Geo Leah

This map shows the location of the main campus of UWF, in addition to two major cities and the interstate highways and major rivers in Escambia County. In the inset, Escambia County's location is shown within Florida.  In this week's lab, we learned how to apply cartographic principles and design in ArcGIS Pro by creating a map of the UWF campus and other important features in Escambia County. There were quite a lot of steps that went into designing a map that looks so simple. One of the first steps was looking through all the metadata to find out who published each dataset and when. There was so much information there that I found it hard to determine which organizations and dates were relevant, especially when a dataset had multiple publication and update years. I'm glad the FGDC has such high standards for detailed metadata, though, and I'm sure it will become easier to sort through with practice.  The actual designing of the map was also time-consuming because every...

  For the first lab, we explored ArcGIS Pro a bit and practiced how to make a basic map from a data set. This map had two layers: the Cities layer and the World Countries layer. Initially, I misread the lab instructions and displayed the cities with graduated colors based on their populations, and I didn't turn on the World Countries layer. I was somewhat confused because there was no POP_2007 field to choose from to get the values for the graduated colors, so I selected POP_RANK instead. This meant that my map's cities were different colors and all the countries were the same color. I didn't realize my mistake until I saw the example map in the lab, which had black dots for the cities and different colors for the countries. This was a good way to learn to read the instructions more carefully and to reread if anything seems wrong! I had some trouble adjusting the map layout, so I couldn't get the map to exactly the size I wanted it to be on the white field. Otherwise, I...

 Hi! Welcome to my GIS blog! I'm excited to start my first ever GIS course!