Tuesday, June 5, 2018
2:30 – 3:00 – Anthony Wong/Connor McCabe – Sediment Loss Hotspot – Rural
Project Description:
The company Wong & McCabe Consulting will work with the Credit Valley Conservation to ultimately fix agricultural fields in rural areas from contributing to high phosphorus loading into the Great Lakes system. The goal of this project is to construct an automated tool to identify and target areas of high phosphorus and nutrient loading caused by erosion from agricultural fields within the East Credit River subwatershed. The process of targeting these rural areas of high phosphorus loading will allow for the assessment of these locations for Best Management Practices (BMPs) suitability. These BMPs are restorative practices that farmers can implement to the agricultural fields to reduce the amount of sediment loss. The automated tool will be constructed using the ArcGIS 10.5 software and will be automated using Python scripting.
The study area of this project will focus on the East Credit River subwatershed within the Credit River watershed. This subwatershed covers approximately 51 square kilometres (km2) and is located in the northern portion of the watershed. To achieve the project goal, five project objectives will first need to be accomplished. The first objective is project management, in which the project team will conduct biweekly meetings with advisor Xinxia Jiang and with the client over the course of the project. In addition, biweekly progress reports and earned value management (EVM) will be produced for the client.
The second objective is project understanding, in which the project team will review the data, research scholarly literature, study Python tutorials in and out of the classroom and pre-process the dataset. The third objective is preliminary data processing, in which the project team will begin to build the automated tool. Using the data, the stream power index (SPI) detailing the erosion risk of a location in an area will be calculated. The soil erodibility factor (K) for each soil type in the study area drainage basin will be calculated and ranked.
The progress report and presentation will be included within this objective that will be submitted to the client along with the work completed up to date. The fourth objective is the final data processing in which the project team will complete the remaining tasks regarding the construction of the automated tool. The SPI and the soil erodibility factor calculated will be combined to produce a new ranking map that will indicate the erosion risk for agricultural soil. The total suspended soils (TSS) and total phosphorus (TP) will be calculated for the drainage basin. Lastly, estimates of TSS and TP changes will be made once BMPs are implemented. The fifth objective is the final report & presentation in which the project team will write the final report including the instruction manuals for the tool and create the PowerPoint presentation.
The first project deliverable that will be delivered to the client is the progress report that will contain the map of the study area displaying the ranking of drainage areas according to SPI, erosion vulnerability and combination of both. In addition, a PowerPoint presentation of the progress report will be presented to the client. The second project deliverable is the final report that will contain the map of the study area showing annual TP and TSS load for each drainage area and a resultant map modified by implementation of hypothetical BMPs. The final report will also include the findings from the preliminary data processing objective. A formal presentation will be conducted to the client to detail all of the findings throughout this project.
3:00 – 3:30 – Olivier Peyre/Emma Stephenson – Planning Applications Index
Project Description:
Our company, OPES Consulting, is teaming with the City of Thorold in order to improve the Development and Engineering department’s planning application filing system. As Thorold grows in population and infrastructure, the aforementioned department is receiving an increasing number of requests from citizens and businesses to adjust the zoning laws. The department’s limited staff is struggling to process this burgeoning number of requests. Current issues facing the department include the scattering of records across different platforms and formats; the regular occurrence of fragmented, inaccurate, and incomplete data; and a lengthy turn-around time for customer inquiries. This means that the entry, browsing, and display of the planning application records is unnecessarily complicated, the records are difficult to map, and spatial patterns in applications cannot be identified. Our study area is the City of Thorold, an 82.99-km² municipality that serves as the seat of the Regional Municipality of Niagara, located in Southern Ontario. The goal of this collaboration is to produce a planning records filing system that utilizes an original user-friendly and centralized cataloging system, one that allows for the georeferencing of the planning application records.
The objective of this project is threefold: to produce a centralized filing system storing the records in three individual databases, to georeference the three types of planning application records, and to report planning application patterns. The first objective entails the storage of three types of application requests, which are minor variances, applications for consent, and site plan amendments, each in its own discrete database. Each database will provide entry forms and queries that facilitate data entry, browsing, and display while minimizing redundant, inaccurate, incomplete, and missing data. To meet this objective, we will collect all application records and the city’s zoning basemap from the client, review all the records to identify and report errors, and transfer these records from Excel spreadsheets to Access databases that will be designed to include entry forms and ease data management. The second objective aims to georeference all the planning application records on ArcMap according to the records’ respective municipal addresses stored in the three databases. The third objective would use the data from the georeferenced records to identify potential planning application patterns on the city’s parcel map, to the benefit of zoning-by-law improvement. We will incorporate Microsoft Word in order to draft relevant reports. The timeline of this project began on December 15, 2017, and will run until June 8, 2018. We will deliver a progress report by April 6, 2018, and the final report will be completed by June 8. The project’s deliverables will include three individual Microsoft Access databases, three individual shapefiles, and three technical memoranda.
3:30 – 4:00 – Taylor Dilliott/Charan Patal – Future Development of Niagara College
Project Description:
TC Technical Consulting has been hired by Judy Johnson, who is the Campus Grounds Supervisor at the Niagara College Niagara-on-the-Lake campus, to complete Phase III of the Future Development Planning project. Prior to the first two phases of this project the school lacked a central geodatabase or online map resource. The goal for Phase 3 of the Future Development Planning of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Campus is the continued updates and maintenance of a geospatial database using a Geographic Information System (GIS). The study area for this project is limited to the Niagara-on-the-Lake campus of Niagara College, located at 135 Taylor Road, Niagara-on-the-Lake. The study area is approximately 0.5 square Kilometers.
The project has eight major objectives, most of which focus on the proper updating of existing data and adding newly collected data into the geodatabase and the ArcGIS Online map. The objectives are the mapping of the outdoor irrigation systems located on Memorial Hill and in the schools Hop yard, the Mapping of the Wetland Ridge Trail, the new trail signs and the water monitoring stations in various ponds around campus, Mapping of the new distillery building and roadway, Mapping the locations of memorial benches, updating and verifying the grape varieties in the school vineyard, verifying the coordinates of the new East Wing expansion at the main building, and finally updating the geodatabase and online map resource for use by the school and associated faculties and visitors. The majority of these tasks will be completed using either a handheld GPS unit or Total Station for surveying, the rest will be completed by gathering data from outside sources such as the Foundations Department, Winery employees, Facilities Management and from our client. The final deliverables for this project will be the formal Progress Report and Presentation, the formal Final Report and Presentation and the fully updated geodatabase and online map resource of the campus.
4:00 – 4:30 – Karen Wong – Forest Road Optimization
Project Description: Unavailable at this time
4:30 – 5:00 – Ahmad Muhmad – Modeling Aquatic Wetlands
Project Description:
The team at Al Hayat Environmental is highly skilled and knowledgeable in modeling wetlands, and GIS applications. Al Hayat Environmental is confident that an accurate representation of wetlands for the Gordon Cosens Forest along with all streams will be modeled and buffers for areas of concern will be delivered on time and within the proposed budget, to assist RayonierAM in forestry management operations.
Our team is Pursuing sustainable development for RayonierAM is vital; forestry management operations, when combined with technological advancements in GIS lead to a successful sustainable model. Creating ‘area of concern’ buffers around wetlands, streams and swamps is an important procedure for RayonierAM’s operation. These AoC’s are created in accordance with the ‘Forest Management Guide for Conserving Biodiversity at the Stand and Site Scales’ known as the Stand and Site Guide (SSG), as well as the Ontario Ecosites Classification. The goal of this project will be to assist RayonierAM in refining existing buffers specifically slope dependent areas of concern. Leveraging LiDAR derived DEM data Al Hayat Environmental will develop a script to model wetlands and their boundaries, also a script to automate updates to existing buffers. Using ArcMap, Python and Whitebox a more precise tool and method to model wetlands and therefore create buffers around AOCs will be created.