2023 National Geomatics Competition

The National Geomatics competition returned after a three-year hiatus and was held at the University of Laval in Quebec City from March 10 – 12, 2023.  This year, 8 teams from across the country participated, including us, sending two teams.  This year’s problem was an interesting one, involving oil and gas exploration.  There are over 200 drilling sumps in the Mackenzie Delta region and the Beaufort Sea of the Northwest Territories from oil and gas exploration. Because of climate change, there is concern about the public health and ecological impacts of these sumps as permafrost melts. The data on these sumps is held by many stakeholders in different formats, there is no consistent structure of data collection or storage. The challenge was to assist the government of the Northwest Territories (the client) in centralizing and filling in gaps in their data so it could be assessed for high-risk sites. As in years past, teams are given 6 hours to come up with a solution and present their results.  Both of our teams did well in coming up with a solution, with one team winning honourable mention.

McMaster Team 1: Qianhui Hong, Qingyue Qian, Bradley Squarek

McMaster Team 2: Eva Novoselac, Amaka Onyeze, Alice Stubbs (winners of Honourable Mention)

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2021 ArcGIS StoryMaps Challenge For Restoring Our Ocean

Each year, Esri hosts a StoryMaps Challenge. In 2021, Esri team up with the National Geographic Society to host the StoryMaps challenge with the theme of Restoring our Ocean. The challenge encouraged students to create impactful stories about the health of our oceans and conservation efforts. The international event had submissions from over 20 countries that addressed different issues for our ocean, from plastic pollution and wildlife protection to the blue economy. This year, the timing of the StoryMaps challenge coincided with ENVSOCTY 4GT3- Special Topics in GIS, where the focus is on web mapping and web mapping applications. Given the timing, students in the class were invited to submit a story map to the competition. Out of 26 students, 10 students submitted and two of them made it to the finals of the competition. Although they did not end up winning, we are proud of these two students for their accomplishment of making it to the finals of the competition. You can see their StoryMap Submissions here:

Farbod Tabaei: Apex Predators – The Role of Sharks in Climate Change Resilience and Biodiversity

Laura Dutheil: FISH-i Africa – How eight countries on the East African coast are fighting illegal fishing activities

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2020 National Geomatics Competition

The National Geomatics Competition is a student-led consulting engineering annual competition held at different universities across the country. The focus is to bring together undergraduate students and industry representatives from across the country. This year’s competition was held at the University of Waterloo from February 21-23. Although we are not an Engineering programme, we were invited to participate in the competition. This year 14 teams from 8 universities from coast-to-coast assembled to tackle the problem of locating an LRT in the City of Guelph. Teams had 6 hours to come up with their solution based on their training and then present it to a panel of judges. In total 6 universities sent two each to the competition, and we are very proud that both of our teams made the finals of the competition. We were the only school to have both of their teams go through to the finals which is quite an accomplishment in itself, and one team won an award for the Most Sustainable Solution. Congratulations to both teams for the excellent showing! Our teams were as follows:

McMaster Team 1: Anika Chiang, Maryrose D’Arienzo, Ashley Wray – Presentation (Winner of the Sustainable Solution Award)

McMaster Team 2: Hope Freeman, Katrina Fries, Michaela Smith – Presentation

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2017 International Year Of Global Understanding (IGYU) Story Map Challenge

The International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU) Story Maps Competition was a global competition that challenged students raise awareness of the global implications of local everyday actions. McMaster had two students finished tied for second place, each winning 500 Euros.

Karl Chastko, Food, Water and 7 Billion People: Improving Water Efficiency in Agriculture

Spencer Elford, Concrete Jungle: Urban Expansion and the Rise of the Megacity

See there story maps here

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2016 Esri Global Content Challenge

This international competition sponsored by Esri, was a challenge to use ESRI’s premier content which consists of a wide variety of cloud based authoritative data products, for their own geographic analyses, visualizations and predictive models. They had to communicate their results with a Story Map Journal, which is a type of web Application. There were 3 categories that students could submit to, land, ocean and population, and each category had three cash prizes ($10 000, $5000, $2000 USD). There were approximately 550 registrations from nearly 60 countries, with 70 people successfully submitting their Apps. I am very happy to report that 5 of our students placed in the money positions, and one received honourable mention.

Category	Rank	Name	Project
Land Category	Second Place	Karl Chastko	Food, Water and 7 Billion People: Improving Water Efficiency in Agriculture
Land Category	Third Place	Kayla Wong	Soil Carbon Sequestration Potential Based on Soil Properties
Ocean Category	Third Place	Kevin Yang	Climate Change in Earth’s Polar Regions
Population Category	Second Place	Michael Kirchin	The American People
Population Category	Third Place	Spencer Elford	Concrete Jungle: Urban Expansion and the Rise of the Megacity
Honourable Mention	Honourable Mention	Christopher Koido-Bunt	Volcanic Hazard Risk in East and South East Asia

Aside from the cash prizes, these Map Journals will be featured at the 2017 Esri Federal GIS Conference, the 2017 Esri Education GIS Conference and other events, as well as in various social media outlets.

For more information on GIS at McMaster, contact Patrick DeLuca, GIS Laboratory, School of Earth, Environment & Society, delucapf@mcmaster.ca.