This is a preview lecture, not a hands-on session: no laptop needed today. The whole hour is a tour of the follow-on course, CCE 414, and of the engineering problems it solves with GIS. Lab 10, Domes for Mozambique, is still due Saturday.

Frame the hour: everything you have done in CCE 114 has been one map, one analysis, one lab. CCE 414 is where those pieces are chained into engineering workflows that answer a design question.

The 2021 version of this slide said "take it sooner than later if you liked 214" — 214 was the old number for this Geomatics course, now CCE 114. Point out that CCE 414 is listed in the course catalog every Fall, so plan around that. Students who take it early can use GIS in internships and in their capstone.

Everything that follows is real student work or a real lab from CCE 414. Move quickly: the point is breadth, not detail. Invite questions as you go.

CCE 414 goes much deeper into cartography than CCE 114 does: projections chosen on purpose, symbology, classification schemes, layout, and map series. You have made a handful of maps this semester; in 414 you make a lot of them, and they get critiqued.

Handheld GPS, phone GPS, and survey-grade receivers. In CCE 414 you collect your own field data with GPS and bring it into the GIS, rather than always downloading someone else's layer.

A field lab. Geocaches are real, published coordinates hidden all over campus and the city. Students walk to them with a GPS receiver, record what the receiver says, and compare against the published location. The deliverable is an error statistic, not just a map: this is where accuracy stops being an abstraction.

Two examples of the same question: given a set of criteria, where should we put the thing? On the left, suitable sites for biofuel manufacturing plants in Iowa. On the right, a cellular tower suitability study for Bonneville County, Idaho. Both were produced by chaining together the same geoprocessing tools you have been using this semester. The original slide title read "Infrastructure Citing"; the word is siting.

The blue area is the suitable zone that falls out of the analysis. Note the ingredients: a DEM (raster) for slope, roads (vector) for access, existing towers (vector) for density. This lab comes back twice more in this deck: once as a ModelBuilder diagram, once as a Python script.

A routing problem rather than a siting problem. Every cell in the study area gets a cost, the costs are combined into one surface, and the software finds the cheapest route from A to B across it. The green line is the answer. Ask the class what should be expensive: steep ground, water crossings, private land, sensitive habitat. Same method is used for pipelines, canals, and highway corridors.

Transition slide. Up to now in CCE 114 you have run tools one at a time. The next few slides are about capturing the whole chain so it can be re-run, audited, and handed to someone else.

Blue = your input data. Yellow = a tool. Green = the output that tool creates, which is often the input to the next tool. The little "P" markers are exposed parameters, so the model can be re-run with different inputs. Emphasise reproducibility: an engineering analysis nobody can repeat is not much of an analysis.

Read it left to right. Five boxes, one question: how much vegetation is there within 200 m of the river? Every one of those boxes is a tool you could also run by hand, one at a time, exactly as you have been doing in lab.

This is the same idea at the scale of a real project, and it is only the first half of the model. Nobody keeps this straight in their head, and nobody wants to click through it twice. That is the argument for modeling.

The Zonal Statistics tool from the Bear River model, opened up. Nothing mysterious: a zone layer, a value raster, a statistic, an output. The model just remembers the settings for you and passes the output to the next tool. QGIS has the same tool in the Processing Toolbox.

Second half of the automation story. Models are great until you need a loop, a condition, or a report — then you write code.

You already know Python from CCE 170. The new part is that a few import lines give you the entire geoprocessing toolbox as callable functions. The bottom image is the payoff: a script with exposed parameters shows up as an ordinary tool dialog that anyone can run. Screenshots here are ArcGIS/ArcPy from the 2021 deck; the same pattern works in QGIS with PyQGIS and the Processing framework.

Left: one function out of a lab script — convert contours to a raster, extract by mask, filter, run map algebra, write out an ASCII grid. Do not read it line by line; the point is that it is a few dozen lines of ordinary Python that run the same analysis every time without a single click. Right: expose the script's inputs as parameters and it shows up as an ordinary tool dialog that a colleague can run without reading any code.

The cell tower siting lab from earlier, built both ways. Students do the model version first, then reproduce it in code, and compare. Ask which one you would rather hand to a client, and which one you would rather change at 11 pm the night before a deadline. Neither answer is wrong: the model is readable, the script is flexible.

The classic argument for scripting. Making one county map is a five-minute job; making one for every county in Utah by hand is a lost afternoon and an inconsistent product. The script takes a shapefile, an attribute column for the names, and a template layer, and loops.

Third theme: getting information out of pictures of the earth.

Aerial imagery flown for a project, with survey control points marked, being fitted onto a satellite basemap. In CCE 414 you work with imagery as data: resolution, bands, control points, and accuracy, not just a pretty backdrop.

A favorite lab. You pick a historical map — a city plan, a fire insurance map, an old survey — and pin it to the modern world by matching identifiable points. Then you can digitize the old street grid, the old shoreline, the old channel, and measure how much has moved. Engineers do this for real when tracking channel migration, buried infrastructure, and historical land use.

NDVI, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is computed from the red and near-infrared bands: healthy vegetation reflects near-infrared strongly. Green in this image is vegetation. It is a good first taste of band math, and it leads straight into agriculture, drought, and land cover change work.

Fourth theme, and the one closest to civil engineering practice: elevation data, and the derived surfaces that come out of it.

Two finished student maps. Left: 22 watersheds delineated for Rock Canyon in Provo, from USGS DEM data and USGS stream data. Right: an avalanche hazard map for the Snowbird area in Alta, built from slope, aspect, and elevation. Both started as a bare grid of elevation values.

This is an earthwork problem wearing a geology hat. Pick a base elevation, subtract the DEM from it inside the outlined boundary, multiply by cell area, and sum. If you can do it for a butte, you can do it for a stockpile, a landfill, a reservoir, or a road cut.

Snowbird and Alta. Avalanches release on particular slopes, at particular aspects, above particular elevations. Each criterion is easy on its own; the interesting engineering is in reclassifying each one to a common scale and combining them. This is exactly the same overlay logic as the siting labs, applied to a hazard.

The map on the right is the output: the Rock Canyon basin outline and the stream network inside it, neither of which was in the input data. Everything came out of the DEM. This is the workflow behind almost every hydrologic model you will ever run. The next slide shows the model that produced it.

The watershed model, left to right: mosaic the four DEM tiles, fill the sinks, compute flow direction, compute flow accumulation, threshold the accumulation with the raster calculator to get streams, convert those to a polyline, turn vertices into points, and delineate watersheds. The two outputs are the stream network (Polyline_RockcanyonStreams1) and the watershed polygons (Rock_Canyon_Watersheds1). Point out how many steps there are, and ask how anyone would repeat this by hand next semester on a different canyon.

Draping imagery on a globe, profiling a TIN surface along a line, a contaminant plume rendered in three dimensions with well logs, and a TIN previewed as a 3D surface. CCE 414 spends time on the third dimension: surfaces, profiles, line of sight, and volumes. These are ArcGIS screenshots from the 2021 deck.

Land the plane. This is the course that turns "I have used GIS" into "I can build a GIS analysis". Encourage students to talk to you in office hours if they are unsure how it fits their plan of study.

Post the recording link on Learning Suite as well for anyone who is out sick. It is the prior-year version of this lecture and covers the same material.

Week 12 is site selection — the Walmart lab — plus the launch of the final project, and Concepts Exam 2 opens in the Testing Center. Tell students that the site selection lectures are the closest model for what the final project asks them to do.

Conversion notes (2026-09-02): source "14 - Intro to Engineering Applications of GIS CEEn 414.pptx" (2021), 21 slides, no hidden slides, no speaker notes in the source (all notes here are new). CEEn 414 renamed to CCE 414 throughout; the source's "if you liked 214" now reads "if you liked CCE 114". Source slide 9 ("ArcGIS ModelBuilder") and slide 10-11 ("ArcPy and Python") were kept as descriptions of CCE 414 content but reworded to name the QGIS equivalents (Graphical Modeler, PyQGIS) alongside the ESRI ones. Source slide title "Infrastructure Citing" corrected to "Siting". ArcGIS screenshots kept and flagged for a possible re-shoot: ce414-zonal-statistics-dialog.jpg, ce414-celltower-tool-dialog.png, ce414-arcpy-snippet.png, ce414-arcpy-script.jpg, ce414-celltower-model.png, ce414-celltower-code.png, ce414-atlasmaker-dialog.png, ce414-model-concept.png, ce414-model-iowa-siting.jpg, ce414-model-bear-river.jpg, ce414-watershed-model.png, ce414-3d-visualization.jpg (ArcMap/ArcCatalog/ArcGlobe windows), ce414-arcglobe-earth.jpg (cropped from an ArcGlobe view), and the ArcGIS credit lines inside ce414-terrain-analysis-maps.jpg. No source slide was dropped: all 21 became slides here, with the source "Modeling" slide split into three (concept, Bear River model, Iowa model) and the source "Watershed Hydrology" slide split into two (purpose + map, then the full model diagram); new slides added for goals, course facts, section leads, "Should you take CCE 414?", the prior-year recording, and Before Next Class. TODO: confirm which software CCE 414 uses this year (the 2021 screenshots are ArcGIS 10 / ArcMap, not ArcGIS Pro) and whether the geocaching, old maps, NDVI, butte volume, avalanche, and atlas labs are still in the syllabus. TODO: confirm the Learning Suite reading and quiz for this week; this deck has no textbook chapter of its own.