Communicating GIS - Module 3 Lab - Terrain Visualization

Hello Everyone!

For this week's lab, we covered terrain visualization! There are many methods to visualize the terrain of the earth available in GIS. For this specific post, I want to delve in a little bit to a map I created using land cover and a hill shade map. The map I created can be seen below:

For this map, I was given a digital elevation model (DEM) and a landcover classification raster. For the land cover, I created a custom symbology that helps show the different land covers with distinct color choices. Where I had varieties of the same land cover, such as Fir tree land cover, I combined them together in one land cover group. I then created a hill shade, overlayed the land cover layer on it with increased transparency so the user can see the elevation features of the area and then created my map. All in all this map came out very well, although I would change Nonforested areas to black or a different neutral color for better area boundary distinction.

Map On!

Communicating GIS - Module 2 Lab - Coordinate Projections

Hello Everyone!

This week in Communicating GIS, I learned all about different coordinate projection systems. Prior to these modules exercises, I knew some things about projections but not the level of detail that I learned about this week! Part of this week's lab that I would like to share with you is choosing a state in the United States and mapping that state based on an appropriate projection. For my area of interest, I chose the state of South Carolina. South Carolina is a good choice for this exercise because of two main reasons. The first being that South Carolina has only one State Plane region unlike most states (for example Florida has three state plane regions North, East, and West). Additionally, South Carolina falls within one UTM Zone, that zone being UTM Zone 17. Because these two potential projections fit so well, I chose NAD 1983 StatePlane South Carolina as my projection because state plane projections tend to be the most accurate. The map layout I created can be seen below.

By choosing this projection, the map is catered to South Carolina. In addition to this map, I added both a reference grid and graticule for map use.

~Map On!

Communicating GIS - Module 1 Lab - Map Design & Typography

Hello Everyone!

This week in communicating GIS, I created a variety of maps incorporating map design and typography. These maps essentially help train cartographers in how maps are created using map principals for organization and balance. One of these maps was a typography map. Typography essentially describes the labeling properties to describe specific features. These properties can range from label size, font, style, and placement. The typography label map I created was for the San Francisco area and can be seen below.

For this map, I attempted to best label the features with some kind of typographic structure. Examples of this include label formatting such as water body and park labels, and labels for areas in order of magnitude. One challenge with this map is that ArcGIS Pro is terrible for the creation of feature labels and fails drastically compared to Adobe Illustrator. Overall I tried the best I could with the software to make an effective map that shows the power of typography labels. This map could also be approved if quad boundaries were provided for some of the block level features.

~Map On