Ten Hours, One Misplaced Campus, and a Lesson in Georeferencing

 Blog Title: Ten Hours, One Misplaced Campus, and a Lesson in Georeferencing

I’ll be honest — I spent ten hours trying to georeference the UWF SP1 image before realizing I was aligning it to the completely wrong part of campus. Ten. Whole. Hours. I zoomed, stretched, and cursed at Null Island (that mysterious spot off the coast of Africa where all unreferenced rasters go to die), wondering why the roads never quite matched. Only after an embarrassingly long stare at the campus map did it hit me: I’d been forcing the image to fit a section it didn’t belong to. Lesson learned — sometimes it’s not your control points that are off, it’s your entire frame of reference.

Once I finally lined up the right buildings, everything clicked. Using the Georeferencing tools in ArcGIS Pro, I matched the unknown rasters (uwf_n.jpg and uwf_s1.jpg) to known vector data — roads, buildings, and the Eagles Nest feature. Through this, I learned the delicate dance between Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and actual visual accuracy. A low RMSE feels satisfying, but if the image doesn’t look right, it isn’t right. Precision means nothing if your buildings are swimming in the bay.

After georeferencing, we moved into editing and digitizing. Creating new polygons for campus buildings and tracing new road segments taught me how essential snapping and attribute management are for clean, logical data. It’s oddly satisfying to see your newly drawn Gym building sitting perfectly atop the raster you just anchored to reality. (And yes, saving edits — manually — is a must. Auto-save doesn’t exist here to save you from yourself.)

The geoprocessing tools came next, with the Multiple Ring Buffer (MRB) tool taking center stage. By buffering 330 and 660 feet around the Eagles Nest, we mapped the FWC’s conservation zones — a reminder that GIS isn’t just about pixels and points, but protecting habitats through spatial awareness.

Finally, the lab ventured into 3D mapping, hyperlinking data (like the eagle nest photo stored on Google Drive), and visualizing layers in a scene that felt almost tangible. Seeing those buffers rise in a 3D environment made the entire process — the frustration, the misalignment, the rediscovery — feel worth it.

In the end, this lab wasn’t just about georeferencing or buffers. It was about patience, perspective, and realizing that accuracy in GIS depends as much on critical thinking as it does on technical skill. And next time, before spending another ten hours georeferencing, I’ll double-check that I’m even on the right part of campus.