[gis_info] UW GIS Certificate Program Annual Call for Projects - Submission Deadline 10/10/2025

Tue Oct 7 13:11:51 PDT 2025

Hi Francesco,

Thank you for sending this and coming up with a project!

Next steps:

  1.
Students begin reviewing projects on Oct. 13th/14th in both sections
  2.
Mid-Nov. We will have teams settled and I will send out notification to the sponsors
  3.
December 1st/2nd students will do a small presentation to their class about the project that they will be working on
  4.
January 2026, the work starts...

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Thank you again for being such a willing and great sponsor for our program!

Leah
________________________________
From: Francesco Tonini <francesco.tonini at TNC.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, October 7, 2025 12:33 PM
To: Leah Saunders <lsaundersuw at outlook.com>; cps-gis at u.washington.edu <cps-gis at u.washington.edu>; gis_info at listsmart.osl.state.or.us <gis_info at listsmart.osl.state.or.us>
Cc: Matthew Kenny <matthew.kenny at TNC.ORG>; Teal Wyckoff <teal.wyckoff at TNC.ORG>; Zach Ferdana <zferdana at TNC.ORG>
Subject: RE: UW GIS Certificate Program Annual Call for Projects - Submission Deadline 10/10/2025

Hi Leah and UW team,

Please find below our proposed project. Keep us posted on the next steps.

Sponsor name and contact information: The Nature Conservancy – Francesco Tonini, PhD, GISP Geospatial Data Scientist at TNC (francesco.tonini at tnc.org<mailto:francesco.tonini at tnc.org>) and Matthew Kenny, Geospatial Data Engineer at TNC (matthew.kenny at tnc.org<mailto:matthew.kenny at tnc.org>)

Proposed student team size: ~3-4 students

Name of proposed project: Evaluating Forest Disturbances and Responses to Management in the Central Appalachians Using Earth Observation Data and GIS

Brief description of proposed project:

The Appalachian landscape<https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/appalachians/> extends from Alabama to the eastern provinces of Canada, encompassing 198 million acres and extending 2000 miles across North America.  This region has been identified as one of The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) focal landscapes, a place where coordinated efforts to protect, restore, and manage forests and freshwater systems are expected to have especially high returns on conservation investments.  This prioritization recognizes the exceptional biodiversity of the lands and waters associated with one of North America’s oldest mountain chains, and the tremendous opportunities to support and partner with Indigenous peoples and local communities to improve conditions for both people and biodiversity.  The scale and breadth of TNC’s goals<https://www.nature.org/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/documents/a/p/Apps-Impact-Report-Digital.pdf> for this region require that we build and support collaborative partnerships, and invest in science that helps us to understand how actions taken at many different locations influence regional and continental scale processes such as carbon sequestration, and movement corridors that support species’ responses to climate change. The work we propose focuses on improving our understanding of the climate change sensitivities of Appalachian forests, and how management practices such as prescribed fire can help sustain these diverse systems. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the spatial variation in responses of the forest canopy to drought conditions and have several forms of ground-based mapping and field measurements in the Central Appalachians that can be leveraged as part of a spatial analysis workflow. The proposed project will use time series of satellite imagery to derive vegetation-based indicators (e.g. NDVI, NDMI) to detect drought events and compare them with other landscape disturbance events, such as wildfire. Students will become more familiar with ESRI’s ArcGIS suite of tools and ArcGIS Online apps (e.g. StoryMaps, ArcGIS Experience Builder) while gaining experience using both raster and vector types of data. During this project, students will have the opportunity to learn about conservation initiatives in the Appalachians and geographical areas where TNC works in scaling these analyses and methods.

At TNC we work flexibly, and while it suits me to email now, I don’t anticipate a response outside your normal work hours.

_____________________

Francesco Tonini, PhD, GISP

Geospatial Data Scientist, Geospatial Services

Conservation & Geospatial Systems, IT

Michigan, U.S.A. (Eastern Time Zone)

[cid:image001.png at 01DC379E.C247AD30]<http://nature.org/>

From: Leah Saunders <lsaundersuw at outlook.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2025 8:14 PM
To: cps-gis at u.washington.edu; gis_info at listsmart.osl.state.or.us
Subject: Re: UW GIS Certificate Program Annual Call for Projects - Submission Deadline 10/10/2025

The University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education’s GIS Certificate program is seeking project ideas for the 2025/2026 academic year.  We are soliciting ideas from organizations and agencies around the region, including local or regional governments agencies, non-profits, engineering and consulting firms, and private businesses of any nature.  If you have a project idea that might be a good fit for the students of the GIS Certificate Program, we would appreciate hearing from you!

Here’s a little bit about what would make a good student project:

·  Size:  should be appropriate for a 3-4 (maybe 5) student project team

·  Schedule:  Project selection takes place during October and November.  Students begin working on the projects in January as Winter quarter begins and deliverables are completed and turned over to the sponsor at the conclusion of the program in early June.

·  Content:  in order to offer the students quality learning opportunities, a project should not be limited to a single activity such as data development or data editing/collection.  Opportunities to perform any of the following help increase the learning value of the experience:  database design, data collection, mapping/cartography, spatial analysis, ArcGIS Online application development, etc.

·  Sponsorship:  some of our best projects have been real-world practical projects submitted by organizations like yours from around the region (including, in the past, from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska). These projects are typically efforts that the sponsoring organization has wanted to act on, but, until now, has been unable to address due to their own limited resources.

·  Time commitment for sponsors:  this does not need to be a great impact on you.  Some students interview their sponsors to assess the needs and requirements, and then work independently from that point forward.  Other projects have very active sponsors who may meet regularly with the student team, and is involved in reviewing documents, providing feedback, and other activities. Regardless of the level of involvement, sponsors will receive periodic status reports from the team as the projects progress.

We have found that many organizations have perfect candidate projects in tasks that have been lingering on the back-burner for some time.  Utilizing our student teams is a great way to get some of these small projects off the back-burner and, at the same time, provide valuable experience for the students.  As for quality of results, our program focuses on practical and professional execution of projects in a way that strongly mimics how a project would be executed in the workplace.  We have had great success with the vast majority of our projects and many have gone on to win awards at the annual WAGISA (formerly WAURISA) conference and other conferences.

If you have a project in mind, here are the details that we would need to get started:

·  Sponsor name and contact information

·  Name of proposed project

·  Brief description of proposed project (a short paragraph is ideal)

Students will begin discussing projects towards the end of October, and by mid-November all projects will have been selected.  Ideally, we would like to hear from you on or before Wednesday October 10th, 2025.  However, if you think of a project later than that, we would still like to hear from you.

If you have any questions or project ideas, please feel free to contact me by replying to this email (lsaundersuw at outlook.com<mailto:+lsaundersuw at outlook.com>), and please feel free to forward this to others as you see fit.

Thank you

Leah Saunders

UW GIS Certificate Program Instructor
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