Exercises

Exercises & Projects: What they are and what to turn in for credit.

The labs from the book  or online will lead you through steps.  I will ask you to “post” certain parts of these exercises.  That means filling out a word doc with the requested material, which you will then save as a PDF to turn in to Canvas. Extra credit points may be available.  I have to be able to easily read your posts at page level to evaluate it without zooming in.  If I ask for a “screen snip” don’t capture a giant monitor (in the lab) or your whole desktop; use a tool to takes a reasonable piece of the terrain. You have snipping/screenshot tools in both Windows and Mac that let you take part of the screen; just ask if you need help finding/using one of them.

The deadline for finishing weekly exercises and projects is the following Sunday at noon to the Canvas site. Every file you submit for  this course must start with your last name and be followed by a descriptive title  (e.g., harbor_week1_exercises.docx)

If you have a question or QGIS doesn’t cooperate, please post your question in the Exercises Discussion in Canvas. You can start there to look for answers as well; if you post a new question, I’ll get an email and respond there so that everyone benefits. You might also want to turn on notifications for that discussion. Please name your Post “Exercise X – your brief description here”  If you answer someone else’s question, you could earn extra credit points. Thanks.

Note that there are opportunities for extra credit within each exercise. You may help each other for the bulk of the exercises–the point is to learn–but do your own work for extra credit.

Week 10 (March 23)

Exercise 6. Three online exercises to get you into remote sensing data and classification processes.

Make a new folder on P:

Copy the lab report template and data for parts 2 & 3 found in this folder
R:\courses\EEG_316_GIS_2026\sharedwork\exercises\Ex6Wk10

Part 1: download satellite imagery

    • Web Exercise1, but read through ALL of the Part 1 instructions before you start it please – Download Imagery (40 mins…not including the download time)
    • make sure you have a folder set up within Ex6Wk10 to receive the data on P drive. You’ll also build a new project in that folder, but un-check the “add new folder” button on the “new” project page from ArcGIS Pro so that the images and ArcGIS project wind up in the same folder. You’ll be sending a snip of your folder contents.
    • Instead of Singapore do this exercise on a place that you know, that you’re likely to do your project on, or at least some place you find interesting (great geology, great vegetation contrasts, interesting environmental problems, home, etc). You can use this same image in your final project, if you know where your project is going to be centered. If the downloading takes a long time, you can start on either one of the next two parts of the exercise while you wait.
    • Move the downloaded file from wherever it goes to your P drive before you unzip it. Use “extract here.” You can use Windows, but I’d suggest you use 7-zip to be safe. It has to do with carriage returns and line feeds. 7zip is a free download. You should always use it for GIS data. Install it on your lab computer if it isn’t there. (right click, “see more options” to find it, if it is there, use “extract here”)
    • update: they are only “TAR”ed now, not zipped. Use 7zip to untar them. Satellite images come as “.tar.gz” fles, which means you’ll have to open and unpack it twice, or right click on the fle and choose “7zip/Extract here” two times to frst “unzip” the fle, then right click on the new “.tar” fle to “un-tar” (un-TapeARchive) it into the multiple fles. DO NOT USE WINDOWS EXPLORER TO SEE OR OPEN ZIPPED FILES.
      sorry for shouting.
    • As you go through the exercise, I’ll ask for some snips to post to your lab report.

Part 2: unsupervised (pixel-based) classification (1 hour or so)

    • Go to the ESRI Academy Unsupervised Image Classification course
    • The data have been downloaded and are already in the “unsupervised” folder
    • Follow their instructions, looking for places where I’ve asked for snips or comments in the “report.”

Part 3: supervised (object-based) classification (1 hour or so)

    • Go to the ESRI Academy Object-based Supervised Classification course
    • The data have been downloaded and are already in the “supervised” folder
    • Follow their instructions, looking for places where I’ve asked for snips or comments in the “report.”

Week 8 (March 9)

Exercise 5 Georeferencing and digitizing polygon data

Make a new folder on P to house your exercise for this week. Copy the following from R:…\sharedwork\exercises\Ex5Wk8 to that new folder

    • the lab report template
    • the Bolstad lab 3 instructions (pdf)
    • digitize folder
    • BolstadLab3 folder
    • do not copy the “geo_maps” folder…you only need one specific file from it.

Part 1: Georeference a scan of a geologic map- instructions on this page (we will do this together)

Part 2: Learn about digitizing polygons
– work on more of Bolstad’s Lab 3, this time digitizing polygons
– The pdf instructions from Bolstad and the BolstadLab3 ArcGIS Pro project folder are in R:…sharedwork\exercises\exercise5

Part 3: Digitize the geology of your map tile- instructions continue on this page

Exercise 3 (February 9, 2026)

In this exercise, you will complete Menke’s  Exercise II.6 “raster data analysis” which has 5 tasks. All the data and Word doc for submission  are in the Ex3Wk5 folder here:
R:\courses\EEG_316_GIS_2026\sharedwork\exercises\Ex3Wk5

Copy the entire folder to your P or laptop, and open the Word document that you will turn in. All the data you need are in that folder.

Exercise 2 (January 23, 2026)

In these parts of several Menke and online exercises, you’re going to do a smattering of things in 4 parts to get your ready for your first project. You’ll learn how to compose a print layout, try out some different projections, and learn to work with attribute tables, table joins and lastly, fields and field calculations. Data you need are in the Ex2Wk2 folder here:
R:\courses\EEG_316_GIS_2026\sharedwork\exercises\Ex2Wk2

Copy the entire folder to your P or laptop, and open the Word document that you will turn in. All the data you need are in that Ex2Wk2 folder.

Exercise 1 (January 12, 2026)

This first exercise is adapted from several sections of the workbook by Menke (2nd edition). You will follow his instructions while keeping an eye out for what I need for documentation of the process, mostly screen snips and short replies. The data for these exercises will be in the folder for each weekly exercise,  R:\courses\EEG_316_GIS_2026\sharedwork\exercises .
All data used in Menke can also be downloaded here.

    • Copy today’s exercise folder
      “R:\courses\EEG_316_GIS_2026\sharedwork\exercises\week1_ex1”
      to your GIS folder on P: (or C: if using laptop). It should be something close to
      P:\your_username\GIS\exercises\week1_ex1\
    • The exercise folder contains:
      • two folders with data supplied by Menke (just what you need, not all 1.5 gigabytes of it)
      • a word doc with spaces for your “answers” to this lab, aka the “lab report”
        “Your_last_name_Exercises_1_Week_1_2026.docx.
    • This “answer” sheet is the only thing you need to post  to the assignment in Canvas.
    • Make sure all the project files get stored in your personal copy of the exercise folder, not somewhere like C:\….users\….\Documents, which is the default!

Part 1 is Menke’s Exercise 1, task 1 through 4. It is focused on data types and how to get layers onto the map canvas.

Part 2  is his Exercise 2 tasks 1 &2, focused on styling the map canvas and the layers on it.

Edited by DJH Jan 10, 2026