GSS Student Intern Contributes to Technology
Bradley Budach came to GSS in February of 2023. He is one of a few WSU students who joined the organization as student mappers. He quickly contributed in other ways as well. He was assigned to our Alaska open-water NWI mapping team, but shortly thereafter was moved to the MN Lakes project. Early on in this project life, Bradley saw an opportunity to enhance the team’s productivity and very cleverly created an ArcGIS Add-in for the team which allowed them to increase their efficiency and accuracy on the project.
Upon learning of his talent in creating useful technology, Assistant Director Kevin Stark quickly implemented the tool which also led to a cascade of other useful requests coming Bradley’s way. “We had been sitting on a few other ideas for small technology improvements that we wanted to explore and Bradley seemed like a great person to take a shot at it,” said Kevin Stark.
Bradley was then tasked with creating a phone app for fieldwork staff. “We wanted an app that would take a field photo, but also be connected to a voice-file, that we could listen to upon returning to the office from a field trip” Eric Lindquist, Project Manager for GSS.
ArcGIS Pro Code interpreter Add-In interface
And then there was more…
The NWI program utilizes alphanumeric codes to identify wetlands that are mapped on the landscape. Our staff needs to know these codes but also needs some tools to help decipher and create correct codes. That’s where Bradley came in again. We had a Python script that needed a home for these types of tasks and Bradley felt he could take the code we had and create another Esri add-in for our software as well as the much-requested phone app for our staff to utilize off-line in the field.
Bradley succeeded at both, and now GSS has four new pieces of technology that can be utilized by our staff and students in their work.
Bradley is a Junior at WSU who comes up to the SMU campus for employment with our BLM Alaska mapping teams. His team leader Ben Moonen is eager to see what other new things he can offer to improve our day-to-day workflow.