Monday, July 7, 2025

Student Spotlight: Maha Habbal


GIS 5103 Module 6: Working with Geometries

GIS Programming students in this summer's session of GIS 5103 Module 6 recently tackled Working with Geometries.  This important module introduces concepts for using ArcPy to access a feature's geometry object. ArcPy provides a variety of classes which allow scripts to access geometry components such as SHAPE, LENGTH, XY coordinants and more. As part of this lesson, students wrote a Python script that generates a formatted text file otuputting each river feature within a feature class. 

This week, we would like to highlight the outstanding work of Maha Habbal!  Maha works as a GIS Analyst for the City of Tampa Mobility Department where she collaborates with engineers, planners, AutoCad Technicians. Her expertise is appreciated as she helps fellow students answer their questions and participates regularly in class discussion forums. She is an excellent student and we enjoy her well written blog posts, as well. 






Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Student Spotlight: Jennifer Melcher

GIS 5007 Module 5: Choropleth Mapping




GIS5007 Computer Cartography Module 5 tackled the subject of Choropleth Mapping. Choropleth mapping is used to visualize data such as population density, health statistics, or economic statistics using color and shading to represent values throughout a geographic boundary. This module asked students to map population densities along with total wine consumption among European countries.  They chose color schemes, data classification schemes as well as proportional symbols to effectively communicate the data. 

We would like to highlight the excellent work of Jennifer Melcher on this assignment! She is a Graduate Certificate student and an experienced Archaeologist with the UWF Archaeology Institute. 

Jennifer went the extra mile by designing a custom picture symbol with open source resource https://www.svgrepo.com/.  She also took additional steps to customize a color palette with palleton.com to get the look she needed to best represent the data. Jennifer applied her SQL skills to filter records and dynamically adjust the size and color shades of annotation for maximum readability and visual impact.  Melcher's attention to detail and extra efforts on this Module were greatly appreciated and we love the results! 

Click on the map above for a closer look and to read Jennifer Melcher's blot post about this module.  You may also see more about her GIS journey at Jennifer's GIS Blog