NACIS 2024

Building the Definitive Draft for River Craft: The John Day Boater's Guide
Gabriel Rousseau & Monic Morin, Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management recently published a comprehensive boater's guide for The John Day River. The John Day drains nearly 8,100 square miles of central and northeast Oregon. It is one of the nation’s longest undammed rivers, 147.5 miles of which were designated as a Wild & Scenic River by Congress in 1988. This talk will take you through the three-year process of field work, data collection, content writing, layout & design, and revision. This guide maps 185 river miles at 1 inch to 1/2 mile and is an invaluable resource for education, navigation, safety, and maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.

Thematic Mapping in Augmented Reality: Challenges and Opportunities
David Retchless, Texas A&M University at Galveston
Augmented reality (AR) platforms are increasingly popular in cartographic research and practice, especially for orientation and navigation. However, the potential of AR techniques for thematic mapping remains underexplored. AR tools: 1) share with thematic mapping an emphasis on making the invisible, visible; but 2) differ from thematic maps in design-relevant ways, including perspective and scale/extent. Drawing on my experience developing thematic maps and AR tools for coastal flooding, I consider challenges and opportunities associated with translating design principles for thematic mapping to the AR context, with a focus on abstraction and prominence of point symbols (but also encompassing other feature types, basemaps, and marginalia).

Mapping the Construction of the Qosh Tepa Canal in Northern Afghanistan
Danielle Henry, BlackSky
The Qosh Tepa Canal is a planned 285km canal diverting water from the Amu Darya River into northern Afghanistan for irrigation, with the goal of making Afghanistan food independent. Roughly 100km of the canal are complete, and progress continues under the Taliban government. BlackSky has been closely monitoring the progress of the canal’s construction using a combination of custom-tasked BlackSky imagery, Sentinel-2 data, commercial satellite imagery, and open-source research. BlackSky’s multifaceted approach to monitoring and mapping the canal has produced novel insights about the canal’s construction, geopolitical impact, and long-term viability.

Coloring Outside of the Lines: Sketch Mapping Fear, Safety, and Community for LGBTQ+ Students Amidst Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation
Natalie Correa, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Over 500 state-level bills were introduced in the US that negatively targeted members in the LGBTQ+ community in 2023. I sought to investigate how introduced and passed legislation impacted how college students think about space. I used sketch mapping and interviews to gather student perceptions of fear, safety, and community within the US. The use of sketch mapping provided direct linkages between where students perceived these characteristics and why they perceived them. I then aggregated the results in ArcGIS Pro to create synthesized maps that showed the areas of fear, safety, and community. My research offers insight on using sketch mapping on a large scale in addition to using sketch mapping to understand perceived realities.