Campus Garden Solar Analysis
Client: UWM Food and Garden Club
Need: To find locations on campus for garden plots.
Description: In late 2010 Kate Nelson, UWM's sustainability coordinator, asked the GIS Club to help the UWM Food and Garden Club to find garden locations on campus that had adequete sunlight and that met other criteria such as easy student accessability and availability of water.
The Food and Garden Club's goal was to reintroduce gardens to the campus. There had been victory gardens on campus during both World War I and World War II. The club offered four-foot square plots to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The club reserved some plots for Conservation and Environmental Science class projects and for UWM Restaurant Operations.
Results: Members of the GIS Club used the ESRI ArcMap Spatial Analyst Solar Analyst with LIDAR data and campus maps to analyze the number of hours of sunlight falling on each area within four candidate locations around campus...
After narrowing the search to the south lawn of the Physics Building, members conducted a detailed survey to establish the precise position of trees and other shadow casting objects before producing the final sunlight map of the location.
During the 2011 growing season, all the plots were gardened.