Cartographic Skills- Introduction

-
Hi! My name is Julieta Ramos and I’m from Los Angeles, California. I hold a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California Riverside. During undergrad years, I completed an archaeology field school in Belize, and interned for LULAC in Washington D.C.. Afterwards, I volunteered for the World Wide Organization of Organic Farmers (WWOOF) for 3 months in France and Italy. From there, I worked in CRM and tutored for a few years before falling backwards into the game industry in which I’ve worked my way up from a tester to project and localization manager for a video game studio in town.

Having worked in software development for the past 6 years helped steer me back to this field since it continues to play a major role in geographical intelligence and advancements. Earth is ever changing and I see this industry growing fast. I figured this is the right time in my life to invest in a dream career path. Upon discovering GIS during undergrad, I've kept meaning to return to work in a field of study I'm passionate about-- environmental conservation. I joined this program to gain a better understanding of GIS and learn about the technology involved in order to pursue a career in environmental conservation.

Outside of work and this program, I enjoy outdoor activities, tabletop games (such as Mansions of Madness, Dominion, Dungeons & Dragons, Pandemic), finding new music, reading, and trying my hand at nature photography and baking. I used to play video games for fun, but don’t have as much free time anymore--a good thing. I've taken a step to become more active the past couple years and began participating in National Park half marathons alongside my mother. They've taken us to Lake Powell in Arizona, Zion in Utah, and Yosemite in California. We hope to complete the one in the Grand Canyon this year.

So far I’ve only completed Intro to GIS for this program, so I’m psyched to get started on this course and get to know more of my online peers!


Last but not least, you may find my story map here outlining some places where education has led me thus far.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GIS5100 Week10: Final Project

-
Image
My final project was dedicated to finding suitable areas for a new Elementary School site in Riverside County, California. I started out by compiling 5 pieces of key datasets: County Assessor parcel data, California Schools, Fault zones, Roads, and Public sites. First I performed euclidean distance analyses on four of them in order to produce zonal raster for preferred areas. A weighted analysis based on prioritizing safety shows that ideal areas fall within Hemet, Menifee, and Palm Springs Unified School Districts. Final analysis results show how active school sites are distributed, where all vacant parcels of at least 5 Acres or more lie, and recommended areas for a new school site. The two circled were determined to be the most suitable after analyzing results from weighted overlay analyses and locations of parcels. Additional setbacks are anticipated as more conditions are implemented to the list of mandatory criteria needed to finalize parcels. Looking b
Read more

Module 5- Analytics

-
Image
Now that we've developed a basic comprehension of color themes, labeling, and typography. This week we dived into creating an infographic using data based on the County Health Rankings data from 2018. This is my very first attempt at an infographic, I don’t think it turned out very well. But I learned a lot overall on how to think more artistically, which is not common. I thought about color themes, placement of data, and amount of information to include and in what format (chart, text, map?). It gave me a lot of ideas on how to tackle the next infographic. Another thing I considered was visual balance by seeing how things looked like when aligned with certain ways and combinations. Given more time and tools on this assignment, I would take advantage of software such as Photoshop to include a fun background that compliments the information supplied via ArcGIS Pro.
Read more

Module 3- Terrain Visualization

-
Image
In this week's module, we covered various terrain visualization techniques, including contour lines, hillshade manipulation, and the use of digital elevation models (DEM) on a 2-dimensional surface. The main exercise required to overlay a land cover layer of Yellowstone over an elevation raster layer. Seen below is my final result. On the left is land cover, with some transparency, over a traditional hillshade effect. I selected a traditional effect because it best represented land cover features. On the right is the elevation with a multispectral hillshade effect.  I went through a few color ramps to test which best complemented this DEM's physical features. I also went ahead and grouped many of the original land cover features into Pine Trees, Douglas Firs, etc. in order to generalize the different types of tree types. As for the map layout, at first I only had a single map frame and tested ways to represent elevation alongside land cover since I would otherwise have to mak
Read more