Compared to the previous lab, this one was fun! I have always been intersted in georeferencing aerial photos, but never had the access to a version of ArcGIS that included that capabiity. I did have to delete several control points and restart when I connected the points backward or not accurately enough.

Data Scavenger Hunt

I actually got rather carried away looking at all the possible data sets. Fortunately, almost all that I ended up using were in the Albers Equal Area projection, and I had to do very little re-projecting. I selected out the major roads fron a file that seemed to have every dirt trail in the marshes, cattle ranches and citrus groves. I removed 'swamps/marshes' fronm the hydrology layers leaving only streams, rivers, ponds and lakes - most of this county seems to be wetlands.

I wanted to use the Invasive Plants data with the Strategic Habitat Conservation Areas, but there was only one point in Okeechobee County in a state -wide data set. I think the conservation and wetlands combination makes a logical pair.

I will post the raster data late(r). I have only 4 hours before I have to get up for work.

The Earthquake in Haiti

This layer package was on the ESRI web site for resources on the Haiti earthquake. The base layer is an aerial photo, and the overlay is from the USGS sensors that measured the strength of the tremors at several distances from the epicenter. This will provide an excellent indication of how much damage to expect in different areas, and what locations may be sfe to relocate the population.

A Tale of Three Projections

The task this week was to take one shapefile and re-project it from the original to two other systems, then calculate the area of four counties.

It was emphasized in the reading assignment that there are errors associated with all projections, due to the difficulty of transforming an 'oblate elipsoid' onto a flat surface. It was not surprising that the calculated ares of the four counties varied. Each projection has a different base reference point, and the farther from that point, the greater the distortion.

Week 3

AN ARMCHAIR VISIT TO MEXICO

The exercise was acctually pretty straightforward, and included a number of tasks I was already familiar with, but I kept finding new, small improvements I wanted to make, like making the scale bar an even number and resetting the overall scale to a round number that was the right size for the layout. I meant to go back and add background color to make the map more readable, but ran out of ArcMap access and time.

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This map is still way too crowded. I had a hard time making the urban areas visible, since I wanted the roads to be on top of the cities in case the user wanted to zoom in to see detail. I think it would be better to focus on displaying fewer features (roads or rivers) and at a larger scale. Again, I ha a few inprovements planned, but Arc Map syopped responding at the last minute. I would have especially liked to add background color to make it easier on the eye.

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I really liked this color ramp for the raster elevation layer - the white looks like snow on the mountain tops, and brown and green for the middle levels. I think a map user would find the colors pretty intuitive. I would have liked to change the lowest color to more green than blue, but when I added the blue background the rest really stood out.