UGEM Hub
The emergency management GIS site for Utah. Placeholder pages became working guides, and every page and link was checked.
Writing
Notes
Methods, experiments, and lessons from making maps and applications. These notes explain the data and the limits of each method. You can also subscribe with a feed reader.
Methods and lessons
Building maps and applications
Professional GIS work for local government, and personal applications built with public data.
One place to see the water in the West
Reservoir storage, mountain snow, and drought for eleven western states, in one ArcGIS application. AI agents did most of the work under written rules.
No test goes red on a misleading name
Four failures from building a GIS application with AI agents. The code was good. The bugs were about meaning, and the tests stayed green.
Millcreek Planning Map
The public planning and zoning map, rebuilt on the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript with Nearmap imagery.
Millcreek Property Lookup
Zoning, hazard, and district facts for a property, as text. No map, mouse, or vision needed.
Sidewalk & Trails Master Plan
A city-wide plan that turns sidewalk gaps into a connected trail network.
Future Land Use, Millcreek
The General Plan land use chapter, made into a map the public can read.
Millcreek Redistricting
ArcGIS Pro analysis and a public feedback loop, used to redraw the City Council districts.
WUI Boundary Mapping
Wildland-Urban Interface boundaries for Utah local governments. The Wildland-Urban Interface is where houses meet wildland fuel.
Alcohol Spacing Regulations
A map and a web application that show where state spacing rules permit an alcohol license.
Keeping neighboring polygons apart
A Python script that gives a different color to each adjacent polygon.
One drought dashboard, two WebGL renderers
The first version of the water dashboard, built twice to compare a commercial renderer with an open-source one.
30 Day Map Challenge, 2026
30 Day Map Challenge
The data and method behind each map in the 2026 challenge.
Western Reservoir Storage
Monthly reservoir storage, replayed over the Western Water Dashboard’s ArcGIS basemap.
Two Lakes, Two River Systems
Two lakes as lines, then two river systems drawn as lines instead of maps.
Drought in 75 Western Basins
The weekly drought map across western drainage basins, then ten years of drought, basin by basin.
Utah Wildfire Starts by Cause
Natural and human-caused wildfire starts in Utah, as dots, as density, and on one combined map.
October Precipitation in the Four Corners
Daily October precipitation at 111 mountain stations, drawn over the dashboard’s ArcGIS basemap.
30 Day Map Challenge, 2024
Selected maps from the 2024 30 Day Map Challenge
Twelve Utah maps, each made for one daily theme of the 2024 challenge.
Utah Dark-Sky Points
Utah's International Dark-Sky Parks, mapped as points to open the challenge.
Utah Scenic Byways
All 27 of Utah's Scenic Byways, 1,893.84 miles, individually symbolized with ArcPy.
Utah Government Land Ownership
Government land ownership across Utah, federal and state trust lands, in Esri's "Firefly" style and color-matched to SITLA's reference map.
Utah Population Hexagons
Census 2020 population summed into a 50-square-mile hexagon grid, extruded and colored by density so every part of the state compares the same way.
Old Spanish Trail
The Utah segment of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, from historic site to historic site.
Raster Terrain Study
An Imhof-style hillshade of Utah built on Esri's Terrain Service, after John Nelson's modern version of classic relief shading.
Vintage Atlas Style
Utah's urban areas and rivers, styled after an 1854 atlas via Esri's Physical Atlas style.
Utah Localities via HDX
Utah's populated places, built from a global humanitarian locality dataset.
AI-Generated Fictional Map
A ChatGPT-generated "map" of fictional Utah water resources, kept for what it gets wrong.
Utah Counties, Pen & Paper
Utah's counties and county seats, styled to look hand-drawn.
Avalanche Paths
A 3D map of avalanche activity in Little Cottonwood Canyon, in cool Arctic colors.
Utah Time and Space
Mule deer migration corridors and stopover habitats across the Paunsaugunt Plateau.