Week 10 - Analyze data for homeland security

Week 8: Project 1 - Analyze Washington D.C.'s Crime

This map shows the crime in Washington D.C during August of 2009 along with the locations of Police Stations. The data was provided by the DC Metropolitan Police Department for crime analysis in order to distribute patrol resources effectivly. One of the many ways the data was used, was to figure out crime patterns near police stations to help determine how effective they are and if building new substations would be helpful. The map below shows the recommended police substations.

Week 7 - Location Decisions: Duval County, Florida

Please veiw the link below for presentation.
http://students.uwf.edu/ylm2/MovingFamily.pptx

Location Decisions: Homing in on Alachua County, Florida

In this exercise were to create maps to help a couple make a decision as to where to live. since they both landed jobs in Alachua County, FL. I didn't have any issues with this assignment as it had great direction. Now we'll see how well I do on my own for next weeks assignment.

This is a basemap of Alachua County, Florida showing places, roads, and public lands to give a better understanding of the distribution of features in the area.


The next map is showing the different deciding factors the couple used to help them figure out where they should live.

The next map shows two weighted overlays combining the various factors used to determine the best place to live.

Week 5 - Urban Planning and Impact Assessment Activity 2

The only issue I ran into was Step 6 during exercise 3, when asked to add a field to the table. I received an error saying the table was in use. I closed ArcMap and then opened ArcCatalog and tried adding the field to the IndustryDesc table and it worked. I was then able to continue working.

ArcGIS Animation: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

http://students.uwf.edu/ylm2/DeepwaterHorizonOilExtent.avi

The above animation shows the deep water horizon oil extent between April 24, 2010 through May 26Th 2010. I was having trouble with the projections on this assignment. I tried to use the Projections & Transformations/Feature/Project tool in ArcCatalog and could not get it to work. I finally checked out the discussion board and found Dily's post to be very helpful. With using the Define Projection tool on each layer to set the property to Unknown and then using the Define Projection tool again to redefine each layer to GCS NAD 1983. I was able to go back and Project each feature to UTM NAD 16N. It worked like a charm.

Week 2 - 4 Natural Hazards: Participation Activity

Emergency management programs depend on data from various sources which are collected, and analyzed. Most emergency data requirements are of spatial nature therefore Geographic Information System (GIS) is a much needed tool. It gives the ability compile information regarding area population, infrastructure, and geographical characteristics from many sources. GIS plays a vital role in the management of disasters with its flexibility and applications. Information involving the damage done during a disaster can be uploaded and applied to preexisting files to analyze and determine a number of factors. These factors include but are not limited to cost, type and degree of damage, kinds of help needed, and reconstruction efforts.

GIS is playing a major role in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill event occuring in the Gulf of Mexico. Maps have been created to show the area of the spill and predictions of what areas are likely to be impacted next. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is able to determine where to use booms, barriers and skimmers in order to contain and store the spilled oil until it can be disposed of properly. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is working on a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) which is used to help establish the type and amount of rehabilitation needed to compensate the public due to the of the oil spill. These are just a few of many ways GIS is being used in this man made catastrophe.

Environnmental Sensitive Index Atlas

This map shows the vulnerable coastal land along with the land management information. This by far seemed to be the most time consuming and brain looping assignment yet. I can say that I have learned a lot especially when it came to projections. My main problem was just getting lost and confused trying to dig in the memory box. I wish I could have done this assignment justice because it was overall a very neat experience.

Hurricanes

Above is a layout view map showing elevation, hydrography, and Bathymetry of the Mississippi Coast counties with places, types of water, barrier islands, and hydrography.

This is a map of the flooded land of the Mississippi Coast after Hurricane. I don't like the way the graph came out on this map. You can hardly make out the words. While working in AI, I was not able to change anything on it because it was an image.

This is the bar graph showing percentage of total flooded land by landcover.

A map showing instructure and health facilities at risk from the storm surge. I ran into an issue when asked to label the major interstate and U.S. highways. The directions said to choose the method to define the feature classes differently and then Click Get Symbol Classes. My Get Symbol Classes button was not selectable. I eneded up Clicking Apply the the button became active. It took me awhile to figure this out. The only other issue with this map, was the redraw time.

This is a table showing various land types that ere flooded measured in acres and square miles. I was not able to get the Acres and Square Miles to calculate using the Field Calculator. With the help of Lynn Palmer, it was pointed out that part of the calcuation was already placed. In other words, I didn't need to put [ACRES] = or [SQMILES] =. Thanks again Lynn. : )

Final Project

Presentation Show
http://students.uwf.edu/ylm2/FPL.ppsx

Summary
http://students.uwf.edu/ylm2/Summary.pdf

Presentation with notes
http://students.uwf.edu/ylm/FPL.pptx

Week 11 - Labels, Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst

This is what I have so far. More to come.

Week 10 - Geocoding

Enjoyed this assignment. Pretty straight foward and easy. I did not run into problems.

Week 9 - Vector Analysis II

This map is of the potential campground sits in a state forest. I did this by creating a buffer for the water and roads layer, and then setting an overlay in order to show the potential sites that were within 150 meters of a lake, 500 meters of a river and 300 meters of a road. The only issue I had with this assignment was to trying to not get the layers confused with one another.

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

* The only tool that had the same layout as the union tool was the intersection tool. I gave me the same results without having to select and export the features that had a 1 in both the "insd_wbuf" and "insd_rbuf" fields.

Q2: Which tool did you use here? Why?

* I used the erase tool to exclude 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?

* There were 79 features the layer.
* The largest feature was 1919 acres
* The smallest feature was 1 acre

Week - Data Editing in ArcGIS

This week I learned how to edit feature classes and shapefiles, digitize, features, snapping and topology. After working through the Virtual Campus I was given some datesets to edit and digitize. This was a fun assignment and came really easy.

Week 6 - Georeferencing Rasters

Module 5 - GIS Data Search

The purpose of this assignment was to collect the required data for my assigned county in Florida (Leon), and display them on one or more maps. I had to organize the layers to have the information show clearly. Between finding and downloading the proper data and creating the maps, this was the most challenging exercise yet but I did learn A LOT.

My first map has majority of the required data. I found the layers at Florida Geographic Data Library. I didn't have to change the projection on any of them as they all had the projection of Albers. It was fun using the clip tool. It came in very handy. If I had to give a tip on this assignment, I would say to be very organized when saving files.

This map is of the strategic habitat conservation areas. The map looked kind of bare, so I added the pictures.

I became very frustrated when looking for samples of the raster datasets but finally found my way through LABINS. Searching, downloading and clipping the required data took me the longest.

Map of Haiti

This image released by the U.S. Geological survey shows a shake map of the Haiti area. (U.S. Geological Survey/Associated Press).

I found this map on the CBCnews webiste (http://ww.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/01/13/montreal-haiti-canada-support.html) which shows the instrumental intensity of the quake.

Week 4 - Projections

What you see are three projected layers used to compare area for a couple counties in Florida. By far, this assignment took me the longest. I got stuck on page 3, when asked to create a county boundary layer in the Florida State Plane North (HARN Feet), but once I got past the confusion (on my part), I was able to get through the rest of the assignment.

Coming up with how to display the square miles to show the comparison was a challenge. I decided to use a legend for each projection but could not figure out how to display both the county names and square miles. In each layer, I selected the counties needed for comparison and exported them into a separate layer. (I did this for all three projections). Since I could not figure out how to show the county names and square miles I figured out a work around.

Now, I don't know if I did this the correct way, but it was the only way I knew how. I wrote down the area for each county in each projection. When I was working on the symbology for the counties, I typed in the name and area for each value. It displayed the way I wanted it but again, I'm not sure if I did it the right way.

Week 3 Deliverables

The map above, showing the states of Mexico, was created during the week 3 lab (GIS Cartography). I did not run into any problems while creating this map, however, I can't say the same for next map.


The Central Mexico map is showing a few of the urban areas in this country. On my first attempt to label the urban areas over a million, I could not figure out why all urban areas were being labled. I triple checked to make sure my SQL statment looked exactly as the example showen on page 9, but could not find where I went wrong. So with that, I went back to my Week3_map1.mxd and started the map over again. I'm not sure what I did different but second time through was a success.


This map is showing the elevation of Mexico using a stretched symbology.

Week 2 Lab - Countries by Population

Module 1 - Using GIS to Solve Problems

The map you see above is showing the possible locations for a new youth center.

During the exercise I had a problem with step 5, which was to create a selection expression. Once I created the expression, I checked the view result to make sure it was correct. My expression looked just like the result. I clicked apply and 26 available buildings were selected. There were only supposed to be 6.

To retrace my steps, I wanted to unselect those 26 available buildings and retry. Since the zones_union also had features selected I tried a work around. I went to the selection tab on the table of contents and right clicked on available buildings and clicked clear selected features. I recreated the selection expression. I'm not sure what happened the first time, but the second time was a charm.

Module 1 - Exploring a GIS Map

The map above was used to locate the San Diego Zoo during the exercise for Module 1 in the Virtual Campus. Fortunatly, I did not encounter any issues during the lesson.