Searching for Data

The Data Search

In all the assignments up to this point, the data I used to create the maps were provided by the instructor. For this exercise, I was assigned a county in Florida (Escambia,) and had to find and download all the data myself. Luckily, a list of places to start searching was provided in the lesson. I was required to assemble up to three maps showcasing the data I found.

Map #1

This map was designed to showcase most of the data I downloaded. I began with a base layer of the County and added Roads, Hydrography, Cities and Towns, Public Land, and City Limits. This is the first time I attempted to use a gradient fill in ArcMap. I tried it on the City Limit layer. This was also the first time I used Clipping. This was used to take out all the data that was from outside my county and just focus on Escambia. This was an extremely useful thing to learn, and I'm sure I'll be doing it regularly in the lessons to come.

Problems

One of the main problems I had with this project was the speed of the program. I'm not sure if it was due to large data sets, or the internet connection, or something else, but any changes to this map made the program run at a snail's pace. Luckily I was saving regularly because I had to force quit the program a few times.

Other problems I had involved the Hydrography layers. The attribute table associated with the river/stream features did not have a way to distinguish between large and small water features. The result is above with the inclusion in all the rivers/streams listed in that file. I had better luck with the roads, which were easy to filter into just Interstates and Major Highways.

Another problem I had which took a lot of my time was getting the shape of Alabama into my map. I tried using the North American map we had from a previous lesson, but it did not look right at this scale. The search sites where I got most of my information was specific to Florida, and I had to search for a long time to find what I needed. It ended up being easily available from the U.S. Census website, I just had to re-project it to match up.

Map #2

This map was much quicker to make, partially because all the data were already downloaded and clipped for the county. I made this map to showcase my Wetlands and Invasive Plant data. After mapping all the locations of Invasive Plants in Escambia County, I decided to focus on one particular location. This was done because it is much harder to see how the layer looks on a small scale map. As a side note, the shape of Escambia County makes it difficult to show all at once on a larger scale due to the "tail" sticking out the bottom.

Map #3

This map was made to show the overlay of the raster data I downloaded. This map was the last one I did because I had a hard time figuring out how to show the DEM raster file in ArcMap. Although directions were provided for doing this, they appeared to leave out a few steps. Luckily a few fellow classmates posted some hints on the discussion board which allowed me to figure it out. After I got that part completed, the rest was smooth sailing. I became a bit more comfortable in this lesson with re-projecting data and defining projections, but there are still some parts where I get stuck. I just played with it until it worked, then tried to remember what I did for next time.