Ian's GIS Blog

In this week's lab, we learned how to access and download data from two sites, labins.org. and fgdl.org (Florida Geographic Data Library). We were able to download, define, and project the data onto a blank ArcMap. For the most part it was pretty easy finding the data, but ensuring the the data was projecting in the correct location on the map, was a bit of a challenge. Here are the results of my work: I was able to project a quad (4 aerial images) of southwestern Escambia County on my ArcMap along with the County Boundaries layer. Also, major roads are mapped in the area. The only problem was being able to correctly place on the map the locations of storage tank contamination sites. After trying again and again to project the data in the NAD 1983 (2011) State Plane Florida North FIPPS 0903 coordinate system, it just wouldn't work for me. I'll have to go back and review the lessons again, to see what I did wrong.

I want to start off by saying this was a fun lab! I'm starting to get the hang of ArcMap much better! To make things better, my work schedule has been fine tuned and I am geared up and ready to do seriously better with map making and in this course overall. What we have below are three individual maps from three different projection coordinate sytems: the UTM, State Plane, and Albers. Upon application of data derived from various datasets for Florida's 67 counties, we created 3 separate maps. From the look of my maps, you really can't see much of a discernible difference. However, once we pulled up the raw data we discovered a different story! When we dove in further to pull up data for Alachua, Escambia, Miami-Dade, and Polk counties, we discovered that each projection yielded greatly different amounts of land area, especially as you get down to Miami-Dade County. I learned from this lab that in the future when I want to make and analyses of Map projections, all systems

Well, This has been a rough week for me again! This is certainly not going to be my best upload, but here I go. I thought I would follow along the same route as proposed in the course with regards to information given on my map. In the class example we were given the Top 10 Redneck Cities in Florida taken from the website "Road Snacks". I decided to share a map showing the Top 10 Hippie Cities in Florida. To my surprise, Road Snacks had also done research for which cites in Florida had the most hippies. Even more surprising, all of the cities are clustered tightly together in Southeast Florida! I would thought that the major college towns of Tallahassee and Gainesville would have been included, but they weren't. Anyway, here is my crude map of the Top 10 Hippie Cities in Florida. Yeah, I'm frustrated the things went in this lab. I have had issues with my work schedule this past couple of weeks, and am getting things sorted out. Those issues have lead me to getting s

The Geographic Diversity of Mexico: To start off, let's take a look at this beautiful  map of Mexico. The oranges, reds, and yellows depicted above show the various concentrations of population within Mexico. You can probably tell that a vast majority of the country's people live in the central area between Tampico (the coastal city on Mexico's eastern side), to the Pacific coast of Mexico just west of Guadalajara. Of course Mexico City has the absolute highest population in the country. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that Mexico City is in fact the largest and most densely populated city in the Western Hemisphere! Going down to the next map we see what looks like a bunch of colorful veins going through country.  Here we can see various railroads, highways, and major population centers throughout the country. As long as it takes to travel across the United States in a car on our nice freeways, one could imagine how long it must take to drive across Mexico.