Assessments of water quality in the Lower Rio Grande downstream of Falcon Reservoir have identified a number of persistent water quality problems in this important transboundary river, including high levels of fecal bacteria and increasing salinity levels.

In 2013, realizing the need to address water quality concerns in the river in an integrated fashion, the governments of the US and Mexico created a binational forum for cooperation and information exchange under the auspices of the International Boundary and Water Commission. The effort, known as the Lower Rio Grande/Río Bravo Water Quality Initiative (LRGWQI), is a pilot project designed to establish binational mechanisms to protect water quality in the river.

Among the technical goals of the LRGWQI is the modeling of pollutant loadings and instream water quality in the river, including simulation of scenarios associated with changing population, infrastructure and management practices.

In order to facilitate binational decision making associated with this cooperative technical effort, UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, in collaboration with the UT’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, developed a geospatial decision support system in Python. The GIS functionalities are enabled using the Python-based Application Programming Interface of QGIS, an open source GIS software. SQLite, a serverless, self-contained database system is used for managing user-specified and system configuration data.

We present the principal capabilities and features of the LRGWQI DSS, discuss some of the challenges we encountered using the QGIS software to develop the application and present some of the modifications and additions we are currently incorporating into the system.

Presenter Bios:
Roger Miranda is a PhD Candidate at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin. He is a licensed professional geoscientist with over 20 years of experience in water resource management and water quality planning. Mr. Miranda earned his M.S. in Geosciences from the University of Texas at Dallas and his B.S. in Geology from the University of Texas at Arlington. Much of Mr. Miranda's work has been on water bodies located in the US-Mexico Border Region.

Alex Sun is a computational hydrologist with the Bureau of Economic Geology at University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D and MS in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He has extensive experience and strong interests in developing decision support systems using open-source technologies.

Maps provide us with some of the most intuitive ways to represent data visually, principally because they provide a way to rectify our physical locality with some digital and data-dense topography; they help us build narrative with relevant geolocation and let us tell trends with data on a geospatial-sensitive canvas. Learning how to make compelling maps with your own data is a a non-trivial endeavor, involving a concatenation of expertise and technical aptitudes with specialty tools that might be obscure to new mappers, and limits the community as a result.

At CartoDB (https://carto.com/), we have a series of open source projects to augment the GIS learning experience, with Academy (http://academy.cartodb.com/), our "code academy" for GIS, or our Trainings repository (http://cartodb.github.io/training/), a place to share lessons and workshops and submit events to a collaborative calendar. We'll talk about the future of education for digital geographers, and how partnering with curriculum producers has fostered a supportive community of stellar mappers across domains. Join us to learn about how we do it, and how you can help!

Presenter Bio:
Andy Eschbacher is a physicist turned educator turned map scientist. At CartoDB he wears many hats. From finding out how to make web maps more scientific with hacks on open source software, to developing educational content, to sharing and learning from the diverse online mapping community, he and his colleagues keep very busy.

There is a growing movement in the Texas GIS community to use open source application software, such as QGIS, to implement spatial solutions for governments and businesses. Until recently, there were only a few rare options available for learning FOSS4G in an educational setting. As the result of a recent Department of Labor TAACCCT grant, there now exists an entire 5 course curriculum available to learners anywhere via the Internet to learn the latest version of QGIS. This session will explore this curriculum and examine learning opportunities for professionals seeking knowledge and training in FOSS4G.

Presenter Bios:
Richard Smith, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Science in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. Richard is currently researching methods to partially automate the cartographic design process and is also building a multi-user multi-touch collaborative mapping application for use in time-sensitive situations.

Phillip Davis, EdD serves as project manager for the GIS program at Del Mar College. He recently served as Director of the GeoTech Center (2008-2013) and is currently serving as the Project Manager for the National Information, Security and Geospatial Technology Consortium at Del Mar College. In this role he is responsible for the creation of this GST 101 course and four others that make the Model GIS Curriculum now used in colleges nationwide. His research interest is in the use and promotion of open source software solutions for GIS and higher education.

On June 2nd, the USGS Texas Water Science Center released the new Texas Geology Web Map Viewer. The map viewer is an interactive web-based tool that allows a broad range of users to explore the geology of the Lone Star State at a scale of 1:250,000. Users can navigate the map with a simple click-and-point tool, or by using the location search tool to find common geographic place names, latitude/longitude coordinates and other areas of interest. The interactive map viewer allows users to turn data layers on or off, identify layers of interest and retrieve detailed information about each geologic formation, such as the feature name, geologic age and feature description. The web map viewer is the third generation in this series of Texas geologic mapping products, which is intended to provide data to a broad range of users interested in exploring the geology of Texas.

In October 2002, the USGS Texas Water Science Center, in cooperation with the Texas Natural Resources Information System, embarked on a project to digitize all 38 Geologic Atlas of Texas hardcopy map sheets (UT-Bureau of Economic Geology) and compile them into a single, stand-alone database. Completed in 2007, the project resulted in a rich, digital dataset containing more than 145,000 geologic features in Texas and portions of neighboring states. The presentation will cover the entire life cycle of the project from data production, to application development and the use of social media outreach tools, as well as the public response

Our new application hosted on Amazon EC2 makes use of ArcGIS server to surface restful endpoints using query layers that point to data hosted on SQL Server 2012 in spatially enabled views. The new user interface takes advantage of Bootstrap to provide a user interface that is responsively designed and works on devices of any form factor.

Great care was taken to build an application that is light on the wire. This has been achieved by optimizing the data that is downloaded within the application and also optimizing our code using ESRI’s Javascript Web Optimizer. The presentation will highlight how we addressed the pain points we experienced in our development of this application.

Presenter Bios:
Born in New York City, Richard Winkelbauer has a masters degree in Geographic Information systems. He spent the majority of his career as a GIS Analyst before transitioning to software development and was a key developer on LCRA’s Hydromet Data website. He enjoys running, mountain biking, skiing and has traveled extensively including having been to all 50 states.

Ginny Vragel has a bachelors degree in Computer Science and has worked at State Agencies for almost 25 years with the majority of her time spent in the GIS field. She is currently the Application Services Manager in the IT Division of the Texas Water Development Board and was the primary technical support for the old ArcIMS WIID site.

The technology group at Drillinginfo, Inc. which includes GIS, Data Dev and IT/CM, has undertaken an effort to provide its customers with a rich set of map and geoprocessing services. The big opportunity and also the great challenge lies in supporting a variety of O&G industry-standard applications with varying spatial service connection capabilities. This effort dictates that Drillinginfo support both ESRI proprietary protocols as well as Open Source (OGC) protocols within this diverse set of applications.

Additionally, each application has its own set of challenges with regard to various supported modes of authentication. This presentation will dive into some of the technical hurdles and architecture decisions made to support such a diverse offering. Additionally, this presentation will speak to how the company has partnered with application vendors and clients to achieve successful technical integration. As the GIS industry increasingly ventures into the new managed API economy, this talk will provide valuable insight about hosting spatial web services for integration into non-ESRI-based applications.

Presenter Bio:
Dale Emrich currently serves as the Director of Products for Geospatial & Web Services. In this role, he is responsible for the DI GeoData Services Product - WMS/WFS/ESRI Modules as well as Drillinginfo's Managed APIs and 3rd Party & Customer Direct Integration. He obtained his degree in Business Administration - Petroleum Land Management from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.

Justin Scott Winn is the GIS Specialist at Drillinginfo. He graduated from Texas A&M University and began his GIS/Cartography career at A&M’s Forest Science department, where he helped develop a GIS for reservoirs under the Fort Worth jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. At Drillinginfo, he has researched leasing and unitization agreements in courthouses and at the RRC, developed models for in-house and custom client applications and overseen GIS customer service requests. He manages client connections and data interoperability for our Geodata Web Services.

Cole Howard is the GIS Systems Analyst at DrillingInfo. He graduated from Lamar University with a B.S. in Political Science and earned his GIS Certification from Austin Community College. His experience with ArcGIS & Open-Source software, programming languages, and relational database management systems is used to align and integrate DrillingInfo’s GIS department with our Information Technology and Configuration Management teams. He is responsible for the architecture and administration of our GIS Systems and Geospatial Web Services.

The primary program I used to create the 3D Model was ESRI's ArcScene 10.0. The Engineering Department at Waste Management provided a number of CAD files showing the topography of the landfill's liner (the bottom), the current level (as of Feb 2014), and the finished grade once the landfill is full. I exported the data into a file geodatabase so I could edit the shapes. Because the CAD files included the topography for the entire property, I had to clip out the areas not relevant to the landfill cell boundaries itself. I then converted each feature into a TIN and using the Delineate TIN Data Area tool, I was able to remove areas along the perimeter with edge lengths that were too long along the outside edges of the landfill area.

Using the Polygon Volume tool within the 3D Analyst Tool Set, I was able to calculate the volume each feature was in order to determine total capacity. By adding together the liner and current level volumes and the liner and finished grade volumes and then subtracting the two totals, I was able to determine the how full the landfill was as of Feb 2014 by percentage. As the years move forward, I can use this process to calculate how much per year the landfill grows and potentially how many years it will take to completely fill it.

Presenter Bio:
Kate Hickey is originally from Norwich, Vermont and came to Texas to attend Texas A&M University in College Station. She graduated from A&M in May of 2013 with a BS degree in Geography, with a concentration in GIS. She began working for the City of Temple shortly after graduation and has been with the City for just over two years. She works in the Mapping Dept. in Public Works assisting all other departments with their mapping needs.

Houston-Galveston is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. With this rapid growth comes increased development and associated impervious surfaces. The Texas Coast, and particularly Galveston Bay, is important economically due to its fisheries and petrochemical industry, as well as for its leisure and tourism industry. Given that the Galveston Bay Estuary (as defined by the National Estuary Program) contains an ecologically unique and diverse ecosystem, and that land use is directly correlated with water quality, understanding how this increase in impervious surface area affects water quality is crucial.

This study examines the degree to which specific development patterns impact water quality within rivers in the Galveston Bay Estuary. The focus will be on several development metrics such as patch size, density, and proximity to a river evaluated through an analysis using FRAGSTATS and ArcGIS.

Using GIS and landscape metrics to evaluate the spatial extent of development patterns across the Houston-Galveston region on a watershed level is a relatively new approach and is important for understanding the implications of certain development patterns. The results of this study will provide planners and stakeholders with a better understanding of the effects of development on water quality.

Presenter Bio:
Helen Walters - Graduate Merit Fellow; Center for Texas Beaches and Shores, Texas A&M University Galveston, Marine Sciences. Research focus: GIS and spatial analysis.

Dr. Samuel Brody - Professor; Director for Center for Texas Beaches and Shores, Texas A&M University Galveston, Marine Sciences. Research focus: hazard mitigation and spatial statistics.

The Texas General Land Office (GLO) administers the federal Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program for the State of Texas. In 2013, the GLO entered into an agreement with the Gulf Coast Community Preservation and Recovery District (GCCPRD), who hired Dannenbaum Engineering Corporation to lead a multidiscipline team to conduct a Storm Surge Suppression Study, which includes a technical, scientific based effort to investigate opportunities to alleviate the vulnerability of the upper Texas coast to storm surge and flooding in Brazoria, Harris, Galveston, Chambers, Jefferson and Orange counties.

This study provides the GCCPRD opportunity to work collaboratively with federal, state, local, and public and private institutions to develop a plan that meets the needs of the region and the nation. The team utilizes geospatial technologies to model and analyze protective alternatives and the results are presented to the public through an HTML5 and JavaScript application utilizing a GitHub project called “CMV – The Configurable Map Viewer”. The CMV is built on an Esri ArcGIS Server and SQL Server platform utilizing Esri Basemaps and was chosen as the map viewer template due to its modular design that allows easy custom tailoring to meet the specific needs of the study.

Presenter Bio:
Jeff Scarborough is Dannenbaum Engineering Corporation's Special Projects Division Manager. The Special Projects Division is responsible for the firm's Coastal, Federal and Applied Technology practices. Mr. Scarborough has over 19 years of industry experience and has led many federal, state and local government programs and projects throughout the region.

Chris Sallese, PMP is Dannenbaum Engineering Corporation's Coastal Program Manager responsible for overseeing the GCCPRD Storm Surge Suppression Study. Prior to joining Dannenbaum, Mr. Sallese served 27 years in the U.S. Army retiring with the rank of Colonel and final duty assignment as District Commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Galveston District.