Open Sourced - From Analysis to Communication in the Age of Web Mapping - Analyze Week 2

Special Topics - Project 4 Week 3

 I downloaded the 2010 census shapefile from FGDL, and used the Florida Counties shapefile from Prepare Week to create my county shape to clip the census shapefile to, and then created my study area and centroid shapefiles from that within QGIS.  I then used Google Earth to identify grocery stores within that study area and created a KLM file from that search and opened that in ArcMap and saved the results to a shapefile, then added my centroid shapefile.  With these two layers I then ran the Analyst tool Near to locate those stores within 1 mile of the census tract centroids and add that data to the centroid attribute table.

With the centroid layer modified in ArcMap I opened the database file in Excel and saved it as a .csv file then went back into QGIS and added the table as a Delimited Text Layer and joined it to the Study Area layer.  This added those new distance fields to the Study area layer.  From this field I was able to select those records in my Study Area that did not have a store within a 1 mile radius of the tract centroid and create a Food Desert shapefile from that.  Reversing the selection I then created a Food Oasis shapefile from the rest.

Moving on to MapBox I uploaded my zipped Food Desert and Grocery Store shapefiles to new Tilesets, then created a basemap from the basic style, changed a few elements, then added the tilesets to the basemap.  After that I added the Study Area to ArcMap and investigated the results of different classes and classification methods and finally settled on Jenks Natural Breaks with 4 classes as the most reasonable distribution, then switched to Colorbrewer for the HEX and RGB color codes for the color scheme I wanted to use.  Back in MapBox I created a Group for the food desert layer and made three duplicates of the layer to represent the four classes, then added filters and changed colors so each layer would represent the correct class.

The last step was to create a webmap in Leaflet.  To do this I copied the text file from Analyze Week 1 and made the adjustments in the text file that were appropriate for the differences between maps.  Basically, all the things that needed to be added or adjusted for Analyze Week 1 also needed to be adjusted for Analyze Week 2. With that done I save the text file as a HTML on my I drive.  This is the link for it:  http://students.uwf.edu/mr80/STGIS/OkDesert.html

The Study Area encompasses the Greater Fort Walton Beach area in South Okaloosa County, Florida, including the surrounding rural area.  Within this area are 10 grocery stores that service most of the urban area, but not all, and there is not one grocery store within the rural area.

Fort Walton Beach is not my home town but I am pretty familiar with it and was actually surprised to see so little of it falls within a food desert.  I didn’t realize there were so many grocery stores within town.  I was also surprised to discover there were no grocery stores at all within the rural area outside of town.  I would have expected there to be at least one.