Geospatial Training

Part 1: The Story of Connecticut’s Changing Landscape

Connecticut’s Changing Landscape CLEAR has been creating and sharing land cover for decades. Our websites and methods for slicing and dicing and displaying the data have evolved along with technology. One thing has remained constant through the versions – the maps (now up to six dates covering 25 years) are a rich set of information with […]

More Than Just a Picture? The Basics of Remotely Sensed Imagery

July 28, 2015 Presented by Dan Civco, Professor, Department of NRE, UConn Director, Center for Land Use Education And Research (CLEAR) and James Hurd, Research Associate, Department of NRE, UConn Director, Laboratory for Earth Resources Information Systems (LERIS) We have all seen remotely sensed imagery, and many of us use imagery as a background layer […]

A Map in an App: Drainage Class for 25 States

The Rain Garden App  In case you haven’t heard, a couple of years ago, NEMO (David Dickson and Mike Dietz) created a cool smartphone app that is all about building rain gardens.  It is full of background information including what a rain garden is, how it works, pictures of existing rain gardens and even videos about how […]

Mysteries of the New Lidar Data

October 28, 2014 Presented by Cary Chadwick and Emily Wilson, UConn CLEAR Lidar is a detection system that uses light from a laser on an airplane to collect very accurate and dense elevation values with many different applications (and it looks really cool!). Connecticut is (partially) covered by a patchwork of Lidar datasets captured at […]

Geocaching: A High Tech Game of Hide and Seek

CLEAR’s Geospatial Training Program recently held a workshop for the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History on the art (and fun) of geocaching. Have you heard of geocaching? No? Then you fall solidly into the “muggle” category – aka a human who is not in the know about the greatest real-world treasure hunt that’s happening […]

CT ECO: Shedding Some Light on Connecticut’s Lidar

Light Detection and Ranging – sounds fancy and highly technical, right? That’s because it is! In a nutshell, Lidar data shows the elevation of the earth’s surface.   But the cool parts are what Lidar looks like, shows, and how people are using it.  Why am I blogging about Lidar now? Two reasons – the […]

CLEAR’s Geospatial Training Program Goes Global

When an email from Dr. Yahaya Umar at the Nigerian Defence Academy came across my desk last July indicating interest in CLEAR’s hands-on workshop on Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, I was initially a bit skeptical. Why would anyone from the other side of the world want to travel all the way to UConn to […]

Teens Master the Art (and fun!) of Mapping at UConn’s NRC Academy

The Natural Resource Conservation Academy (NRCA) is an innovative program in conservation and land use planning for a select group of Connecticut high school students. The Academy starts with a week-long field course at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Throughout the week, students interact with UConn faculty and learn about mapping and geospatial information, […]

Goodbye GPS Unit, Hello Smart Phone

Smartphones are the swiss army knife of the digital world. They have replaced countless single-function gadgets from calculators to cameras to pagers to, um, phones! But for mapping geeks, one of the gadgets they have not quite been able to shake is the handheld GPS unit, at least until now. The Geospatial Training Program at […]

NEW! Land Cover for the Long Island Sound Watershed

You may have heard of the Connecticut’s Changing Landscape project and website that provides basic land cover information through five directly comparable land cover datasets, from 1985, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2006, allowing us to look at, and quantify, landscape change in Connecticut.  Now, thanks to the support of the Long Island Sound Study, we […]

CLEAR/DEEP Team Wins Award for "CT ECO" Mapping Website

The CLEAR and CT DEEP team responsible for the development and operation of the Connecticut Conditions Online, or CT ECO, website has won the 2012 Public Service Award from the Connecticut Chapter of the American Planning Association. CT ECO is a highly advanced internet mapping site that provides access to the state’s natural resource data. […]

CLEAR’s Newest Geospatial Technology Course Focuses on Land Trusts

CLEAR’s Geospatial Training Program (GTP) has partnered with the Connecticut Land Conservation Council to develop a new course for land trust staff and volunteers. The first workshop was held on a sunny Friday in September. The one-day course is designed to teach participants how to use a handheld GPS receiver to map property boundaries and […]

Demonstration of ArcGIS.com

July 18, 2012 Presented by Emily Wilson, UConn CLEAR Interactive web maps are powerful tools for organizing and disseminating information for public consumption. For years, Google has led this revolution in online mapping by making it easy for practically anyone to create a custom web map of their own using Google Maps and Google Earth. […]

Rain Garden App Coming Soon!

Several CLEAR programs (o.k., since you asked, it’s the CT NEMO, National NEMO Network, and the Geospatial Training Programs) have teamed up to develop a “rain garden” app for smart phones.  A rain garden is a vegetated depression that accepts and infiltrates runoff from a rooftop, driveway of other impervious surface.  Unlike many  “Low Impact […]