Wow! We are in the homestretch of Geography Awareness Week 2025. Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s 2025 GIS Day celebration in The Catalyst at Park Library. Thank you to our fabulous presenters and panelists for sharing their research and knowledge.
GIS Day 2025
Here is some follow-up from two of yesterday’s presenters.
First, here is the link to Mariana Castro Azpíroz’s StoryMap project, “Stories of the Seasons: Exploring Seasonal Change and Climate Resilience through the Stories of Iowa Land Stewards.” Mariana Castro Azpíroz, an ISU graduate student in Creative Writing and Environment with a minor in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Stories of the Seasons is a collaborative multi-year project that explores climate change experiences and resilience strategies through the eyes of 13 Iowa women landowners and land caretakers. Stories of the Seasons braids narratives of solidarity and common experience through art and storytelling to communicate climate-related topics and projects connected to sustainable practices and relationship-building across the state of Iowa. The project was a great showcase of how ArcGIS StoryMap technology can help tell a compelling and engaging multimedia story, incorporating photos, embedded audio, maps, text, narratives, and artwork.
Artwork by Caylin Jayde
Please take time to enjoy this beautiful, thoughtful, and informative StoryMap.
Artwork by Caylin Jayde
Second, Tim Sklenar shared with us about his project, “Mapping Areas of Potential Ephemeral Gully Formation Using Terrain Indexes”, and showed us a demonstration watershed with some of his results in an application he built in Tableau Public.
Here is his Tableau Public project, Gully Risk Areas Field Boundaries. To use it, examine the map and determine a field boundary that you would like to explore. When you hover over the field, you will see the field boundary in black. When you are ready to select the field boundary, double-click. A new window will open for that field, and you can see areas where water is likely flowing across the field. By using the drop-down menus below the map image, you can change the parameters, such as image resolution, which will help refine the tool’s results.
Again, thank you to everyone who participated in GIS Day and for being part of the GIS Community.
