Week 4-Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Fishing Closure-Environmental Sensitive Index Mapping
Cape San Blas, Florida--Map No. 41

Part 1
Google Earth-Fishing Closure May 25, 2010

I orginally had some issues with the projection and tracing operations in developing this map, but in the end I believe it all came together.  I learned a lot on checking my data.

Environmental Sensitive Mapping-ESI Index Mapping

This weeks submittal had a number of challenges and opportunities for learning.  The first challenge was getting the DRG Quad map file to project correctly.  It took quite some time and eventually, I went back and changed the projection for the whole project to NAD 83-UTM-16N.  After the change,  the quad file came into the project correctly but the graphic display was really terrible and very grainy.  After seeing this I went back to LABINS and downloaded the DOQQ files for the study area.  The files downloaded and projected seemlessly.  When I was nearly completed with the project, I tested an export of the DRG file and found that it exported fine.  I'm not sure why it looks terrible in the drawing but fine in a jpeg export.  After seeing this I went back and reworked all of my maps to display the DRG, as the project requirements requested.  I did include one of the DOQQ files for reference.  One thing that I noticed was the beach at Cape San Blas has eroded since the DRG-Quad was mapped. Interesting!  If I had the project to do over again, I would perhaps pick an area that had a larger population area.  I was a bit surprised that there wasn't more booming planned for the area, but perhaps there are higher priority areas?  I also would have liked to add more graphs and tables, but ran out of time with nearly 50+ hours into the whole project.

Week 3-Hurricanes

Hurricane Katrina-Analysis of Flooding in Hancock, Harrison & Jackson Counties, Mississsippi

I thought this project was straight forward as the instructions were excellent.  Although I did have a few stumples with the labels and getting my symbology where I wanted it.  If there was more time I would have liked to place some labels on the places, but thought the overall exercise was to show the extent of the flooding.  I also was unclear why we put the churches layer into the drawing, unless it was to show potential shelters.  I believe a more pertinent statistic would have been to show the population center within the county as this would have shown the officials where damage, help and rebuilding would most likely be needed.

Final Project-Bobwhite Manatee Electric Transmission Line

Bobwhite Manatee Links

Presentation Link:
Presentation

Summary Link:
Written Summary

"THAT'S A WRAP"....................for Semester 1---------Intro to GIS

Lab 11-Labels, Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst

Part 1-Labels

I thought this lab was real informative, although it will take me some practice to understand all of the features that are available. It was a little time consuming, but I think well worth it for future map submittals.

Part 2-Spatial Analyst

This seemed pretty straight forward and was interesting to see another way to set up the geoprocessing.

This part of the lab had a number of cool features with the reclassification although the ESRI exercise seemed to have some unexplained errors.  I can see this having a number of "real world" applications.

Part 3-3D Analyst

I enjoyed using the ArcScene module.  This exercise was real exciting for me to use as Mt. Shavano is fairly close to my home, being about 45-50 miles away.  I have also done a bit of surveying at the flanks of the mountain, so it really was a fun module and hope to learn more about ArcScene in the future.  I also enjoyed the line of sight exercise as it seemed as though it could be real helpful for siting cell towers or showing a group of people in a PPGIS setting about line of sight issues. Although the line of sight exercise seemed to have some issues with my computer..........maybe I need a better graphics card for this kind of work?

Week 9-Vector Analysis II

Lab 9-Potential Campground Sites

I thought this was a fun and interesting Lab.  It seemed that the operations of buffering and overlay have a lot of "real world" applications and it was educational learning the sequence to perform these tasks.  I had a few stumbles along the way but doing it a few times and a few different ways promoted more (hopefully!) understanding. 

Q1:  Which tool did you use? Was there any noticeable difference between it's results and the results from the instructions?

I used the intersect tool.  I did not notice any difference between its results and the results from using the union tool for this example.

Q2:  Which tool did you use here?  Why?

I used the Erase tool.  The erase tool was used to create a new feature class by removing portions of the buffer areas that were overlapped by the conservation areas.

Q3:  How many features are in this layer?  What is the area of the largest feature?  What is the area of the smallest feature? 

I counted 79 features in this layer.  The largest area polygon is 776,503 square meters.  The smallest area polygon is 748 square meters.

Spring Break Lab

Gulf County Largest Parcel Owners

I thought this was an interesting exercise.  After computing the data, I was sure I didn't do it correctly, as it said the St. Joseph Land & Dev. Co had 198,000 acres.  After reviewing some other Gulf County statistics, I saw that they did indeed own about 80% of the county.  The last two exercises has shown me the power of joining.  I also learned about the "create a layer from current selection".  Great tools.

Lab 7-Data Editing

Lab 7-Data Editing

I found that one of the buildings with a blue dot was not present in my data set so I went ahead and digitzed it. I had to refer back to the keystoke sequences in the ESRI-Module 5 exercise.  I obviously would need to have a lot more practice with this module to feel comfortable, but I think I got some of the basics.