About Me

Hello! My name is Lauren Chaphe. I began my GIS journey in graduate school, where I took a few classes in geographic information science and remote sensing. During my last semester before graduation, I did a summer internship with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission's Division of Marine Fisheries, where one of my projects included working with artificial reef geospatial data. This experience opened my eyes to the option of going into the field of GIS for natural resource management and conservation. After graduation, I did another internship as a GIS Intern with the City of Orange City Public Works Department where I got to use GIS to map and update the city's public utilities geospatial database. I then used this experience as an environmental scientist in the environmental consulting field. This involved researching any potential environmental issues within a specific project area, such as mapped wetlands or mapped endangered species habitats, that may require environmental permitting. Now, I combine both GIS and environmental science as a GIS Analyst for an environmental consulting and engineering company, where I work on a variety of projects within central Florida. In my free time, I like gardening and cooking!

I joined the UWF Online Certificate in Geographic Information Systems program to learn new skills and to enhance my existing skills in the field of GIS. As an introduction to UWF's Computer Cartography course, we were asked to create an ArcGIS StoryMap to introduce ourselves and to become more familiar with StoryMap formats. Here is a link to my Story Map describing all the places I have lived:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0113074cd6b94c91bb954cd985d06b8a