Spring Break Optional Assignment

Connecting Tables

In this exercise I was given the Gulf County Parcels in one file and the tax roll in another file. I joined them into a single place based on the unique PARCELID number (which was present in both files.) After completing this, I calculated the acreage for each parcel, then created a table listing the amount of acreage per owner. Next I found the top four landowners and began to construct my map. I went to the Florida Geographic Data Library website to find some more information. I downloaded Roads and Towns/Cities and added them to the map.

Problems

I was attempting to complete this entire project in ArcMap. So I came across some problems I had to work around. Firstly, the layer showing who owns what is actually a bunch of different parcels, not a single shape. The parcels do not all connect as pictured above. When you look at the actual data, you can see breaks in it where there are roads and rivers (not part of the parcels,) and other small diversions. It looked very spotty. Since I was trying to display the land as a complete picture by owner, I wanted to try and make them each look like a single shape as much as possible. To do this I used the same trick I recently discovered in my Dot map from my other class. I added an outline to the parcels in the same color. Then I increased the size of the outline a bit to smooth everything out.

Another problem I had was trying to change the color of the background gradient I used. The default is a yellowy color, which looks fine, but I was never able to find a way to change the color but keep the gradient in ArcMap.

A new server was added between the last time I used it and this time. I used the second server and it appeared to work much quicker than when I created my last maps. That is very helpful.