UC GIS Week

Digital Documentation of Santa Cruz Cultural Heritage

The presentation includes my projects as a GIS Intern at California State Parks under the guidance of Denise Jaffke, Archaeologist at CSP, and Paul Veisze, Instructor at American River College. The first project is a historical barn, Cascade Ranch Barn, in Pescadero that was destroyed due to wildfire. As one of the historical landmarks in Santa Cruz County, Pigeon Point Lighthouse is the second project. The focus is on processing UAS imagery using Agisoft Metashape and Drone2Map.

Space and Time for the Milpa Forest Garden Cycle

As a critique of the temperate prejudice of the tropics, we embrace the hypothesis that the Maya Forest represents a domesticated landscape to examine the settlement and environmental patterns of the ancient Maya of El Pilar. Recognizing that land use is dependent on knowledge, skill, labor, and that the residential requirements of the landscape are not restricted to field crops, we consider the whole production cycle for both human subsistence and animal habitat. This includes open fields emphasizing annual crops, succession of perennial products used in homes and maintenance, and closed-canopy forests for major construction and fruits. We define the potentially cultivable landscape by excluding architecture, considering how it would cycle from field to forest and back again. Using slope as a proxy of erosion, we assess our 14sq km settlement survey around El Pilar by determining areas of cultivation with a land use cycle of 20 years. We present our results as a model of sustainable land use in the Maya Forest.

Google Places API to Create a Geospatial Dataset

City and county data portals offer useful datasets such as local farmers markets or grocery stores.  However if specialized data is not available, such as take-out food near an event location then Google Places API can be helpful in generating a dataset. Using the Google API I’ll briefly show the steps to create a customized dataset that can be read into geospatial software such as QGIS or ArcGis.

Abolition Through Art

The presentation will explore the impact of the arts as an organizing tool, how this can be an instrument to deconstruct carcerality, and ultimately, how it helps us imagine liberation expansively. Using story maps, I offer two accounts from my experiences facilitating arts workshops in juvenile halls in New York and Los Angeles and how they helped shape my perspective on the intersection of abolition and the arts.