ArcGIS Online

This week was a little less involved than last week.  We learned about creating and sharing map packages online.  This is a vital tool when you need to present or collaborate with multiple parties who may or may not be in the same location.  It was fairly simple to create map packages, we needed to create 2 separate map packages

Use and modify map and tile packages

The above map package will be used to identify climbing spots in Yosemite National Park.  It was a very good introduction to using and sharing map and tile packages.

Optimize a map package

The above map package was significantly more involved.  We constructed a map that showed the study of Ponderosa Pines in the Aguirre Springs drainage. This map can be used to monitor the sample sites by hydrologists, landscape ecologists, and hydrologists.  Overall it was a very good lab to show the power of the online collaboration tools as well as how easy it is to upload a map for collaboration. 

What Fun!

This week there were three maps created using some similar elements and I really enjoyed creating them.  All of them had to do with Mexico in some way elevation, population density, or urban areas.  I think that my favorite was the elevation map because that is more along the lines of the data that I one day hope to work in scientific data so I really did like this one.  Below are my map examples:

Mexico State Population Size

Urban Areas of Central Mexico

Surface Elevation in Meters of Mexico

One of the neat things about the Urban Area of Central Mexico map is that my cousins lived in Guadalajara for a few years and I was able to go visit them, it was a very neat experience.  Also, my sister did a study abroad in Puebla for a semester.  Previously I wasn't sure in Mexico where it was in relation to other cities but I have a better idea now!  Some of the challenges that I faced while completing this lab is that I was very nit picky about the display of things and worked very hard on the presentation of elements in these maps.  I will say that from my previous GIS classes, I am missing Adobe Illustrator because of the ease of manipulating things like text and colors.  I sure do hope that we get into that program in the class.

Week 2, Warming Up

This weeks lab was to create a map allowing the viewer to locate the UWF campus in reference to a map of Florida and Escambia County.

This lab was a good introduction to some more complex features of ArcMap such as clipping and working with multiple dataframes.  I belive this will come in handy later on this semester.  It was sometimes frustrating when you wre trying to work with a feature only to realize that you were working in the wrong data set.  Overall I belive that this lab was very helpful because I finally figured out how to change cursor modes after a bit of frustration.  I belive that this is one of the cleaner map layouts that I have produced during my time working with GIS data.

I just couldn't stay away

Here I am back again at this GIS thing.  This weeks lab was fairly straight forward because I have worked with ArcGIS before so it made the orientation easier.  I did have trouble following the directions for the process summary through because they were not very straight forward.  This map is a basic map of the worlds population in 2007 with the cities populated.

I'm looking forward to getting back into doing some more GIS and hoping that this certificate may afford me some opportunites in the future that I may not have had previously.  

FINAL!

Whew, oh this final.  This final's objective was to create from scratch a map of the United States showing both the participation rate and the mean score for either the SAT or the ACT.  I chose to use the SAT because that is what I took however, the data for both was provided.  We were given quite a bit of time to create both the map and our summary.  The summary was not too bad to complete because it was fairly straight forward.  The map on the other hand was more difficult because I felt that I had to reign in my "want to go nuts" in order to create a more professional and polished product.  I can say with complete certainty that this project really utilized the skills that I have learned over this semester in many ways such as projections, data classification, stylistic effects, proportional symbol creation and I'm sure there are some others that I'm forgetting.  I chose to use the choropleth and proportional symbol mapping methods because I felt that both of those were suited to displaying the data required.  I needed to think about many things in the creation of this map such as figure ground distinction, using the usable map space and placement of items.  To create this map I used a combination of ArcMap and Adobe Illustrator.  First I imported the data from a previous lab then chaged the projection because I felt that the Lambert projection had a little more geographical layout than that Alberts.  Once I changed the projection I then imported the table that I created in Excel by cutting out the part of the SAT data PDF that I needed.  This allowed me to directly import the participation rates to create the cloropleth map.  I used ColorBrewer to help me decide on a color scheme to use.  Once I had decided I chose one at random in ArcMap then applied the legend, north arrow, labels and scale bar.  I exported this to Adobe Illustrator and imported the color scheme that I downloaded from ColorBrewer.  Once in AI I needed to edit all of the layers because when you import there are a lot of paths that you don't really need.  After deleting these I was ready to go.  I then changed the color scheme, arranged the map as well as resizing it making sure to include the scale bar because otherwise the scale would be off.  I created the symbols by importing it from the internet and creating a clipping path around the circle itself.  Once the symbol was created I then had to scale them for the data.  I did this by taking the cube root of the SAT mean score which I calculated by adding up the scores then dividing by 3 to get the mean.  Once the cube root was found I then manually scaled them based upon the largest symbol size I wanted.  Once this was done I then placed them on the map along with the state labels.  This is what I ended up with:

Lab 12

Lab 12s objective was to convert our Dot Density map from last lab to a KML file for import into Google Earth.  Google Earth is a very powerful program that contains quite a bit of data about various places on earth.  It allows you to zoom in on specific place as well as create tours of places in 3D that can include quite a bit of information about that specific place.  For me this was an easy lab because I have used Google Earth before and am famililar with the navigation and operation of this program.  The one thing I did learn about Google Earth is that some of the data is inputed by LiDAR imagry which is a very accurate satillite type.  This type of imagry contains a large amount of detail as seen below with the picture of the St. Pete Times Forum, the area located in downtown Tampa.  The fact that you can read the sign on the front as well as see the ads diplayed on the area is absolutely amazing to me.

Lab 11

Oh lab 11 how difficult you were for me!  I really struggled with this lab.  Not with the material, creating a dot density map was fairly straight forward.  Especially when you create one from scratch 5 different times!  Let me tell you, that was quite frustrating!  However, I finally got the map to work, kinda.  What I eventually had to do was take a screenshot of the map with my masking working and then I turned in the .JPG of the broken map.  I tried pretty much everything to get the masking to work but unfortunately it wouldn't work.

Anyway the purpose of this lab was to create a dot density map of south Florida's population.  We were given quite a bit of freedom in the actual creation of the map which was good because it made us use good color schemes in the creation.  We used two layers in this map the Surface Water and the Urban Land.  The best way to create this map was to place dots only in the Urban Land areas.  I chose the colors to emphasize the dots as opposed to the surface water or the interstate system.  The bottom picture is the map with the masking turned on.  This should give you an idea of where the dot densities should have fallen in the actual map.  You can see that the main concentrations are Tampa and Miami which makes sense because those areas are some of the larger cities in Florida.