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.