Based on your interests and the potential relevance of these methods for your own work, choose one of the following tutorials to gain some hands-on experience applying spatial analysis techniques to solve real-world problems using ArcGIS Online. In each tutorial, you'll ask a geographic question, make maps to visually explore the data, and perform spatial analysis to generate and interpret results.
Note: In ArcGIS Online, you may occasionally run into issues where an analysis tool will fail on the first try. If this occurs when you are working through one of the tutorials below, try to rerun the analysis tool, and it will generally succeed after a few attempts.
- Evaluate Locations for Mixed-Use Development (est. 60 min.)
- Young adults in Gresham, Oregon, need affordable housing. Your job, as a real-estate analyst, is to identify suitable locations in this Portland suburb so your company can build apartments allowing this generation to shop, live, and commute. In this lesson, you'll research suitably zoned areas, populated with young adults, near light-rail stops. You'll then share your newly discovered and proprietary knowledge with your company.
- Where Does Healthcare Cost the Most? (est. 60 min.)
- In 2016, America's $679 billion Medicare expenditures provided health insurance coverage for 56.8 million beneficiaries. According to a 2017 Medicare Trustees Report, the program remains solvent through 2029. But after that, the effects of a rapidly aging population are expected to consume program income. In this lesson, you'll explore Medicare's costs by creating a national heat map reflecting regions experiencing high and low costs. Identifying areas of high cost is the first step in understanding and containing the factors threatening the program's longevity.
- Plan Routes for Food Inspectors (est. 60 min.)
- San Diego County includes 4,300 squares miles of Southern California. It also has 12,000 food establishments - and you, as a supervisor for the county's retail food monitoring and compliance program, have just four inspectors. In this lesson, you'll map the unannounced inspections of your food detectives in ways that spreads their stops geographically while keeping them in restaurants more and on roads less.
- Connect Streams for Salmon Migration (est. 90 min.)
- Atlantic salmon populations are dwindling. This concerns Canada because Atlantic salmon are the country's top aquaculture export. In the coastal province of Nova Scotia, dams prevent these fish from reaching the freshwater they need for spawning. To address this issue, officials are considering retrofitting dams in the Mersey River Watershed with artificial waterways so Atlantic salmon can swim upstream and access fresh water. In this lesson, as a GIS technician, you'll identify the best locations for constructing these aquatic bypasses.
