Jonathan Swart Email and Phone Number

Following a three stage interview process I was offered a 6 month position as a sustainability consultant at the company. In addition to research and writing based work, my GIS and technical skills were quickly utilised and I became responsible for important tasks required by the various projects Urban Earth was currently involved with. Such tasks included creating maps (both static and HTML/Leaflet) for Local Government Climate Change Support plans as well as to be used as visual aids at workshops throughout majority of the districts within South Africa, writing Google App Scripts to automate and increase the efficiency of the company’s day to day doings, as well as creating and maintaining the back-end of a Department of Energy/UNDP funded website.

I joined 3DroneMapping as an intern graduate and filled the role of a GIS practitioner for the company. In this role, I gained valuable experience and tested my skills in real world scenarios by being deeply involved in the processing stages of 3DroneMapping’s operations. My responsibilities included the processing of raw flight data into accurate, geo-referenced orthophotos, digital elevations models and pointclouds as well as the various GIS tasks that are required by the particular job. Such tasks included digitizing (feature extraction), contour generation, measuring vegetation (NDVI, EVI etc), manual pointcloud classification, 3D modeling etc. This position also provided me with the access to various GIS software resources which helped developed my skills using QGIS, ArcGIS, Global Mapper, VRMesh and Pix4D. A major achievement for me during this internship was playing a leading role in the development and maintenance of an online GIS web-server. This in-house solution has allowed 3DroneMapping to host online data on their own server, thereby giving their clients easier and faster access to locally hosted GIS projects and, as important, saving the company the monthly installment fee (approximately US$250) paid to an overseas-based GIS server provider.

Co founded automotive company within the automotive market. The company concentrated on the sourcing, refurbishment of used car parts, becoming an accredited dealer for multiple local and international aftermarket companies, as well as the creation of our own line of aftermarket products. From starting the company from the ground up with very little funds, we achieved a turnover of R100 000 within a year.