Week 3 - IntroGIS - Cartography

Topography map of Mexico. Green depicts lower elevations, whereas brown indicated higher elevations. Data Source: UWF, ESRI (2007)

I really enjoyed working on this lab. We made three separate maps: one for the states of Mexico, with a color ramp depicting population sizes; one for showing the major highways, railroads along with primary and major rivers of Central Mexico; and the above topography map. I liked the fact that although we worked with totally different data sets, we mapped relatively the same area. This shows a small sample of the different kinds of information that can be utilized when using a GIS. We used raster data for the first time in order to make the topography map, which was quite interesting to work with. I did realize that I am slightly OCD in the fact that it bothered me greatly that there was no "texture" to the surrounding countries.

Week 2 - IntroGIS - Own Your Map

Map showing the location of the UWF campus within Escambia County, Florida. Source: FGDL2008

I had a lot of fun creating this map. I really like the fact that our instructions allow us to add our own personal touches to the maps that we create. I did have one little time-consuming issue in the beginning with the Overview: Escambia County data frame (inset). I misunderstood the directions and struggled to keep the image within the frame ( I was re-sizing and panning repeatedly). I did finally realize that all I had to do was "Zoom to Layer". I really like that this week's lab built on last week's, reinforcing what we have learned so far. I look forward to improving my skills through the upcoming weeks.

Week 1 - IntroGIS - ArcGIS Overview Lab

Map 1. Population of countries across the globe. Colors coordinate to population size, with teal being least populated and white being most populated. Black squares indicate major cities. Data Source: USGS 2008.

This was my first time working with ArcGIS, and I found it fairly user friendly when following the instructions given. The biggest struggle that I had was with learning how to save the file correctly for later use. I learned the hard way that you cannot rearrange your files after saving and expect for your map to come back up, that you must save again in the new file structure. 

At first I was not happy with the size of the legend for this map, I wanted it larger for better reading, but was not sure how to do so. Luckily, someone posted in our discussion forum how to do so (using the Pan Tool). I also do not like that the first value for the lowest populated countries is -99,999 instead of 0. However, for my first map, I am happy with it overall.