GIS in Action 2025

ORURISA Board MeetingORURISA Friends and Members Meeting

The Chapter was founded in 1992 and serves as a forum for geospatial professionals and students to meet, share ideas and encourage the advancement of Geospatial and Open Source technologies.

The vitality of the organization is in its local Sections and Special Interest Groups. Local sections are geographically disbursed throughout the bi-state area and meet to discuss local geospatial topics and technologies. Participants include public sector and private GIS professionals, educators, and students. The chapter also has Special Interest Groups that serve varied topics and areas of interest.

Our mission is to inform, educate and promote the geospatial industry to support and strengthen geographic diversity in our community. We offer legitimacy with other organizations, authority of knowledge, leadership development and career support. We encourage you to participate in local and statewide events and to get involved in the organization.

To learn more, join us, visit our table at the Vendors area or at our website www.orurisa.org

Agenda:

ORURISA Welome and Intro
Member Participation

Instant Apps offers a set of purpose-driven templates that can be quickly configured into powerful tools for engaging citizens in your community. Learn how Instant Apps can help you share information about local points of interest, collect and manage reported issues, and provide critical updates during disaster scenarios, all from within your ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise organization.

A walk through of using open source libraries in ArcGIS Pro and QGIS to 3D print topographic maps from publicly available raster data.

The Marbled Murrelet is an endangered seabird that relies on forests for nesting. Traditionally, a species survey crew would be sent out to see if the species is present. However, that is labor and time intensive. This project explores using high resolution LiDAR data to determine the possibility of Marbled Murrelet habitat in the area. Using characteristics derived from the LiDAR data such as canopy height, density, etc. we can make calculate the probability of habitat in the area and confirm in person. LiDAR technology can be used to speed up the environmental analysis process in what is presently a costly and timely endeavor.

The Emerald Ash Borer is an invasive pest first detected in the United States in 2002. Since then, the Emerald Ash Borer has spread, killing over 100 million ash trees in the eastern U.S. alone and causing over $2 billion in damages. EAB was first detected in Forest Grove, Oregon in 2022 and is has now been detected in Marion, Yamhill, and Clackamas counties.

With EAB spreading in Oregon, the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) Forest Health group wanted our GIS team to build an interactive map to give members of the public a place to view and interact with Emerald Ash Borer data in Oregon. The map needed to combine data from multiple agencies, allow users to turn reference layers on and off, change basemaps, and have a quick way to display information about layers on the map, all in a publicly accessible location.

To meet these goals, we used ArcGIS Experience Builder to create an interactive web application. This application utilizes a web map with all the layers we needed as feature services, with custom pop-ups to show information that was requested and obscure fields that aren’t needed. This application also allows users to turn layers on and off, change basemaps, provides links to more information, and more. This presentation will show an “under the hood” look at the Experience and webmap, focusing on the settings and widgets we used to build the Experience and how the pop-ups were built using a combination of HTML and Arcade scripting.

This study explores land cover classification methods using high-resolution UAV imagery collected at Lakeside Farm, Oregon in July 2024, with a focus on mapping land cover types. The goal is to assess the effectiveness of multiple supervised classification techniques: K-Nearest Neighbor, Maximum Likelihood, Random Trees, and Support Vector Machine. Object-based and pixel-based classification methods were applied to RGB imagery collected using the Parrot ANAFI drone. The study area provided a unique array of land cover types, including varied vegetation, unvegetated areas, water, and wetlands, which help provide insight as to the advantages and disadvantages of the different classification methods when dealing with each land cover type. This research provides insights into the optimal conditions and methods for UAV data integration in agricultural land cover mapping, contributing to enhanced precision agriculture practices.

This study assessed the accuracy of spatial data collected through a simplified PPGIS tool that uses circles as the sole input method to mark points and areas on a map. A survey of 59 participants completed mapping exercises to locate buildings, parks, and geographic regions.

Results showed participants successfully marked point locations with 90% accuracy and area locations with 95% accuracy. Areas typically exceeded target size by a factor of 1.5 when boundaries were visible on the basemap. Statistical analysis revealed a significant relationship between map zoom level and data accuracy. Users entering data with phones also had higher error rates approaching statistical significance.

These findings validate the simplified PPGIS approach for collecting reliable spatial data with minimal participant training, while suggesting interface improvements like enforcing minimum zoom levels for data entry to enhance accuracy.

In this lightning talk, I will delve into the latest updates to Metro’s online mapping application, MetroMap. I am the lead cartographer for the MetroMap project and we have some new functionality that I think would be really important to share with the GIS in Action attendees. The primary focus on this lightning talk will be on the new enhancements that have been implemented to improve user experience and accessibility. Key updates include the addition of a Print tool, Spanish translations, and new map layers. I will also discuss the significant changes made to meet WCAG Accessibility requirements, ensuring that MetroMap is more inclusive for all users. Additionally, I will highlight improvements related to SEO and findability with hopes that it will make it easier for users to discover and utilize the application. My hope is that this presentation will help showcase an important tool for our region but also inspire other jurisdictions to consider sharing this application to help answer important questions from the public.

Recent federal actions have disrupted access to key datasets, raising concerns about the long-term availability of some essential public data sources. In response, Metro has launched an internal initiative to track changes, assess impacts, and share knowledge across departments. This lightning talk will outline our approach, which included the creation of a Public Data Watch SharePoint site and Teams channel to facilitate collaboration. We will share key takeaways, challenges, and resources, including archives and data preservation efforts. Attendees will gain practical strategies and access to a one-pager with links to helpful resources.

Since we have seen a lot of climate change around the world with snowfall being one of them it brought up the question of how snowfall has changed for the Contiguous United States. In this project I was looking at snowfall trends for the Contiguous United States over the last 10 years from 2014 to 2024. Using NOAA’s National Weather Service’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center’s National Gridded Snowfall Analysis to collect the data needed to analyze the snowfall trends for the last decade. There has been a rise in snowfall over the past decade with each year increasing in snowfall amount. Using state boundary lines showed changes in the amount of snow a state has gotten over the last decade. The results have shown that with the uptick in snowfall over the last decade, there are states that do not necessarily get snow are receiving snow like Georgia and Alabama. The effects of this uptick in snowfall can mean that states that normally do not get any snow will receive snow over the following next years. There is also the concern that there will be severe flooding depending on how fast the snow melts and the terrain of the areas that have received snow. Potentially looking at temperature patterns over the last decade will help provide an understanding of the reason for the uptick in snowfall.

The submitted StoryMap considers the construction of solar panel canopies over parking lots at Portland Community College's Sylvania campus, analyzing drone imagery to measure area which used to estimate both potential kilowatt hours of solar panel generated and also estimated construction costs.