Many people associate community service with food donations to homeless shelters or a few hours spent at a local soup kitchen, but what a lot of people don't think about is how technology can be used to contribute to the community in some very positive ways.

Class members of an introductory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) course at Williston State College produced two community service projects for their final assignments, and presented them during their last class Tuesday night.

The group was joined by Vector Control Board Director Fran Bosch and board member Steve Kemp, who will be using information from one of these projects to help fight mosquitoes more efficiently in the area.

"Our goal here is to help the city," said professor Jackie Stenehjem. "I am very proud of the community service projects by these students."

The first project was presented by Randall Torgeson, and it utilized data about where water is located in the Williston area so that Vector Control can then use that information to spray larvacide during aerial sprays. "You can get into as much detail as you want," said Torgeson about the map being projected onto the screen.

Main river channels, minor channels and backwaters, frequent standing water and mud flats are all depicted on the map.

Bosch and Kemp agreed that this information will be highly useful for them when battling mosquitoes this season. Bosch mentioned the Devil section, which consists of 10 to 15 percent water.

"Just today we were working in an area called No Improvement, a springy area north of the golf course and north of Spring Lake Park," he said. "We're at a point now when we would like to take Bluetooth units out and plot those areas that are known breeding sites."

Torgeson said it will be possible to do this using the map they created for their project.

"We are really fortunate to have the technology that we do, because even just four years ago we couldn't have done this," said Torgeson.

Bosch elaborated on why this community project is so important for them.

"We've got 87 square miles in our territory, and we can enlarge the WSC map to make newer, more detailed maps. The ones we are using right now are black and white soil maps," he said.

Kemp agreed about how important this information will be when dealing with problem areas where ATVs and other kinds of ground transportation are not recommended.

"What's happened is that we contracted with Aero Spring with Rick Marburger, and he will drop the larvacide (which is a dry pellet) on the area. Rick has a GPS in his plane, and what we will do now is hand these maps to him. Because they are in digital format, he can put them into his GPS system, and he'll know where to start dropping the larvacide," said Kemp. "That's the power of this."

"For a dry year there is water all over the place," added Bosch.

All of the sites on the map were developed by information from David Benth, previous director of the Vector Control Board. Kemp also said that there will be an important decision made on June 10, the date of the primary election.

"One of the two dollars that we get from everyone's water bill is up for renewal and we could lose $75,000 of the $150,000 that we get every year for vector control," said Kemp. "We do need this because otherwise it severely hampers Fran's efforts."

Class member Ron Radle presented the next project, which showed the distribution of WSC alumni throughout the state, country and world to see where they are distributed. He explained how he used Excel and compiled three different lists to map the location of over 10,000 alumni.

"The biggest challenge was converting the addresses to longitudinal and latitudinal points," said Radle. "After that it was just a matter of adding the Excel spreadsheet into the map. We also have a graph that shows by state and country how many people are in each one."

He said it was also difficult to geocode all of the addresses, so he found a Web site that converted zip codes to coordinate points and was then able to bring it into Excel.

"As you can see, Williston alumni are almost worldwide," he said. "A lot of alumni are from the upper midwest, we have some in Canada, Trinidad, a couple from Germany, one from Japan."

One of the coordinates on the map also happens to be a 0,0 coordinate, belonging to an alumni in the military.

Stenehjem commented about the importance of the project.

"For marketing purposes, it is important to see which regions we are impacting and where we might want to reach out to attract more students to Williston. It is also useful for alumni financial assistance," she said. "It's not a finished product but its very close."

According to the map, 72 percent of alumni live in North Dakota, which comes out to over 7,000 people. In order to add visual appeal, the data source, zip codes, a picture of WSC and a "Go Tetons" emblem was included on the alumni map.

"This is a great visual for the WSC Foundation and administration," said Stenehjem. "I think we really have some great results here, and it is amazing. We just started these projects two or three weeks ago, but have been talking about them for a very long time."

Kemp agreed that in addition to the Vector Control map, the alumni map will be incredibly useful to the community.

"Whoever does the marketing or recruiting for the college should be very interested in this. It should click home for them," he said.

In his presentation, Radle expanded to say that GIS mapping systems have many uses beyond what these two projects will be used for.

"There are so many different uses for GIS mapping systems," he said. "There are many different kinds of data that can be entered. Some other uses include agricultural and environmental issues, or you could use it to map where the highest crime rates are. Another project we did in class was the mapping of wireless internet locations," said Radle.

Class members Brad Hingtgen, Scott Sheets and Mike Duehr work in surveying, and attested to the fact that GIS mapping is very useful for work in the oil field, in addition to a multitude of other industries.

Ultimately, Stenehjem is very pleased with the work of her students.

"My plan is to showcase what they have done," said Stenehjem. She is planning to enlarge all of the community service maps that have been created and put them up somewhere in WSC so that other students can see their work.

She also said she would like to have students present their findings to the WSC administration in the near future. Her goal is also to be able to offer this course (GIS 107) every semester, but currently it is only offered each spring semester at WSC, and the future of the course will depend upon student and public interest.