Juniper GIS Blog

This is our first blog so we are going to start with a recap of some of our significant activities of 2009.

Mexico:  Teaching People to Map Fish & Coral

We taught a class in Mahahual, Mexico to some people in the local community and to the Mexico staff of Global Visions International (GVI).  GVI works with volunteers to monitor the reef systems of the Mesoamerican barrier reef system which runs along the Caribbean from the Yucatan to Honduras and is the second largest coral reef system in the world.

 

 

Mahaual is the home base for Juniper GIS south.  Check it out — www.casauvero.com.

International Scholars from Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Cameroon, Indonesia, Uganda, Philippines, and Russia

We had the opportunity to teach GIS to visiting scholars from countries around the world.  Each scholar was doing GIS work in the field of  environmental conservation and was part of the Global Scholarship Program of the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS).   To learn more about SCGIS go to www.scgis.org.

The scholars attended a two-week GIS training program at the James Reserve in the San Jacinto Mountains in California.  The GIS training was organized as a “GIS camp.”  Living conditions were casual in a dorm-like settings at a facility that is in the mountains and off-the-grid.  Electricity is from solar and the views are spectacular.  The day would normally start with a hike up the mountain before settling in to a full day of work at the computers.  It was difficult sitting inside at a computer-lab with so much beautiful nature around, but all the students were very excited about the tools they were learning, and they worked hard.  Days usually ended around the campfire, often with a little singing and guitar music.

 

 

 

 

 

Juniper GIS Team

Paul Ferro of Geotrek_GIS has joined our Juniper GIS team for some projects.  He helped us teach the classes in Mexico and at the James Reserve and adds his special GPS skills to our team. 

Kathy Baker-Katz continues to work with us, bringing her expertise in forestry, water projects and real estate mapping. 

 The Conference Season

 We attended the ESRI user conference in San Diego.  John learned more about ModelBuilder and advanced spatial analysis techniques, and reconnected with old friends.  He also had his bike so he got explore a lot of San Diego.  Patti learned from ESRI marketing people that we need to do more of this – Youtubing, Blogging, Twittering, Facebooking.  We’re going to give it a good try in 2010.  So look for a  our new email newsletter, a video of John teaching on YouTube, updates on our Facebook page, regular updates to our Blog, and you may even be able to follow us on Twitter.

After the overwhelming size of the ESRI conference in San Diego, we drove to the mountains for the SCGIS Conference at Big Bear Lake.  John partnered with Tatyana Soroko for a new preconference class. They team taught a one-day class in ModelBuilder and Python.  The class was well attended, but almost everyone felt that each subject needed a full day of instruction.   They will be teaching a two-day version of this class in Boise in January/February.  Look for it on the Juniper GIS schedule — http://www.junipergis.com/training/schedule.

SCGIS will meet in Asilomar, California on July 8 – 11, 2010.  Check the conference website for more details – www.scgis.org.

John continued to offer some of his regular presentations during the remainder of the conference, including his informative and interesting presentation on projections.  You can find a video of a small part of this presentation and the PowerPoints from many of John’s presentations on our website — www.junipergis.com/gis-links/presentations.

The NW ESRI User Group Conference is our standard conference that always feels like home to us.  It was good to see old friends at this year’s conference in Sunriver.  John taught his Spatial Analyst class and Paul Ferro was the conference chair.  In 2010, the conference will be at Spokane on Sept 13 – 17.  Check the conference website for details —  http://www.nwgis.org.

Our Bend Friends Meet Our GIS Friends

John invited one and all to bike 60 miles to Mt. Bachelor for his big birthday, and quite a few GIS people came to town to help him.  This may turn into an annual event.

We’re learning about E-learning

We have partnered with GeoSpatial Training Services in Texas to help us develop our E-learning capabilities — www.geospatialtraining.com.  They helped us get our first E-Learning class up and running in December 7 – 18.  The class was Working with Geodatabases and Linear Referencing.  Look for it soon to be available for purchase directly from our website. 

 Clients & Partnerships:  New & old

We have discovered that when economic times get tough, partnerships help us all.  We are very pleased with the new partners who have shared opportunities with us in the past year, and we look forward to expanding these partnerships in the future.  We appreciate our ongoing partners in Portland, Boise and Olympia.

We have discovered new clients in Texas, on the Oregon coast, in northern Idaho, and close to home in central Oregon.  We have renewed relationships with old clients in Milton-Freewater, Olympia, Fossil and Sunriver. 

We are grateful to all of you and look forward to working with you in the coming year.  Look for our holiday calendar in the mail.

Patti & John

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.