Our GANS Social Spotlight continues, showcasing the people shaping Nova Scotia’s geomatics community.

Interested in being featured? Visit: https://lnkd.in/e8enpW84
(Keep in mind, you don’t need to be a GANS member!)

This week’s spotlight features Arwen Estrada Perez, recent graduate of the GIS Graduate Certificate Program at the Centre of Geographic Sciences, NSCC.

Q: What made you decide to study geomatics?
During my time as an Environmental Sciences undergraduate at Acadia University, I started to become keenly aware of the direct connection between environmental research and geomatics. Every single proposal or experiment had a critical spatial component. Every fish, every tree, every bug that was collected as part of a study was collected from somewhere. That somewhere had all sorts of specific characteristics in it of itself, which got me thinking that the next logical step in my academic and professional journey would be within geomatics!

Q: What area of geomatics interests you most right now?
I have recently picked up the habit again of taking a georeferenced picture of every tree that looks interesting to me, and uploading it to a project within iNaturalist! It's been a lot of fun to slowly populate the map of Nova Scotia (and beyond) with my observations. In the near future, I am planning on organizing a "bio-blitz" of sorts, where a group of friends and I try to catalogue the entire Halifax Public Garden in a single evening, should be fun!

Q: Is there a project or course you’ve especially enjoyed so far?
As part of my capstone project, I had the opportunity to work with Service Nova Scotia updating their point cloud LiDAR dataset by developing my own Deep Learning Model. It was a lot of fun to troubleshoot and improve my model, and weirdly enough I also enjoyed the process of creating documentation for that project, I guess it's the sort of thing that makes my brain tick!