Field and Trap Maps for

Georgia

Boll Weevil Eradication

Michael Rivera – GIS Regional Project Manager Rachel Strom – GIS Department Manager

Southern Georgia Regional Commission

Valdosta, Georgia

Eradication Programs

• Every cotton growing state has an eradication program in place.

• Georgia Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation

• Every cotton crop is certified with the Farm Service Agency with recorded acreage to be included in their inventory.

Georgia

93 of 159 Counties

Background Information

• Up to 2010, farmers would go into FSA office, draw on a map and give an estimate of what they would plant.

• This information would be passed onto the University of Georgia.

• Around August (mid-season), the BWEF would receive a map from UGA of these crops.

Background Information

• It was an expensive process because of inspectors’ road miles, fuel and time to drive all county roads to look for cotton.

• Only 15 inspectors so wasn’t very efficient.

• They wanted to gain control of their data earlier in the season for placing traps and finding cotton fields.

2011

• Produced map books of all 93 counties.

• Built an ArcGIS Server application with editing tools. This was very important as it allowed inspectors to draw what they saw “in the field”.

• Which helped build the first statewide ground-truth cotton field database.

2011

• Inspectors marked on map books where cotton is being planted in 2011, drew on web and recorded approximate acreage, used a GPS enabled barcode scanner (Intermac) when pacing traps in fields.

• Produced next set of map books with cotton fields and traps.

2011

• Update map books with fields and traps every 3 weeks (more fields are planted / more traps).

• 8 total runs of map books.

Python Script that exports to PDF format every map project in a folder.

2011 After thoughts

• End of season compare our acreages to Farm Service Agency which had about 25% more acreage than GIS.

• First year’s cost $12,800 • The ADF was clunky, slow response

times (redraw), search tools limited, edit tools not ideal.

2012 Prelude

• Moving to the cloud was a possibility • Moved to the Flex environment

–Most of the cost was having ESRI develop a county map book widget for Flex. Takes average of 5 minutes to produce a map book per county

• Went to a statewide grid, instead of having a grid for each county.

2012

• The county map book widget grabs a cover page from a mxd, a index page from another mxd and the map book and merges them into 1 pdf.

• Demo web app http://www.sgwebmaps.com/bwef2012

Notes

• SQL Express File GDB manages editable layers. Everything else is in shapefile format.

• ESRI’s basemap services used for aerials and roads.

• Using ArcGIS Server 10 on a 2008 Dell Server with 9 other applications active.

The Road Ahead

• Mobile Devices – Being able to do work in the field on ipads / iphones.