Open Sourced - From Analysis to Communication in the Age of Web Mapping - Analyze Week 1

Special Topics - Project 4 Week 2

Analyze Week 1 introduced us to Mapbox, Leaflet and web mapping.  Using the data we created last week in QGIS, this week we uploaded our food desert and grocery store shapefiles to Mapbox, then symbolized it.  This was a little more complicated than in ArcMap.  In Mapbox, first copies needed to be made of the food desert layer for every class we had, then the class and color needed to be assigned to each layer.  There were a few ways this data could be derived.  I chose to use ArcMap and experiment a bit with the classes in the layer symbology window until I felt I had a reasonable distribution of the classes, then I made a note of those ranges.  Then I went back to Mapbox and added that many layers.  Next I went to the Color Brewer and selected the color scheme I liked best and specified the number of classes.  I made note of the HEX and RGB codes for those colors.  Back in Mapbox I started with the lowest copy of the food desert layer and in the Select data window associated that layer with the lowest range of data based on the POP2000 field of the attribute table for all the layers, then went back through all the layers and in the Style window used the RGB codes noted from the Color Brewer to assign the correct symbol color to each of the layers.

Next we moved to Leaflet to create a web map to be hosted on our UWF I Drive.  We started with the source of the Leaflet map as a base template, then adjusted the code to meet our requirements.  This included changing the location of the style sheet and script files, changing the center point so the map would open centered on Pensacola, FL, editing pop-ups, polygons and circles, adding a legend and a geocoder to make the map searchable.  Adding the legend required us to add a long section of code that was provided, then changing the population ranges and the HEX codes we had noted earlier.  I also adjusted the size of the map view and scale so almost my whole study area would show when the map opened.  This file was then saved to the I Drive as an html file.

It was an interesting assignment, but a lot of new stuff to deal with for a final project.  Here is the link to the web map:

Lower Escambia County, FL Food Desert