Poster takes third place in College of Science contest

Avalanche Terrain Poster takes third -

Last semester Tim Weigel and I took a class from Gary Raines of the USGS about modeling using GIS. We learned about weights of evidence, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural networks. Tim and I did a project in collaboration with Randall Osterhuber at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory in which we used weights of evidence to model avalanche terrain in watersheds adjacent to two watersheds that had been heavily studied.

We entered the poster that we made for class in the 2007 College of Science poster competion and took third place. I'm planning on giving a talk at the Nevada GIS conference at South Lake Tahoe next month about this project. Below is a snapshot of the poster. Click on the image for a larger view. I intend to update the image with a better one sometime in the near future.

Interagency Weeds Inventory IMS Website

Interagency Weeds Inventory IMS Website -

Last year I took Gary Johnson's GIS Design Studio class here at UNR. One of the projects that I undertook was designing a Weeds Inventory IMS site for the state of Nevada. The site is intended to serve as a tool for weed inventory specialists in Nevada and to demonstrate the utility of ArcIMS. I also gave a brief talk at the ESRI Northern Nevada Users Group Meeting held here in Reno this past December. You can view the site yourself by clicking below:

http://mapserver2.library.unr.edu/website/BLM_Weeds_Test/viewer.htm

Professional website -

I've got a graduate student website now that talks about my research.

http://www.unr.edu/cos/geography/tdilts.html

-Tom

About Myself -

I'm a graduate student here at the University of Nevada Reno in the Department of Geography studying landscape ecology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I've been living here in Reno for nearly a year now and thoroughly enjoying it, particularly the climbing and mountaineering opportunities that exist in the Sierra Nevada. This blog is intended as an online journal of my climbing and outdoor adventures. Also, I'm holding out some hope that it will encourage me to take more photographs of my adventures.

So, you may ask, what brought me to Reno. I had been living in Fairbanks, Alaska with my girlfriend, Holly Hemming, and working for the Bureau of Land Management as a contract employee doing GIS. I enjoyed my job, but at the same time we both had decided that it was time to further our careers and build our skills. In other words, we decided to go to graduate school. In looking for graduate programs we both decided to only consider universities that had both geography and speech pathology (Holly's career of choice) departments, and we only considered western states within the U.S. (minus California). After phoning several potential advisors and weighing my options Reno stood out above the rest. In addition to the good academic environment, and the good weather, the outdoor opportunities were a big attraction. So, here I am.

As you'll see soon my outdoor pursuits are varied, as are my interests. However, I one unifying theme stands out; the mountains are where my heart is. I enjoy all forms of climbing: big mountains, traditional rock climbing, sport climbing, ice climbing, backpacking, river rafting, trail running, etc. For starters, I'll point to a few websites of three of my closest friends: Sean Bemis, Nate Pamperin, and Andy Mahoney. Sean, in particular, has been photographing and documenting our adventures for a number of years. He has pictures of two trips to the Ruth Gorge in Denali National Park, Alaska, as well as the Black Rapids Glacier and Mt. Hayes, Alaska. He even has some good ice climbing pics from Valdez.

Sean Bemis - http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~sbemis/
Nate Pamperin - http://mercury.bio.uaf.edu/~nate_pamperin/index2.htm
Andy Mahoney - http://www.gi.alaska.edu/~mahoney/Research/Research.html

So without further ado I'm going to sign off. Expect to see journals from a trip last year to Mount Marcus Baker in the Chugach Range in Alaska as well as Mount Whitney from this past January and Mount Shasta this past May.

-Tom