In this milestone, you will have weeks 1 and 2 to build a project proposal that contains your research question or hypothesis, background information, potential data sources and methods, and your expected results. This proposal will lead you into future milestones by providing a guide to help keep your analysis on track. You will start by getting an overview of the entire project and the assignment for this first milestone. From there, you will learn about some sources for project ideas and data sources and look at an example project proposal.

In this module, you will continue to work through Milestone 1, your project proposal as outlined in the first week. You will then submit your proposal for peer review.

In this milestone, you will have week 3 to practice your algorithmic development. In the previous milestone, you posed a question you want to answer - now you'll develop a plan, your algorithm, for how to answer that question with GIS. In practice, this means you'll develop a ModelBuilder model that shows your planned analysis workflow, or some part of it. For those of you who are conducting an analysis that's not conducive to making a model, you can write out your series of steps instead. Regardless, by the end of this module, you'll have a plan for how to produce your results.

For this milestone, you will have weeks 4, 5, and 6 to process your data according to the model you created in the previous milestone, reinforcing your data analysis concepts and practice. When you complete your analysis, you will add metadata to any resulting layers, and you will also write an assessment of what the results mean and how they answer your research question.