Week 6: Georeferencing and Editing

For this week's lab, we georeferenced two raster images of the UWF campus to known buildings and roads. It took me a while to figure out things like how far to zoom in and how closely I needed to match the unreferenced and referenced layers to get low residual values. One problem I kept having was trying to add control points that were already well matched between the layers. It wouldn't let me add a link between two points that were very close together, which makes sense because there's no need for a control point in part of the map that's already accurately georeferenced. Sometimes I had to keep searching around for a while and zoom in to find somewhere to add another control point. I also found it difficult to georeference the Heritage Hall Parcel Survey. One reason was because the area was a lot smaller, with a lot fewer points that could be identified on both the raster image and the survey map. It was also sometimes difficult to see where corners and edges of the parking lots were on the raster image because of trees and the graininess of the image when zoomed in so far.

I then created a new polygon feature in the Buildings layer for the UWF gym and a new line segment for the Roads layer using the raster images. I also added a multiple ring buffer for the protected areas around an eagle's nest near campus.

Creating the map layout was the most challenging and time-consuming part of this lab for me. I wasn't sure what should be included in the layout or what information it was meant to display. The different parts of the lab didn't seem to be thematically related beyond having the same geographic extent and layers, and I struggled to make a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the many elements in my layout (possibly too many). I'm not really satisfied with my final layout, but I doubt that spending more hours rearranging it would have gotten me anywhere better.