Hurricane Harvey Flooding Reproduction

As my final project in the Open Source GIScience course I reproduced an introductory QGIS lab problem using a reproducible Python notebook. The original lab problem aimed to determine patterns of racial environmental justice and flooding in Harris County, Texas immediately following Hurricane Harvey. Students in Human Geography with GIS were instructed to create workflows in QGIS to produce tables and maps of the flooding and its overlap with regions of different majority racial or ethnic groups. My goal was to reproduce this workflow, but through Python scripting instead of a desktop GIS. While the workflow steps were fairly simple for a desktop GIS, I undertook a significant challenge by starting a reproducible research compendium from scratch and translating all steps of the problem into code. This required a significant amount of research into python packages I hadn’t used before that could be used to accomplish specific tasks such as zonal statistics and group by’s. This was a project that pushed me to develop my Python skills and document all steps of the process such that this computational notebook can be used in the future as an example of a simple, working study that has been implemented in Python. There are very few simple, working studies or problems that have been reproduced in Python or R, and projects like this represent an opportunity to create educational materials and projects for future courses and research that involve teaching geospatial Python to undergraduates.

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