biodiversity questions for New World plants. In this role, I have been responsible for generating many species distribution models using Stephen Phillip's Maxent software (and R with the Dismo...

Speedy Attribute Editing with a Custom ArcMap Add-In

One of my colleagues, TerraSystems Southwest, is assisting The Nature Conservancy in Tucson with the Sonoran Desert Disturbed Lands Analysis project. As part of their scope of work, they were asked to assess the level and type of land disturbance for over 100,000 1-square mile hexagons covering the Sonoran Desert. As you might expect, editing the attributes...

A Script Tool for Unzipping Files in ArcGIS

I was recently working with the SWReGAP data DVDs and wanted to develop an ArcGIS geoprocessing model to copy the DVD data, clip the rasters to the state of Arizona boundary and reproject them. Because the DVDs contained a raster dataset for each species that was stored as a zip file, I wanted a way to decompress each raster within my...

How I’d like ArcGIS to Work with SQL Server 2008

When Micosoft announced that SQL Server 2008 would include spatial data types I was excited. I've been a SQL Server user for a long time and have always preferred its management interface over those of the other DBMS I've tried. So the idea of spatial data types was exciting. Though there weren't many tools out there to...