NRGS Geospatial Blog

One thing I can say about owning your own business is you get tied up in a lot of different things. Some fun and some not so fun. This was something fun.

I found myself the first full week in June at a Clean Water Kids Camp.  How did I get involved -I got there because of the  Caribbean Sea….no it wasn’t in the Caribbean. It was at Audubon Acres. I met the director of Caribbean SEA about a year ago at another even and helped clean up a map they had of St. Lucia (in the Caribbean).  So this summer they  ramped up the TenneeSEA portion of the non-profit and held this camp. Kids got to spend a week outside learning the basics of clean water and watersheds. I went out for three days. The first day I scooped critters out of a creek.

My second day out I spoke about maps. As you can imagine that went over well with 21 kids who have the attention span of a gnat. So after the talk and in the middle of a thunderstorm I started the second portion of my presentation: Geo-caching. I lucked up – with the work that I’ve done on Open Street Map and thanks to the generosity  of Cloudmade they shipped us some GPS’s.  It’s actually quite amazing, 1o years ago I struggled a bit to explain to people in English what I did. Now – you can stand in front of 21 kids and find that 25% have GPS’s on their phones (the may not fully understand what it is) and just about all the parents have an in-car navigation device. Oh yeah – and about half the kids have used Google Earth for something. So it only took about 15 minutes to get them up to speed on what they needed to do.

Now – Audubon Acres is one of those hidden/forgotten parks around Chattanooga. They much like everyone else have been feeling the crunch. I spoke with the Caretaker and she handed me a map. A 19 year old hand drawn map of the facilities.  So I decided that I’m going to help.  Thanks to Hamilton County Water Quality (a sponsoring organization) I received orthoimagery and some parcel information for Audubon Acres. I used ArcGIS to lay out the caches and used that information to load the GPS units with some pre-defined points. This wasn’t geocaching as those of you who are familiar with geocaching know it. We made it a bit easier. Kids used the GPS to walk to the points.  They also got a papers with coordinates and the supervising adult in most cases got a map. If you look at the map below the red dots are caches. Notice the placement.

Audubon Acres

As I said – Audobon Acres had a 19 year old map. I turned on Tracking on the GPS Units. I put the Caches on Trails. So about 5 groups and 3 hours later – I should have multiple tracks on all the usable trails (they’ve lost a lot of trails back to the forest).  From this – Audubon Acres should make Open Street Map and have a really new map for visitors (I hope). So this upcoming weekend I will be mapping Audubon Acres. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves. I made sure that they had to traverse the whole of the park. They had an option to cross at a bridge or to take a short cut across the creek. Once again proving that boys operate on about half their available brain cells they took the creek and made a trail. The girls crossed the creek and found the trail.

Back to the Kids Camp – they made the local news. If you have a question about the camp or want to hold one in your county – email Mary Beth Sutton at marybeth@caribbean-sea.org.

I should be posting the new map of Audubon Acres up shortly.

Oh yeah – Finally – My last appearance at the Clean Water Kids Camp.

Canoes

We all jumped in the water and paddled like maniacs down South Chickamauga Creek. This was taken from my Canoe – or as I call it North River Geographic System’s Aquatic Unit 4.