Assignment 3- Cemetery Mapping

Introduction

The problem in this assignment involves the Hadleyville cemetery in Eleva, Wisconsin.  Located just south of Eau Claire, the cemetery has lost all record of their maps.  This has caused them to start from scratch.  The Geography 336 this semester has gone and collected the necessary data from the cemetery over the past two weeks in order to fix this problem.  Now each student is required to make a map of the cemetery in order for them to have an updated and reliable map.  Each student in the class has created their own map through using ArcMap which allows for attribute data to be attached to each headstone.  This is much better than creating a simple map with just the points of each headstone.  By using GIS, an interactive map is created which allows for easy usage, simple updating methods, and reliability.

In order to gather this data, the class used a survey grade GPS, a UAS, and written data collection methods.  It was planned that the UAS would take a high resolution aerial image of the cemetery because the images available online were of low quality.  Then, the original plan was to collect a data point with the GPS for each name on a headstone, but this method took too long.  It was decided upon to just stick with written data collection methods which worked out much better and quicker.  This data will then be turned into the attributes entered into the GIS map.

Study Area

Below in Figure 1 is the study area.  It is just south of Eau Claire, WI.  The data was collected in the last couple weeks of Summer 2016.  The data was collected in warm and sunny weather.

Figure 1: Hadleyville cemetery location.

Methods

The class used a survey grade GPS and a UAS in order to conduct the survey.  These were both very accurate tools that were used in order to produce a final interactive map for the cemetery.  The GPS has an accuracy of just a few inches and the UAS has a high definition camera which allows it to produce great looking images.  It was important to have accurate tools because this is such a small study area with many of the headstones right next to each other.  It was originally thought that the GPS would collect the data points, but this ended up taking too much time.  Instead, each student went around collecting the data for each headstone with pen and paper.  This goes to show that a purely digital approach is not always the best choice when it comes to collecting data.

Once the data was all collected it was then entered into a shared spreadsheet which was filled in by the students of the class.  Each name in the cemetery was given a unique identifier (ex: "D5") in order to be joined with the points within the map later on.  The fields for the attribute table were agreed upon by the class.  Not every field is filled in for each headstone, but most of them are.  Some of the headstone were too old to read or were missing which made it difficult to have a fully complete and accurate table.  Once all of the data was entered into the shared spreadsheet, each student downloaded the spreadsheet and joined that data with the points they had entered into their own personal maps.  The UAS data had to be combined with the points in order to have the higher resolution image with the final map.  There were many UAS images to choose from and it was possible to change the bands in order to find certain headstones.  It was very useful to have different images readily available.

Results/Discussion

Below in Figure 2 is part of the table used to create the final map.  The full table is quite long, but looking at this one section covers the fields and how they were filled out.

Figure 2: Attribute data used to create the final map.

Also below in Figure 3 is the final map for the Hadleyville cemetery.  It shows which of the headstones a joined or single, where the ground control points (GCPs) are, and where family monuments are.  The data transferred well into the map.  A few fields had to be updated in order to produce the final result, though.  The data collection methods used to produce this map were good ideas, but needed to be more thought out in the long run.  Some of the fields are missing data and creating point for each headstone became difficult by just relying on an aerial image.  Perhaps discussing the data collecting methods beforehand as class and assigning jobs would have produced better results, but overall this assignment was a success.

Figure 3: Hadleyville cemetery final map.

Conclusion

The methods transferred well into a final product for this project.  This mixed formats of data collection were messy and could have been discussed more, but they were overall a success for the first big assignment.  The potential errors within the map are outweighed by the fact that this map is full of information that the cemetery previously had lost.  The errors can be updated until the map is 100% accurate.  This map can be updated in the future and will be very useful for the cemetery.