One way to celebrate Earth Day (today) is to review this REAL-TIME ArcGIS dashboard of important Environmental Health indicators of our planet! It leverages LIVE data feeds from the ArcGIS Living Atlas!

Esri has gathered near real-time information within the ArcGIS Living Atlas from many data-contributing partners such as: NOAA, UN Environment Programme, and the US Geological Survey to create this ArcGIS Living Atlas Indicators of the Planet. This ArcGIS application was launched in July 2020 and organizes an impressive collection of indices into a dashboard gallery of Environmental conditions for our planet. Earth Day 2021 is the perfect time to review these Earth Indicators and possibly plan activities to help mitigate these impacts. Simply planting a tree, or picking up litter in a local park could make a lasting difference!

ArcGIS Living Atlas Indicators of the Planet was developed using the ArcGIS Experience Builder and is in its Beta release while additional capabilities are being implemented. This Experience Builder template can be customized for your own topics of interest. All of the underlying layers, maps, and apps are available from this Content Group.

Each ArcGIS Enterprise organization address will be unique so your address will differ than this example screenshot from ArcGIS Field Map

Field Maps was released in October 2020 and is set to replace ArcGIS collector in December 2021 so now is the time to dive into using Field Maps.   The migration to Field Maps will simplify the ArcGIS variety of ‘mobile mapping applications’ and eventually consolidate functionality into one application: ArcGIS Field Maps.   For EAST students, you have used ArcGIS Collector when field mapping or creating new geodata, such as points, lines or polygons from your mobile device, so Field Maps should feel very familiar. If you have questions, contact the EAST Geospatial Support Team (Brian Culpepper or Malcolm Williamson)

There are several excellent ESRI Blog posts that summarize what you can do with Field Maps and why it will improve your workflow; especially if you are needing to ‘work offline’ in an area with limited cellular service.  Map navigation within the Field Maps app has also improved, so let’s download it and try out these FIVE THINGS TO TRY WITH THE NEW FIELD MAPS app from Esri.   We are interested in hearing your thoughts too!

ArcGIS Online Updates: The ArcGIS online platform is scheduled for an update on April 14, 2021 but this list of Internet web browsers are the currently recommended web browsers for ArcGIS Online applications.

For the best performance within the ArcGIS Online website, use the latest version of a browser listed below. The ArcGIS platform leverages the local storage capabilities (like cookies) of the web browser. If this storage is disabled, the ArcGIS site may not function properly. To learn how to enable local storage, consult the web browser’s online documentation.

ArcGIS Online Map Viewers, StoryMaps Builder and Web Scene Viewers support the latest versions of the following browsers:
Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge
Mozilla Firefox
Apple Safari*
*Safari does not have WebGL implementation optimized for memory-intensive applications and may not work reliably when opening certain scenes.

Specific requirements for ArcGIS Storymaps: Only WebGL-enabled browsers are supported, and the browser must support JavaScript and cookies.

Note: Internet Explorer 11 and Edge Legacy are no longer supported. Please use the latest versions of the browsers listed above.

Thanks to some legwork by Jerry Prince at EAST and Charlie Fitzpatrick at Esri, I can share the cure for this malady. The bottom line is that Esri has been making some changes in the “User Types” used by their system, and they’re pushing all of their accounts to change from a User Type of “Creator” to one of “GIS Professional Advanced” (sounds fancy, doesn’t it?). The only “gotcha” is that you may have to do this for many users, so I’ll show you the easy way to do that.

After signing into ArcGIS Online, make sure that you are on the “Organization” tab, and then click on “Members” in the blue bar.

If you have more than 20 members in your organization, you’ll note that this page only shows 20 members at a time by default. Thankfully, if you’re like me and have a lot of members, you can go to the bottom of the page and tell it to display up to 100 members per page:

Go back up to the top of the page and check the checkbox next to “Member” at the very top of the list to select all members on the page. If your account is also displayed on this page, you’ll need to uncheck the box next to it, as you can’t manage it at the same time as everyone else (you’ll repeat these steps just for your account). Above the list, several options will appear; you want to click on the option to “Manage User Types”:

In the “Manage user type / role” window, click on the arrows to the right of “User types assigned”:

Click on “GIS Professional Advanced”. You might also want to Roles assigned; you probably want everyone except you to be a “Publisher”, so you can take care of that at the same time if you wish. Finally, click the “Save” button. You’ll be prompted to confirm that you really want to update the User/Role of you members; you will of course click “OK”:

You’ll be returned to your Members list, where you should see that everyone now has a User Type of “GIS Professional Advanced”, except possibly yourself (you’ll fix that in a minute).

Before selecting another page of members (if you’ve got more than 100) or fixing your account, you should take this opportunity to manage add-on licenses for everyone. While all the members are still selected, click the option at the top of the list to “Manage add-on licenses”:

Because you’ve got enough licenses for all your members to have every license, I recommend saving yourself some effort in the future by simply granting every license to everyone. This includes the extensions for ArcGIS Pro, the ArcGIS Urban Suite app bundle, and all the other Applications – just select them all, then click the “Save” button at the bottom:

There is the possibility that you’ll see an Add-on License that shows (in red) that you’ve got more licenses in use than are available – this means that that particular app license is no longer part of the Education bundle. I ran into this with CityEngine, which previously was a separate license. Now it’s part of the ArcGIS Urban Suite. Regardless, if you see such an issue in your account, you’ll need to remove those licenses from the members to which they were assigned, else you’ll keep seeing that same warning box when you sign in!

That’s the basic process. Don’t forget to go back and assign the correct User Type and Add-On Licenses for yourself. If you’ve got more than 100 members, you can then go to the next page and repeat the process. Either way, it won’t take you long once you get used to it.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or problems.

-Malcolm Williamson

Ever wanted to get a glimpse of what your town or school looked like some years ago? If you search for something like “historic imagery” in ArcGIS Online, you won’t find many useful results. Sure, they were taking aerial photos as far back as World War I – 100 years ago! – but all these photos were on film, not digital media. Scanning these photos and then aligning them properly on the Earth was a lot of work, and therefore expensive.

In the last few years, computing power has vastly increased, and software has been created that can automate much of this process. Because of this, your friends at CAST have been able to collaborate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Arkansas GIS Office to convert 4500 scanned photos, flown over Arkansas in the early 1980s, into a seamless set of georeferenced digital images. Through the Arkansas GIS Office, anyone can now access these images directly in their GIS project.

Using these images couldn’t be easier. Simply copy the link below, and then use the Add > Add Layer from Web option to add it to the Map Viewer of ArcGIS Online.

https://gis.arkansas.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ImageServices/IMAGERY_NHAP_1980_1986/ImageServer

I’ve put together a detailed handout that walks you through the process of downloading free data from The New York Times, filtering it for your state, uploading it to ArcGIS Online, and creating a Time-Aware app, like the one above, that you can share with your class or the entire world!

You’ll find the tutorial right here. If you have any questions or problems, please contact me at mdw05@uark.edu . I hope you find it useful!

The issue is the exported (text) format of their Last login Date attribute field within the exported user table. Importing the .csv into another Google Sheet or Office365 Excel file disables the sort by Date option that can help determine which accounts maybe dormant within the ArcGIS Online organization. Date field formatting issues are a common within Time-Enabled Data Analysis too, so I’ve provided one possible solution it this common issue. I’ll demonstrate using a ‘go to’ product for non-programmers, Microsoft Excel software has many powerful features. Although, it’s not a true database it has a lot of useful data formatting capabilities and is often used in small businesses around the world.

Goal: Use Office365 (Excel) to convert the text field (column) into a correctly formatted Date column within the Excel worksheet.

• This tutorial walks you through Excel’s Import Text to Columns tool (within the Data Tab) to import the text formatted Date column values into three (new/empty) columns within the same Excel worksheet. 
• Then, I demonstrate using a DATE function to convert those three columns (Month, Day, Year (txt)) into a proper Date format using the DATE function within an Excel formula.
• In this example, I’ve already exported the ArcGIS Online Users Report into a .csv from within an AGOL Organization I administer. I then imported it into Excel (Office365) and used File> Save As to create a new copy of the data in a proper, Excel Worksheet file (.xlsx)

Below, you can see the originally formatted (Last Login Date) column within the imported Excel file. btw- It works perfectly well within ArcGIS Online, but once its exported, the sorting by Date/Time is often lost, and this DATE formatting issue is a very common data problem for scientists/data developers everyday so I thought I’d share this solution with my EAST peers.

• Once Imported into Excel and saved as an .xlsx format, Insert three empty columns between the Last Login Date and the Date Created columns.

• Switch to the Data Tab within the Excel menu and look for the Text to Columns wizard.

• Next, Left-click to select the Last Login Date column within the Excel worksheet

• Then, the Text to Columns Wizards (3-steps) opens; choose the Fixed Width option within the first step.

• Move to the (3 of 3) Step within the Wizard, and then Select each COLUMN within the “Preview of selected data:” and ignore the unwanted  Weekday, TIMESTAMP and UTC  columns within the preview; those are not needed so they’re not imported.  Import ONLY the Month, Day(number), and Year as TEXT format.

• Make sure to DEFINE the Destination of these parsed values by “click-n-dragging to select those 3 empty columns you created earlier”.   (review the image below to see what I mean)
• Make sure to select the TOP ROW of the worksheet too, so that the partial header/ text gets written into that row!  you can rename those column headings, anyway.

• You can rename the column headings for those three new/imported columns and it should look something like this after you’ve clicked Finish on the Import Text to Columns wizard.

• Next Step use the FIND/REPLACE tool to update all of the 3 character MONTH abbreviations (LastLoginMonth) into the number for each month.  There is likely a better way to do this(! via python), but I’ll use the Excel Find & Select tool to accomplish that column value conversion.  It is on the Home tab of Excel 365 under the Find & Select tool.

• Now, we can use these three columns to calculate an actual Date value for the Last Login by using the DATE function within Excel.   Review your ribbon view within Excel to the Formula tab, then SELECT the first row within a new column you insert after these three newly imported text values. (like below)

** Format the NEW excel worksheet column into the DATE format, prior to performing the next calculation using the DATE formula.    (yes, I misspelled formatted too, sorry about that typographical error.)

– the Author

• From the Date & Time button on the Data Ribbon within Excel365, choose the first Function DATE so that it’s dialog opens.   Fill in the Function Arguments  by clicking within the argument setting within the dialog box and then selecting the corresponding column within the SAME ROW as your formula your creating for your new DATE value…

• The resulting column properly formatted (and correctly spelled) with the Date each user Last Logged Into our ArcGIS Online organization.

• Whew! That export format (and this DATE conversion methodology) will most likely need to be updated.
• I hope this Excel tutorial on Date field reformatting may help you overcome this common data processing obstacle. 
• I’ll be patiently waiting for you to provide a simple python script or new to me export/import option that illuminates this multi-step process.

Take care; be well and share what you know with others.

– Brian Culpepper

The 2020 EAST conference was unfortunately cancelled due to Covid-19 this year but many presentations and competitions were held online/virtual. We’re happy to share this years winner of the Mapping Competition that was sponsored by the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas. We firmly believe in and support our local trash cleanup efforts within Arkansas; what better way to give back to your community! You can view their winning ArcGIS Story Map here!

“There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” -Eldridge Cleaver.

These EAST team members worked closely with their county solid waste managers to help visualize (via ArcGIS online and Storymaps) where illegal dumping had been an issue within their rural county.

It is important to monitor and reduce waste dumps near water supplies because they hurt the groundwater supplies, make our water lower quality and pollute our rivers and streams.

Washington County Solid Waste Manager

We’d like to congratulate Davis McClure for submitting this amazing TEAM EFFORT between Helen Tyson Middle School, Hellstern Middle School and J.O. Kelley Middle School in Springdale, Arkansas. Their 2020 Storymap “Illegal Roadside Dumping within Washington County, Arkansas” is a great example of how the EAST initiative positively impacts our community leaders via accelerated education and outreach.

I discovered this Arcade function within ESRI’s online forum back in May of 2019 and it’s helpful for converting the X, Y coordinates from the Web Mercator Projections that many of today’s world wide mapping services use (ie ArcGIS Online basemaps, Google Maps, Bing, Mapquest, etc).

Most of us are comfortable with geographic coordinates or commonly referred to as the Latitude and Longitude coordinate systems. They are also often displayed in a decimal degrees format such as: 35.2345566, -94.234456 It’s for this very reason that I needed an Arcade expression within my ArcMap web map. I simply wanted to display a pop-up or a map label with Geographic Coordinates because other map users are already familiar with it.

Open ArcGIS Online to get started.

• Open a ArcGIS Online map with a point feature service you own or can edit.
• Download the Arcade_ArcGIS_webMercator2LatLongLabel.txt file and then open it within Notepad or Notepad++ (for formatting purposes).

• Within your AGOL Map Viewer, left-click the More Options (circled below in blue) to open the map layer context menu; then select Configure Pop-Up.

• After selecting Configure Pop-up from the context menu, scroll down within the Configure Pop-up side panel until you see the ADD attribute expression dialog. Left-click the ADD button (blue circled).

• Once the Arcade Expression dialog opens, you’ll want to Edit the name of this script (LatLongLabel) in the upper-left corner
• Next, you will copy/paste the entire contents of the Arcade expression (.txt file) provided within this tutorial.
• It should already be open within Notepad or Notepad++, so hopefully the copy/paste will be easy.
• Paste the Arcade Expression into the Code Block section (left side/shaded blue in the screen shot below) and click the blue TEST button to confirm that there are no errors. A cleanly formatted lat/long coordinate pair is what you want to see.

• After Testing your Arcade expression, and if it’s OK, then click OK in the lower right corner to close the Arcade dialog.
• You should see your NEW custom arcade expression within the Attribute Expressions list of your Configure Pop-up dialog.

• Now, You will put this new LatLongLabel expression to use within your map pop-up. And, as you can see below, it’s formatted as Latitude, Longitude within the Pop-Up of this Trash Tag Web Map.

And there you have it, that’s how the Arcade scripting language can help you customize maps with labels and pop-ups that contain geographic coordinates.

Those coordinate pairs can be used to pass a URL string to other web services too, such as Survey123 for ArcGIS or even outside of the ArcGIS platform to Google Map Driving Directions services. If needed…

Take care; let me know if you have questions. I tried to keep this short as possible, so let me know if I can help.