GIS Projects

A routine shopping trip becomes the worst outbreak in Shasta County history. Within hours, infected individuals have carried the virus to seven more locations creating eight zombie infection clusters spreading outward on foot. By the time authorities understand what they are dealing with, it is already too late.

~The Objective: Determine where to find food, water, shelter, and safety within a 48-hour window before the infected reached most of Shasta County’s population centers.
~The Methodology: Cost Distance analysis modeled the outbreak spreading outward at five miles per day, with terrain, waterways, and slope acting as real barriers that shaped where the threat could and could not go. A Weighted Overlay scored every location outside the active danger zones on four survival criteria, with food and defense resources carrying the most weight.
~The Insight: Demonstrated that the areas with the most survival resources are the most dangerous places to be because they are located within the initial outbreak zones. The problem is not unique to zombie fiction. It is a real challenge in disaster planning.

Cleanup efforts in Shasta County were spread across multiple organizations, each tracking their own data separately. There was no shared record of what had been collected, where, or by how many people.

~The Objective: Centralize cleanup data to show the scale of volunteer impact and where restoration efforts were happening across the county.
~The Methodology: Built a Survey123 form to collect cleanup event data and an ArcGIS Dashboard to display it in real time. The dashboard tracks total trash removed, volunteer counts, cleanup locations, and site type breakdowns including roadside, waterway, park, trail, and open space to document specific stewardship efforts and identify areas requiring ongoing maintenance.
~The Insight: The dashboard gives multiple organizations a shared, live record of trash removed, volunteers involved, and locations served. Scattered, individual records are now visible on a single source that shows what the collective effort actually looks like.

The proposed 18.5-foot raise of the Shasta Lake Dam creates a complex conflict between increased water storage and the permanent loss of existing shoreline infrastructure. Without a detailed spatial assessment, the impact on cultural sites, roads, and recreation areas remains unclear.

~The Objective: Map projected water levels to show what shoreline infrastructure, cultural sites, access roads, and recreation areas would be permanently submerged if the dam raise proceeds
~The Methodology: Used Digital Elevation Models to generate three water level surfaces: current full pool, the proposed new pool at 1,088.5 feet, and the additional take line above the new pool elevation.
~The Insight: The rise would submerge significant portions of local infrastructure, providing a foundation for assessing whether the benefit of increased storage outweighed the cost of the cultural and physical loss.

Downtown Redding and the Sacramento River corridor cover 2,941 acres of land where impervious surfaces and urban development have physically displaced the natural landscape. While the riverfront is often designated as open space, the ground reality shows a network of roads and concrete that has replaced the area’s original natural systems. This map documents the current footprint, showing exactly where built infrastructure now dominates the river corridor.

~The Objective: Produce a high-resolution cartographic print to document current surface conditions and and show exactly where built surfaces have replaced the trees and habitats that once defined the river’s edge.
~The Methodology: Mapped surface conditions across a 2,941-acre study area using curated datasets from USGS NLCD and local sources. The analysis isolated areas with over 60% impervious cover and used buffered centerline data to calculate the physical footprint of roads and trails, allowing for a clear distinction between hardscape infrastructure and the remaining open space or tree canopy.
~The Insight: Nearly 40% of the study area is already covered by medium to high-intensity development, while riparian habitat has been reduced to just 15.3%, highlighting a critical gap between restoration goals and the actual expansion of hardscaped surfaces.

The City of Shasta Lake grew out of five separate construction camps built for the Shasta Dam workforce. While an ArcGIS Story Map existed to document this history, the content was outdated, poorly organized, and lacked the visual quality and accessibility required for a public city resource.

~The Objective: Overhaul of the existing Story Map to improve historical accuracy and narrative flow. The goal was to produce a polished, legally compliant, and accessible digital archive that clearly connects the city’s origins to its current layout.
~The Methodology: Restructured the narrative by auditing existing content against primary and secondary sources. Sourced new high-resolution imagery, cleared all copyright and licensing requirements, and implemented alt-text across the entire platform for ADA accessibility. The updated Story Map utilizes linked reference maps to spatialize the transition from federal camps to modern neighborhoods.
~The Insight: Refining and centralizing this data shows that the city’s modern footprint is the direct physical legacy of the original five camps. By fixing the narrative structure and technical gaps, the project transformed a degraded document into a functional, permanent record of the city’s evolution.

This section features municipal data work from an internship with the City of Shasta Lake and a spatial analysis project for City of Redding parks. The internship included reconciling historical lot line adjustments from scanned paper maps into a live parcel dataset and establishing a citywide sign and post inventory under MUTCD standards. The Redding project built a new spatial dataset for 64 parks, mapping internal path networks and documenting ADA parking conditions. All three projects involved incomplete source materials and required independent decisions about how to structure data for ongoing city use.