MSU's Geospatial Skills Camp for Rural Montana Youth

The Geospatial Skills Camp for Rural Montana Youth, hosted by Montana State University, is an immersive, hands-on program aimed at introducing high school students from rural Montana to geospatial technologies and their communities.

Introduce rural Montana youth to GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and its key concepts in order to inspire creative geospatial thought and broaden STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) access in communities.

Students will learn curriculum concepts through exploring and analyzing data and themes related to rural experiences and community needs. This includes themes in natural resources & management, agriculture, and human geography.

Objective: This exercise aims to introduce key geospatial terms while illustrating how we use our creativity and mental maps to help us think geographically. We will be taking the skills that we already have and applying them in the context of mapping!

The following topics will be covered in this first lab:

1. Discuss how geographic knowledge and spatial awareness are unique to our location in Montana.
2. What features do we use to make readable maps?
3. Moving our mental maps to paper.
4. Practicing concepts of location, direction, distance, scale, and navigation. These will be our geospatial terms for the day.
5. Introduce software (computer tools) that students will be using throughout the week.

Lab 01, Part 1: Spatial Thinking

Thinking about geographic perspectives. In Montana, 33% of its 147,040 square miles is public land. In what ways can we spatially represent this information?

Montana Public Lands Map A:

Students considered the following questions:

The blue polygon represents the percentage of the state that is public land. Is this realistic, or a good way to represent our data Hint, what type of context is missing, is this where all of our public land is located? Maybe we need spatial relationships/ context.

Montana Public Lands Map B:

Students considered the following questions:

Is the following map a good spatial representation of our public land? From the map, is it easy to tell that 33% of Montana's land is public?

Lab 01, Part 2: Mental Maps Activity

Producing maps using the skills and experiences campers already have to practice thinking spatially. What is special about this is that everyone’s mental maps are unique to their own mind, and even animals share these maps as well!

Mental map 1:

1. Montana is approximately 147,040 square miles big, within this distance think about where your home lies. Draw the outline of Montana.
2. What geographic features (mountains, rivers, plains, cities, towns, highways, coulees, forests etc..) will you use to orient yourself? Make sure to add these geographic features to your map, and to the best of your mental map knowledge fit the features to scale.
3. On your mental map of Montana and the geographic features that you used to orient yourself, add a point to your map of where you consider home.

Mental map 2:

Next, use your imagination and pick a new geographical area to mentally map out that has a different scale than what our Map 1 was.  

1. What scale is your map? Is it smaller than your first mental map of Montana or bigger? Make an estimate of how large the area is using a numeric scale, AKA how many miles, acres, feet, and inches.
2. What direction will your map be oriented? Draw a compass on your map that shows the viewer which direction is North, East, South, and West. 
3. What geographic features (mountains, rivers, plains, cities, towns, highways, coulees, forests etc..) did you use to orienteer yourself?
4. Add a scale bar to your map that represents the distance of your map.

Objective: Learning how we put the Earth onto a piece of paper, and exploring the two forms of data: Vector and Raster data.

The following topics that will be covered in this second lab:

1. Learn what coordinate systems and projections are and how we use them.
2. Learn about mapping software and introduce ArcGIS online & National Geographic Map Maker.
3. Learn about the importance of good file storage.
4. Learn how vector and raster data are used.

This activity is aimed to help conceptualize how we take the 3D earth and project it onto a 2D map while preserving an area of interest.

After students have been exposed to a few different projections and understand what Coordinate Reference Systems are, students will attempt to make their own Projection and Coordinate Systems using eggshells.

Activity steps:

1. Each student will need a hard-boiled egg, markers, scissors, a spoon, and a ruler.
2. Using the markers, students will be given the opportunity to draw the Earth's Continents, and a Coordinate Reference System.
3. If possible, students may use their phones to record a video which represents the 3D design on their egg to compare with their 2D projection.
4. Students will then crack the shell of their 3D egg and attempt to line up the pieces so that their image is conserved on a 2D plane.

Vector Data: Vector data consists of coordinates and are represented by points, lines and polygons.

Students will learn how to navigate through ArcGIS online and make their first map while exploring vector data!

From this map, students discuss:

1. What students thought each form of vector data does well representing.
2. How vector data can give us information about the movement of earthquakes. Students will look at the polygons, and make spatial inferences about how an earthquake travels on land vs in water.
3. Students will explore how earthquakes, fault lines, and volcanoes are related based on the map and make spatial inferences on communities that might be high risk.

Raster Data: Raster data is made up of pixels, or grid cells. Each pixel is represented as a square and can vary in size from one meter by one meter to one kilometer by one kilometer.

Students will explore the Sentential-2 10-Meter Land Use/ Land Cover dataset in the context of land use change over a duration of time. Specifically, students will explore how pixels have different values or classes representing the land it is covering and how that translates into quantifying change.

 https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/landcover/.  

NOTE: the wildfire lab is being rewritten and the specific GIS curriculum for this section is not available for the moment, but the objectives will stay the same.

Objective: Learn about primary and secondary data, and present data using story maps.

The following topics that will be covered in this third lab:

1. Learn to create our own data using ArcGIS field maps, and create our own map using the data we collected.
2. Learn how to use secondary data to make a map in ArcGIS online and create our own map using the secondary data.
3. Create a story map using the maps we created.

Objective: Learn how to filter data by creating a map that shows the traditional territories of a tribal nation and their current territory.

In this lab, we will also be thinking about traditional lands and food systems and exploring the Native Land Information System (NLIS).  https://nativeland.info/about/data-sovereignty/ 

The following topics that will be covered in this fourth lab:

1. Learn about what information comes with a data set (attribute table), and how we can use different fields to answer a spatial question.
2. Learn how to filter data in ArcGIS online relative to a location or a feild by using queries, attributes, and locations.

In lab 4, students were encouraged to explore two spatial scenarios while working with their traditional indigenous land data.

Lab 4 was created for the students at Pryor High School, where they completed a historical research project that involved creating maps based on oral history. This lab is intended solely for the Pryor camp and will not be shared in our public curriculum.

Objective: Learn about digitizing old maps and how we can use them as a tool to quantify land use change.

The following topics that will be covered in this fifth lab:

1. Learn how old maps are digitized into digital maps by using coordinates, and then transformed into a raster layer (tiff).
2. Import the Butte 1904 tiff layer into ArcGIS online and use transparency to identify landscape change due to mining activity.
3. Create a primary polygon data layer that will allow you to quantify the land use change in the Butte area due to the mine.
4. Learn about a superfund site and the agency that designates and monitors the area.

Objective: Learn about watersheds and snowpacks by observing snowpack data from the current snow year in Montana, and a current drought index. Students will then take the spatial information they noted about areas experiencing drought or higher-than-normal precipitation and look at the specific watersheds & waterways that fall within their observed areas.

The following topics that will be covered in this sixth lab:

1. Learn what effect the Snow water equivalent (SWE) has on our watershed and use the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s NWCC Interactive map to explore how this snow year compares to others.  click here. 
2. Use a current Drought Intensity Index and watershed boundaries to identify watersheds with possible water scarcity, or watersheds that have normal water abundance.
3. Map the lakes, rivers, and wetlands that lie in your watershed using data from the National Wetlands Inventory.  https://fwsprimary.wim.usgs.gov/wetlands/apps/wetlands-mapper/ 

From this map, we can identify watersheds that are experiencing current drought. Next, students will dive deeper into what that means for the wetlands, rivers, lakes, and ponds.

Objective: Learn about interpolation by taking a USDA grasshopper density dataset which includes point data and converting it into a map showing the low and high densities of grasshoppers across the West.

The following topics that will be covered in this seventh lab:

1. Learn how Grasshopper infestations have an impact on Agricultural practices.
2. Learn about collecting data in terms of the USDA data collected on grasshopper infestations. This dataset is an XLSX (Microsoft Excel file) of public land collections from 2023.
3. Learn about taking point data with grasshopper infestation numbers and transforming it into a readable grasshopper infestation raster layer.
4. Create a map that shows areas of high and low grasshopper density across the entire Western US. Identify areas that have a high number of grasshoppers on the land and therefore will have a large impact on agriculture systems.

Thanks to mapping, we can use data on grasshopper numbers collected by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) to map the areas that have high grasshopper density and prepare for the risks of infestation. We will do this through a mapping technique called Interpolation.

Spatial interpolation is the process of taking points with known values (in this case it is the density of grasshoppers per square yard at a location) and using them to estimate values in other areas. For example, it basically is taking the patterns of grasshopper infestation at a certain point and then estimating the amount of infestation in an area 5 miles away.

Understanding the USGS dataset and the interpolation technique, students can analyze the data to produce a new map showing infestation patterns!