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News Roundup — September 2018

Get inspired by Edmonton Public School Board’s back-to-school app. Find out how Annapolis County in Nova Scotia engages its community in heritage mapping with ArcGIS. Learn more about the Plant-for-the-Planet Initiative and more in the September News Roundup.

Feature Stories

September’s App of the Month: New School Drop Off App
The first day of school can be tough for both students and parents. To make it easier for parents and caregivers to drop off students, the Edmonton Public School Board created a collection of story maps — organized in Esri’s Maps and Apps Gallery — that informs parents about their school’s drop off area and rules, parking restrictions and alternative modes of transportation. Find out why their gallery of story maps was selected as September’s App of the Month.

Increasing wildfires in Canada’s forests: The new normal
With wildfires and other disasters expected to set new records, David Hamilton, Esri Canada’s public safety industry manager, shares how communities can use location intelligence to prepare for this new normal.

How can you give mapping powers to Excel users?
Providing mapping powers to Excel users in an organization will open the door to letting anyone find lots of location-related answers and tell the story of your data from a new perspective. Read this blog post for examples and ways you could benefit from leveraging your data.

Basemap updates for Canada — August 2018
There have been a few basemap updates this past month: seven communities had their content updated on the raster topographic basemap and two had their vector tile basemap updated.

Customizing vector basemaps
Anyone who has been working in the field of GIS has heard of these sayings: “raster is faster, but vector is corrector” or “raster is faster, but vector is better.” Times have changed when it comes to online maps. Raster is no longer faster, and vector is definitely better.

How do you assess the quality of geospatial data available over the Internet?
Interoperability and web service improvements are making it easier to share geospatial data, perform analytics and make better decisions based on data obtained from multiple sources and different data perspectives. But to make better decisions, the retrieved data needs to be current, valid, accurate and precise. Data quality is one area where GIS practitioners have an important role to play. Read this blog post to find out what constitutes good quality data and how to decide if the data you retrieved from an SDI meets your data quality requirements.

Esri Canada News

City of Brampton and Teranet Win 2018 Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award
July 12, 2018

Esri News

Esri Workbook Teaches How to Plan, Develop and Present a GIS Project
August 23, 2018

Esri Announces Living Atlas Innovations to Revolutionize Digital Twin Technology
August 2, 2018

Esri Enters into Memorandum of Understanding with World Bank
July 31, 2018

Resources

ArcNorth News: Engaging the Community in Heritage Mapping
ArcNorth News is Esri Canada’s digital magazine covering Canadian GIS successes using Esri technology. The latest issue of ArcNorth News highlights how The Science of Where is laying the foundation for effective asset management. In this article, find out how ArcGIS helps create new possibilities for shared asset management in a Nova Scotia community.

Be the first to receive the spring and fall issues of ArcNorth News. Subscribe today

WhereNext Magazine: A Small City Fights for the Millennial Workforce
WhereNext is Esri’s digital magazine for business leaders. In this article, Helen Thompson, Esri’s global marketing strategy manager, discusses how small cities are using location intelligence and innovative planning to curb the brain drain of young talent to big cities.

Esri & The Science of Where Podcast: Change Management for Digital Transformation
The goal of the series is to help executives and leaders in industry and government understand how modern GIS technology enables digital transformation and drives growth. In this podcast, Michael Green, a change management expert at Esri, explains keys to overcoming the many challenges of digital transformation.

Video

Plant-for-the-Planet Initiative: The Trillion Tree Campaign

Felix Finkbeiner was just nine years old when he had an idea to plant 1 million trees in every country on earth. The German primary school student was inspired by the late Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement with the mission to plant 30 million trees across Africa. But Finkbeiner was determined to do much more. On March 28, 2007, the first tree was planted at his school in Bavaria, marking the official launch of the Plant-for-the-Planet Initiative. In the decade since, children and organizations across the globe have planted more than 15 billion trees in 190 countries under the guidance of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).