The Rhode Island Shoreline Change Special Area Management Plan (RI Beach SAMP), a program supported by many partners accross the state, works to study and understand how RI’s coastal communities will be affected by flooding and erosion in the coming years, and to assist municipalities in planning how to protect both people and property from these changes. One of the goals of the Beach SAMP program is to generate new data that can be used by communities and individuals to plan for the future. One of their many projects is the RI e911 Exposure Assessment, which utilizes the E911 sites data published here on RIGIS. Background on the E911 Data: The e911 sites data (as well…
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Getting Ready to Use the Collector App
Recently I authored a blog post for the Environmental Data Center blog on setting up a feature class and Web Map for use with Esri’s Collector App. Based on discussions at previous RIGIS Executive Committee Meetings, I thought this posting may be of use and interest to the RIGIS community – especially the municipal-based RIGIS community. This workflow walks users through the process of setting up domains within a file geodatabase, applying these domains to a feature class, preparing the feature class for use with the Collector App, uploading the feature class as a Service to ArcGIS Online and then configuring the Service and Web Map in ArcGIS Online. The…
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Implementing ArcGIS Open Data in Rhode Island
The concept of “open data” is not a new one, for years those of us in the GIS community have come accross this term to describe data that has been shared with no copyright restrictions (or other control mechanisms) for people to use and republish as they wish. Within the past two years, Esri has jumped into the open data world by beginning their ArcGIS Open Data initiative. This is a way for Esri customers to disseminate data through a customized ArcGIS Online web portal under an open data license. Organizations that implement ArcGIS Open Data are inherently agreeing to allow their users to download, use, edit and redistribute data for their…
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Recap: RIGIS User Group Imagery Seminar
On August 19, an educational forum on aerial and satellite imagery available for Rhode Island was held at the University of Rhode Island’s (URI) main campus with the goal of informing attendees on a variety of online resources for image data of Rhode Island, with a heavy emphasis on RIGIS and the US Geological Survey (USGS); this forum also highlighted the new suite of ArcGIS Image Services featuring RIGIS data that are being developed by the Rhode IslandView. There are three ways to download imagery from RIGIS. The majority of RIGIS imagery is available as tiled GeoTIFF and JPEG2000 format files, however historical imagery is available as tiled MrSID format files…
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Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) Database
The Gridded SSURGO (gSSURGO) is a complimentary product to the traditional SSURGO data made available the USDA-NRCS. All attribute tables associated with traditional SSURGO data are contained with the gSSURGO database. These data are stored in an Esri File Geodatabase and are easily combined with other national raster datasets such as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) or the National Elevation Dataset (NED), to name a few. Because file geodatabases offer the capacity to store much more data, the gSSURGO covers wider spatial extents than traditional SSURGO data, giving the NRCS the ability to make these data available as statewide, or even Conterminous United States (CONUS) tiles. The USDA-NRCS has…
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New Data – Topobathy Lidar bare earth DEMs for Southern RI
Between July and August of 2014 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geodetic Survey (NGS) collected topobathy LiDAR for 2,775 miles of the Atlantic Coast from Rhode Island to South Carolina. This provides coverage of areas highly damaged during the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012. In Rhode Island, this project covered a total area of 205 square miles along the south coast, from Westerly to Narragansett. These data have been available for download from RIGIS as raw, vendor-created LAS files since the inception of the new website, however I am happy to announce the release of bare earth Digital Elevation Models created and tiled by RIGIS. For…
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The First RIGIS Metadata Author’s Workshop
The first RIGIS Metadata Author’s workshop was held on March 25, 2016 at the University of Rhode Island. Throughout the all-day workshop participants learned the ins and outs of metadata and how to author it using ArcCatalog. The goal of this workshop was to provide RIGIS data contributors with the new minimum metadata standard, based on the FGDC metadata standard, that all RIGIS data must meet for inclusion on the site, however this workshop was great for anyone looking for more guidance on how to create and write metadata for themselves or their organization. Throughout the morning’s presentations attendees were able to ask questions and have discussions about how metadata…
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New Coastal Lidar and Imagery Available
LiDAR There are two new collections of coastal LiDAR data available for download via the Elevation and Bathymetry section of this website. While neither collection provides full coverage of Rhode Island, both provide users with high-quality elevation data that can be used in a variety of ways. First, is the 2014 NOAA post-Sandy Topobathy LiDAR collection that provides coverage of RI’s south coast towns. Currently these data are only availabe in LAS file format from RIGIS, however we hope to make tiled Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data available in the future. For users wishing to access and use DEM data now, please visit the NOAA Digital Coast Data Access Viewer, where these data…
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Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data ArcGIS Online Open Data Site
Historically, access to the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) has been restricted to applicants meeting a variety of criteria, such as working for a federal government agency, or state emergency management agency. With the release of their new ArcGIS Online Open Data website, the HIFLD has made data previously contained within the Homeland Security Infrastructure Program (HSIP) databases available, and open, to the public. Currently available are over 270 public datasets that are downloadable in a variety of useful formats, such as CSV, KML, and Shapefiles. These are also all available as APIs, such as GeoJSON and GeoServices for easy compatibility with web applications. There are a wide variety of data…
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New Data – Derived Inundation Surfaces: Scaled Sea Level Rise
These data were developed by the Shoreline Change SAMP Team and the URI Graduate School of Oceanography as the result of recent coastal storms, such as Superstorm Sandy (October 2012), which reveal the need to address the vulnerability of populations, infrastructure, and resources at risk from storm surge throughout Rhode Island. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) completed the North Atlantic Comprehensive Study (NACCS) in 2015, which provides new tools and information to assess coastal storm and flood risks. Information from the NACCS was integrated into STORMTOOLS. These coastal inundation modeling results can be used by state government and local communities to identify storm surge flooding risks and develop adaptation strategies to…