Week 10-Protect

The map below shows the points into and out of the Cheyenne Mountain Heliport 500 ft buffer. Knowing the location of these points is important because it will allow surveillance of who enters and exits the vulnerable infrastructure.

This week's subject was based on homeland security. This week I learned that GIS can be used to locate areas that are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. In the map above, I used ArcMap to form a 3mile buffer around NORAD and a 500 ft buffer around the Cheyenne Mountain Heliport. NORAD and the heliport are considered "critical infrastructure" and are high risk for terrorist attacks. These maps were fairly straightforward and easy to create. I had quite a bit of trouble on the other two deliverables. I had trouble keeping file names organized. I was also confused on which files to use, especially in ArcScene.

Week 8 Washington DC Crimes

Below is a basemap of the Washington DC area. It shows the major hignways, the crime dispersal, and police station. The chart tells how many and what type of crimes were committed in the area.

The map below shows distances from police stations and the crimes committed around them. I noticed that there is a cluster of crimes in the southern part of the state. These crimes happened more than 2 miles away from a police station. I would recommend a new station be placed in this area.

The map below shows where concentrations are higher for different crimes in DC. The areas with higher densities of crimes are a darker color.

The maps below show the density of auto thefts in DC. The chart shows the number of total crimes that happened during each hour of the day. Auto thefts have a higher density during the evening hours. All other crimes have a higher density during evening hours, as shown in the chart.

Week 6

The map below shows the best places to live in Alachua County, according to the couple's specifications. Each specification had an equal weight in the top map. The bottom map was unequally weighted. Distance from UF and the hospital were both weighted at 40% and median house value and age were weighted at 10% each. The orange outlined census tracts are the best places to live according to the specifications. The unequally weighted specifications allow the best areas to live to be closer to the couple's jobs. Descreasing the weight of age and median home value makes the best areas to live closer to the school and hospital. This will allow the couple to avoid traffic, like they wanted.

The map below shows each of the couple's specifications for finding a house. I did not have any problems with this lab. It was fun and interesting.

Week 5 Impact Assessments

This map shows a Social Impact Assessment. This map shows where most of the students in the area live.

The map below shows the results of an Ennvironmental Impact Assesment. The map shows how the construction of a new building will increase traffic flow in the area.

Participation - Week 4

GIS plays an important role in disaster relief and response. It can be used to map areas that have been damaged after a natural disaster. Disaster relief aid, such as FEMA, can respond to these areas first. This will help save money because aid will be sent only to areas in critical need of help. Clean up is another major issue after natural disasters. GIS can be used to show what areas have the most damage. It can show what streets are passable and what buildings are destroyed. GIS can even help prevent damage from occurring. Models can predict what will occur if a hurricane, for example, came through the area.
Although the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill is not a natural disaster, GIS can be used in the disaster response. GIS analysis can show organizations, such as Waterkeepers and the EPA, what coastal areas and animal species are most vulnerable to the oil spill. The analysis will allow the organizations to respond to the most vulnerable areas first. GIS can also help responders decide where to place boom. The boom can be placed so that the most vulnerable coastal areas can be protected.

Oil Spill Week

The map below shows the coastal land types that will be most affected by the oil spill. The most vulnerable land types are all located within the estuary. Luckily, the beach is the least sensitive to the oil since it will be the hardest hit. Properly placed booms can protect the more sensitive lands inland.

The map below shows the booms that are in place and the ones that are proposed, but not in place. It also shows the management areas which are all managed by the state.

The map below shows the animals that will be affected by oil. SOme species in the list are not native to the area but were in the attribute table, so I included them anyway. There were no mammals in the area that will be affected, according to the data.

This assignment was agonizingly long and difficult!

Hurricane Week

Below is a map of coastal Mississippi counties that were affected by hurricane Katrina. The map shows where flooding occured and the infrastructure that was affected. All hospitals located in the area were affected by flooding. Many churches as well as highways and railroads were also affected by flooding.

Below is a map of coastal Mississippi counties that were affected by hurricane Katrina. This map shows the hydrography, bathymetry, and elevation of the area.

GIS Final Project

Here is my presentation and written summary of my final GIS project!

Week 11 -3D

This was really cool to work with. It would be really interesting to use the 3d analyst in a real world situation.

Week 11- Vegetation Reclassification

I enjoyed using the reclassification tool, although it took me more than the estimated 15 minutes!

Week 11 - Modelbuilder

This was interesting to see how to build a model. I'm still not quite sure how to actually put it to use, though. I may just be overthinking it.

Week 11 - Add custom text to your maps

This was fairly easy. I enjoyed making the callouts and will use them a lot in future maps. Manually making labels is easy and straightforward. Dynamic labeling is less straightforward but comes in handy when many labels are needed.

Week 11 - Manage Your Labels with Class

I did not have any problems with this part of the lab. I think the labeling will definitely come in handy when designing future maps.

Spring Break Lab

This lab was fairly easy. It took longer than it should have because of the server.

Week 9

Q1: I used the intersect tool. The output was exactly the same as the union tool's output.

Q2: I used the erase tool because I needed to exclude (erase) the conservation areas from the buffers union layer.

Q3: There are 79 features. Largest: 7765034.49 Sq. Meters, Smallest: 748.11 Sq. Meters

Week 7

I made this assignment harder than it was. For some reason forgot pretty much every step in digitizing, so I had to go back to the ESRI site and read the lessons over again.

Week 6

This map shows two UWF raster images that were georeferenced according to the roads and building layers. I did not have any problems with the lab until the end when I needed to clip off the roads and buildings that were outside the raster image. I ended up deleting them with the editing tool. The line dividing the two images is quite obvious. I don't know how to fix that without messing something else up in the process!

This map shows the DEM, DOQQ and DRG raster files for three Putnam county quadrangles. This map is projected in Transverse Mercator except for the DEM raster. It is "on-the-fly." I made many attempts to get this file to project correctly. It never worked. I probably spent 20 hours trying to get this thing right!

This map of Putnam county shows the major land cover, and invasive plant species. I encountered no problems with making this map. It took a long time to make because it was very slow in loading each layer. The projected coordinate system I used was Albers Conical Equal Area.

Here is the first map of my assigned county. This map displays public parks, major highways, hydrology, and cities of Putnam county, Forida. Finding data for this map was not too hard. I did find a couple data layers that had errors in them, I believe. The only other problem I had was the amount of time it took. Sometimes clipping took 15+ minutes. Then when I cancelled the clipping, the program froze up and I lost everything I did not save. I think certain times of the day (around 8 pm specifically) more people are using the network and it is much slower than usual. Today I had no problems with the speed of the program. The Projected coordinate system I used was Albers Conical Equal Area.

I liked this map because it shows the major earthquake and the aftershocks' magnitudes. It also shows how many people were affected by the earthquakes. I found the map at this website: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/JOPA-7ZNJWW?OpenDocument

Florida Map Projections- Week 4

This lab was a bit trickier than the others because I had to remember previous methods (such as selecting the counties). It took a couple of tries before I could reproject the maps. The input and outputs had me confused at first.

Week 3- Mexico

The first map is of Central Mexico's elevation. The second map shows Mexico's urban areas, major highways, railroads, and rivers. The third map shows the states of Mexico and thier populations. I did not have any problems making these maps. Trying to find nice looking colors for the maps was the most difficult part of this assignment.

Week 2- World Populations Map

The only difficult part of making this map was trying to get the ratio scale accurate. Using the scale bars helps to see exactly what an inch would be on the map. An inch on the map equals 5,200 Km.

Module 1 - Potential Youth Center Locations

The only problem I had with this exercise was that the building addresses were too small and were unreadable. I had to increase the font size. Other than this, the exercise was interesting and allowed me to learn an important use of GIS.

Module 1- San Diego trip

I had a problem with the measurement tool during this exercise. After selecting the two locations to find the distance between them, I did not know how to stop the tool. I just clicked on another tool to discontinue it.