Week 11 - IntroGIS - Vectors Week 2

Map of campsites that are considered ideal, because they within 150m of a lake, 500m of a river, and within 300m of a road. They are also outside of conservation area.  

This week we continued working with vector analysis. I really liked learning about the Overlay tools, they are very helpful and I can see myself using them quite a bit in the future. I was not, however, thrilled working with Python. I was having issues, the main one being that all of my folders for this class have been named by the week, followed by the name of the lab (i.e. 01_Overview). This is not an option in Python, so I had to rename this week's file, and now it seems unorganized compared to the rest. Especially since we are constantly reminded to organize our data.

I am having an issue where I am not able to add a Basemap to my layers, and I can't figure out why. I was able to earlier today, but when I tried to do it again, it was grayed out and I was not able to do so. This is not the first time, either. I've searched through ArcGIS help, but haven't been able to find anything.

Week 7 - IntroGIS - Data Search

Map of Manatee County, FL, showing major cities and roads. DEP Quadrant 2920 (Southeast corner) is also highlighted. Projected in Albers Conical Equal Area. Source: FGDL, LABINS

Map of Manatee County, FL, showing species richness of strategic habitat conservation areas in relation to the elevation of the county. Includes a digital elevation model of the county obtained from the USGS. Projected in Albers Conical Equal Area. Source: FGDL, USGS

Map of Manatee County, FL, showing the wetland gradient across the county, and surface water. Categories of wetlands include flooding regularity, tidal frequency, among others. Map also shows elevation of the county, which affects wetlands type. Projected in Albers Conical Equal Area, with datum of GCS_North_American_1983_HARN. Source: FGDL, USGS.

This week we combined all of our new-found talents to do a data search for our own data, which we then put together. I really enjoyed looking at the different available data that is available to the public. We had a little bit of free-range with the data, as long as we included the major components.

I was assigned Manatee County, which allowed me to add in a cute little icon to my maps. For the strategic habitat conservation areas, I chose a raster data set for species richness because it ties into my other biogeography class. I did think the data provided was a little lacking in terms of distribution (there were only 6 categories), but this was a good start to such information.

Projecting the data into the same coordinate system was fairly easy since most of my data came from the same site (FGDL). All of the data is projected in Albers Conical Equal Area, with a datum of GCS_North_American_1983_HARN. For the rasters, though, it was a two-step process to reproject the data and a little more complicated, especially when trying to keep them straight in ArcCatalog.

I also enjoyed teaching myself the drawing tools when showcasing the DOQQ layer. I saw something similar in the examples provided, so did a Help Search to try to figure out how it was done. I know there is a lot to learn still with ArcGIS, and I can't wait to see what else we learn this semester.