ArcGIS training course on the Isle of Man

Just before Christmas I had the opportunity to venture to the beautiful Isle of Man, where I had the pleasure of training some fantastic members of the government's Department of Environment, Food & Agriculture (DEFA) team in ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online. From forestry and fishery experts to climate enthusiasts, blue carbon advocates, and the guardians of upland peat, we had a wonderfully eclectic group eager to dive into the world of geospatial technology.

It was my first time on the Isle of Man and I flew into Ronaldsway Airport south of Douglas. Training began on the following morning and over the next few days we worked at a couple of different venues. The first was Knockaloe, famous for being the world's largest WW1 Internment Camp - less famous for being home to a very territorial and somewhat aggressive cockerel. For English and Welsh readers you may have noticed that DEFA is missing an R. This is simply because everywhere in the Isle of Man is classed as Rural as evidenced by a couple of goats peering in the window evidently keen to share their favourite map projections with the group.

During a break I took a stroll to the 'Barbed Wire Garden'. This garden serves as a memorial to those detained in the WW1 internment camp. Among its notable residents was Joseph Pilates, the founder of modern-day Pilates. In the garden, there's a plaque dedicated to his memory. Interestingly, I often include a Pilates ball in my traveling trainer kit, using it to demonstrate an oblate spheroid.

Day 2 of training took place in Peel looking out across the marina and Peel Castle. At this stage of the course we'd 'travelled by map' to Colombia but the charm of Peel is undeniable -although the temperature was a little lower than in Cartagena. During a break we got the chance to explore Peel Castle and fortunately avoided the Moddy Dhoo (black dog) that haunts the site. The afternoon of Day 2 included using ArcGIS Pro's Data Engineering capabilitiies. Was blast fishing around Tierra Bomba correlated with water quality? Finding an answer to that question so easily certainly blew some minds.

For the third day we were back to Knockaloe and focussing on ArcGIS Online. Group map making was fueled with some carto-cookies - peanut butter delights in the shape of the continents. There was a lot of ground covered in the two and half day course and certainly from a trainer's perspective it was a lot of fun. The group were engaged and inquisitive with some great peer learning. With such a full schedule it wasn't possible to cover every aspect of GIS. One workflow that was requested during the course was georeferencing. Looking for suitable examples to demonstrate georeferencing in ArcGIS Pro I found Clare Corkill's site on the appropriate subject of the WW1 interment camps in Knockaloe. You can get hold of the pdf map here if you'd like to replicate the georeferencing workflow in the video below: