Internship Introduction & GIS User Groups

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My internship this semester is being merged into my current Environmental Specialist position with Alachua County's Office of Land Conservation. Since GIS is used regularly within our program to produce maps and perform basic geospatial analysis, completing my GIS internship through my employer was the logical choice for me. I'm grateful that our Director and Program Manager were so supportive in facilitating me in this arrangement. 

One of the main projects I will be working on throughout this internship is creating an updated feature class of all the properties that have been nominated for acquisition through our conservation program, Alachua County Forever, since the program's inception in 2000. One of the previous Program Managers was maintaining a database with this information until 2015, but his database was so convoluted and cobbled together that once he left the program, no one was able to decipher how to use the database. I will need to dig through a lot of data and come up with a process to create a current feature class that includes all of the property nominations and the relevant attributes for those properties. 

I also spent some time this week searching for GIS user groups for my location. The closest group I could find was the Northeast Florida GIS User Group. I'm not sure how active they are, but I signed up for their email list so that I could receive information about GIS events, webinars, or other learning opportunities in my area. 

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