Field Activity 3: Creating a GIS for Hadleyville Cemetery

Introduction

Field activity 3 is designed to facilitate the creation of a GIS for Hadleyville Cemetery. In previous avtivities, students collected data from Hadleyville Cemetery using handwritten notes and a UAS survey drone. Activity 3 is designed to bring all of the data together to create a visual GIS for the county of Eau Claire to distribute for the cemetery. This activity is important because the cemetery does not currently hold all of the records for the burial plots anymore. Thus, a map with all of the data is very important for them to know the current status of the cemetery. Each burial plot point on the map created holds all of the known information of the grave site such as name, year of birth, year of death, condition, and any other attributes available from the headstone. 

Study Area

Hadleyville Cemetery is located in the town of Pleasant Valley. The official address of it is County Road HH, Section 04, Twn 25N, Range 9W. It is on the south side of the road, and is about 1 block west of S Lowes Creek Rd. Figure 1 shows the location within the County of Eau Claire.

Figure 1: Location of cemetery within Eau Claire County. (1)

Methods

The class used a combination of hand-written notes and aerial data collection to create a GIS for this project. Dr. Hupy flew the UAS over the cemetery to get a good aerial picture of the parcel for mapping. 5 bands of em were collected to help view the headstones in different light. The mm accuracy of the drone allowed people to drop a point directly onto the burial plots within the cemetery. Once this was done, the class created a Google spreadsheet o all of the data collected to eventually save as an excel file. This allowed the class to collaborate on data collection, and create a hard copy of the information so that it could be reviewed by all before it was published. After the spreadsheet had been made, the class made GIS' of the images with points on each grave corresponding to the knowledge of the hand-written data. This was then table joined to the excel table in arcmap (see Figure 2). This process was very quick and allowed the class to streamline the process to create a GIS. Once this was completed, an aesthetically pleasing map was created of the results (see Figure 3).

Figure 2: Portion of Grave attribute table/

Results/Discussion

Figure 3: Resultant map with graves plotted out.

Overall the method was very efficient. The class originally planned on taking a survey GPS out into the field to collect all of the data points, but due to bad tree cover and time spent creating the points, the hard copy notes, and heads-up digitizing proved to be the most efficient method of creating a successful GIS. One way the class could have refined the method would have been to count the headstones in each row to get a definitive number before collecting the data. Assigning the correct number of headstones was a difficult task for the class on the spreadsheet. This would have allowed the class to plan out how the graves would have been divied up, and would have provided a much smoother data collection.

Conclusion

The methods transferred well to the overall objectives. The mixed format of data collection allowed the class to expedite the project very quickly and accurately, and provided a means for collaboration. The potential errors should be reviewed, but are most likely negligible to the overall final product. The GIS created provides a clean, accurate source of data for the county and is a successful product. If all goes well, this GIS should be able to be kept in use for as long as the county can keep tack of it.

  Citations

1) Wikipedia Page on Hadleyville Cemetery https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Hadleyville%2C_Wisconsin.png