Model Building?!

It is amazing how quickly things can be forgotten, or in some cases remembered. A criteria of the portfolio assignment for my GIS internship course requires a Model Builder screenshot be included in my Gallery. I went back - a long, long time ago - to the Fall semester of 2017, and found a model I had built for an extra credit assignment. It worked with data related to Florida's snail habitats. Realizing I remembered very little about the Model Builder, I decided to create a new model for the Gallery. 

I watched a quick video, and soon remembered how it worked. I created a model for a long-term project I recently finished. Every couple years, the organization I intern for replaces their public shapefile that represents the municipalities of the 16 counties within their district. Aside from acquiring up-to-date shapefiles from the counties themselves, the longest part of the task is the Geoprocessing. All the files must be the same projection, have no topology errors (overlaps), and consistent attributes streamlined to show the same data in the same order. I made a model that Projects all the files at once, and then Dissolves them according to the county name. Then, it Clips them to an accurate counties layer.

In the near future, my next step will be designing a Python script with more detail, that may make this update more efficient in the future. The Python scripting language is still new to me, but I have taken a short course on ESRI and edited existing scripts to function as needed. Although, this was a GREAT project for building familiarity with the common Geoprocessing tools, as well as strengthening communication and organizational skills. And now, it has helped me refresh my Model Building skills, too!