From June to September of 2024, I worked as a GIS intern for the Access Fund, which is the main organization in the US dedicated to protecting the nation's climbing areas through advocacy, conservation, and stewardship. 

For my first project, which durated about a month, I created a feature class of polygons using land parcel data with the goal of mapping the Access Fund's land acquisitions. This involved searching for and downloading land parcel data for each county, importing it into ArcGIS Pro, and tracing the parcels to create a new feature class. Additionally, I kept track of all of the data sources using an Excel spreadsheet, and used other resources, such as OnX, to cross-reference the boundaries of the parcels.

The next project I undertook was much more complicated and challenged me to problem solve independently and expand on my analysis skills. Using a nationwide raster from The Nature Conservancy, my goal was to map the climate resiliency of climbing areas, as well as the Access Fund's land acquisitions. The simple question behind the project was if climbing areas are "special" - meaning, different from the average plot of land in the US, which directly correlates to the organization's goals of conservation for these areas. To accomplish this goal, I used a variety of geoprocessing tools, as well as ArcPy coding. While I completed the majority of this project independently, I also received valuable feedback from GIS professionals at the Open Space Institute.