Data Search

Intro to GIS - Weeks 7&8

This week's lesson was our mid-term project.  Even with two weeks it was tough to get it all done in time.  This was a very time consuming assignment, but in the end, very enjoyable.  For this lesson we had to hunt down and download all the files we needed ourselves.  I did this through Labins for my aerial, FGDL for all five of my vector files and for my two environmental rasters.  The DEMs were both downloaded from a USGS site.

A map of Polk County set in four data frames to display the
digital elevation, wetlands habitats, and habitats and
 land covers of the county.

Since I was working on a county level I decided to go with a State Plane projection.  This process went quite well and I was done with it before I knew it.  It was the next step that took so much of my time.  The water dataset had every drop of water my county had ever seen in it.  When I added that file to my county it obscured everything else that needed to be on there.  I spent quite a bit of time creating and deleting selections trying to find a nice balance.  The same was true for the parks, roads and cities, though cities weren't quite as tough.  Finally I got my selections down to proportions I felt made a good representation of their fields without overwhelming the map.

After that I moved on to my rasters and decided one file just wasn't going to be enough for my DEM so I went back and downloaded and projected a second one.  I used the raster clip tool for all my raster images, but that didn't quite get it so I had to used the data frame clip as well.

Once all of that was done I set about laying my map out and decided on one map with four data frames.  Two of my data frames were either too dark to too busy to display anything else with them, but I felt with the other two data frames having the roads and cities on them for reference so close by it wouldn't hurt to have them just display their data alone.

I'm still going back and forth about having the projection information displayed coming from the maps dynamic text option of Coordinate System.  On the one hand it's kind of cool to have all that information there, but on the other, it's not really aesthetically pleasing.  I don't think I'll do it that way again, but I think it was worth doing once.