Week 5 - GIS Data Search Assignment

The posted maps were completed for the Week 5 Lab for the University of West Florida Online GIS Certification Program class, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS 4043/L).

The first map shows Hydrology and Man-made features of Indian River County, Florida including the county boundary, cities & towns, major roads, line and polygon hydrography and wetlands. Additionally, I have added DRG, DEM and DOQQ raster datasets to 3 adjacent quads across the middle of the county. I learned quite a bit making the map but spent way too much time on it. In particular I was not happy with the way some of the downloaded files attribute tables classified information and wanted to make my own but could not figure out how to add a text field to the attribute table and then fill it in, something I hope to learn soon. I was lucky with the shape of the county as it lent itself to leaving open areas for legends and such. I left my Florida layer turned on because it adds some extra contrast to the legends. All my shape files came from the Florida Geographic Data Library for this map and the next one. All were in the Alber's Conic projection.

The raster files came from the Land Boundary Information System (LABINS) and I attempted to re-project each of the layers to the Alber's projection which prove to be highly difficult and fraught with confusing results that may not be 100% successful. The DOQQ maps were the easiest because they were already in Alber's projections with matching False Easting and other information. By far the most difficult was the DRG because I could not seem to get the un-collared file to re-project properly.



Okay, this one is a little much, but I'm giving myself an E or A for Effort. I spent way too much time trying to work the elements of the map into a presentable theme and I'm not sure I was 100% successful. I probably should have provided less detail but even though it's a busy map, I do think everything is well organized and understandable, especially at the blow-up size. So in the end I'm satisfied with it. Basically I was focusing on the public lands and tried to categorize them in a meaningful way. The attribute table had three fields that seemed reasonable - Owner, Managing_A (Association?) and ManageInst (Managing Institute) which is the one I chose though i renamed it in the legend. I thought who managed each public land was an important piece of info to display. I created my own symbols for the invasive species which was one of the coolest things I learned on the assignment, also learned how to add transparency to a layer. In the invasive species attribute table were about 14 actual species but only the four listed by name were given a separate symbol because they had more then a few occurrences. I wanted to combine two fields, Common Name and Scientific Name, into one description for the legend but forgot how to do it. If I have time (unlikely) I may try to figure that out. At the last moment I added the Archie Carr NWR inset because that was where there was a large concentration of invasive species and since that was one of the map themes I thought it was needed.

The bottom line was I learned quite a bit about ArcGIS on this exercise.