2025 WA GIS Conference

This research project uses GIS to raise awareness and provide resources and support for people living with chronic conditions; specifically, endometriosis, adenomyosis, and chronic pain. Through Survey123, I captured anonymous data relating to the personal challenges faced by those with these conditions as they navigate the healthcare system, among other information. After geocoding a list of specialists sourced from support groups, I used Network Analyst to generate service areas for each specialist. This analysis helps to identify gaps in healthcare access. Finally, I created an Experience Builder to present the results of this analysis in an engaging, and easy to understand format. The Experience Builder contains sections dedicated to mapping access to specialists, anonymized locations of survey respondents, a section to highlight stories from people with these chronic conditions, and links to support groups among other information. Through this project I hope to increase awareness and bring hope to those with these chronic conditions.

This presentation highlights the work of University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education Students’ GIS Community Sponsored project with 4Culture.

4Culture, the cultural funding agency for King County, WA, sought to analyze, visualize, and present the impacts of 2 grant programs: Building for Equity and Doors Open Facilities. These programs distribute grants to organizations that are acquiring, building, or renovating facilities that make cultural experiences possible. By utilizing GIS, 4Culture and the UW GIS students hoped to highlight the impactful and effective use of a GIS in an arts and culture organization where GIS did not exist. Students created an ArcGIS dashboard for 4Culture’s internal uses as well as a StoryMap to be used for community engagement.

Maptime Seattle is a community group dedicated to making geospatial technology accessible and engaging through beginner-friendly workshops. Our meetups are free and centered around open-source tools so anyone can participate. Our events cover topics ranging from web mapping and Python to hand-drawn maps and social gatherings.

For geospatial professionals, Maptime can be an opportunity to give back, mentor newcomers, and expand the local mapping community by lowering the barrier to entry for geospatial education. Come learn more about who we are, what we do, and how you can get involved or make your own group!

A GIS Strategy to Map Historic Racial Covenants Across Washington State
Stacy Warren, Logan Camporeale, Larry Cebula, Tara Kelly, Monique Baxter, Rachael Lowe

The Washington State Racial Covenants Project, in response to Washington House Bill 1335, seeks to identify all properties with recorded covenants or deed restrictions that include racially discriminatory language. Ultimately, all property owners and prospective buyers should have an easily accessible tool to check whether a given property has ever had a racial covenant associated with it. A team of student and faculty researchers at Eastern Washington University has been tasked with tracking down, mapping, and sharing these documents with the public across fourteen counties in Eastern Washington. We report on the critical role GIS has played in achieving these goals. Specifically, we use a combination of ArcGIS Pro for geodatabase development and Experience Builder for presenting our results in interactive map form.
Our interdisciplinary team includes historians, geographers, anthropologists, geoscientists and GIS practitioners. Much work has to be accomplished before GIS ever enters the picture; this project would not be possible without the hours our historians spent in dusty archives and our partners at University of Washington scanning and converting images to text. Properties with racial covenants can then be identified and entered into spreadsheets. We next developed a workflow to geolocate information from the spreadsheets into feature class layers, align with existing GIS layers from a variety of sources, and populate with attributes pulled from associated historic documents. This data forms the basis of our Experience Builder map series, starting with a prototype model for Spokane County that we are now applying to other counties in Eastern Washington. We report on our workflow design and logistics, problems encountered, and solutions discovered.