Week 7 & 8: Data for GIS and Data Quality (Midterm)

How did I get to the middle of the semester already?  How does my instructor think that I can search and find my own data and put it together?  Why does she think she can give me two weeks and expect me to manage my time to accomplish said task with very little instructions?  Where are my training wheels (Lab pdf with step by step instructions)?

This assignments has spanned two weeks.  I was assigned a county, Madison, and told what data I needed to get and to put it together in a maximum of three maps and still display all of the required data.

Most of the data I found by searching FGDL.org meta data explorer.  Here are the layers:

• County Boundary layer from FGDL.org, vector
• Cities and Towns layer from FGDL.org, vector
• Public Land layer from FGDL.org, vector
• Roads from FGDL.org, vector
• Surface Water from FGDL.org, vector
• Two Environmental Layers of our choice
• Wetlands from FGDL.org, vector
• Land Cover from FGDL.org, vector
• DOQQ (digital orthophoto quarter quad) from Labin.org, raster
• DEM (digital elevation model) from NationalMap.gov, raster

All layers from FGDL.org are in Albers projection so I chose to use that projection for the project (less layers I would need to project into Albers to be sure all layers were in the same projection)

All layers had to be clipped to Madison County Florida with Vector Clip Analysis tool for vector data.  The DOQQ did not require clipping as it was smaller than the county.  The DEM required  Raster Clip data Management tool and limiting the extent of the data shown on the map by Clip the Data Frame.  Clip the Data Frame does not clip the data it limits the data features that fall outside of the extent defined (in this case outside of Madison County).

This project had many challenges.  Yes, some of them are probably user error as I am still learning.  Some came in the form of internet issues.  Others I don't know the cause only that when downloading data sometimes it only appears to be downloading as the folder will then turn up empty. 

Here are the maps (and again delayed as the jpeg files have not shown up from exporting the mdx files):

Week 6 Projections cont.

No finished map to post the week, must say that is a little disappointing for me.  I enjoy the satisfaction of a completed map at the end of the lab.  No map does not mean that it was a light week.  This week was most labor intensive so far.  I downloaded aerials (DOQQ), topo quadrangles (DRG), and shapefiles.  This doesn't sound to difficult but getting the files to download to my local drive and then access them through my student drive was challenging.  I finally resorted to saving the zipped file to local drive and upzipped to the student drive.  Either obtained data in State Plane projection or reprojected it to State Plane and then loaded it all in a rough map to be sure it all worked.

1. downloaded aerials from Labins.org through the FTP site in State Plane projection
2. downloaded Toporgaphic DRG files from Labins.org through FTP site in State Plane projection but when I checked the spatial reference it was undefined projection so I defined the projection as State Plane (since I know that is what I just downloaded)
3. downloaded County Boundaries shape file from FGDL.org.  Their data is in Alber's projection so I had to reproject this data to State Plane
4. downloaded Quad Index from FGDL.org.  (Again) Their data is in Alber's projection so I had to reproject this data to State Plane
5. Finally I edited XY Tabular data provided for Eagle Nests for the assignment with Degree, Minute, Second geographic coordinates.  This had to be converted to Decimal Degrees to work in ArcGIS.  I inserted the formula to convert.  Then added XY data in ArcMap with an unknown coordinate system.  Defined the data as WGS1984 per lab instructions and then reprojected to State Plane

Intially when I checked the spatial reference of the XY Tabular data for Eagle Nest my points were not where they should have been.  After checking my formula I realized I had omitted a 0, and as we copied and pasted the formula the same error was throughout.  I corrected my formulas, and found my points were where they should be.  Yeay!  [only two pages left of lab assignment!].  The last two pages were "Do it again" with petroleum tank contamination sites instead of Eagle Nest and pick a different county for the aerials.  WHEW!  I submitted a screen shot showing the mess of all the layers in one map with the same projection.  I have included two of the screen shots.  Not pretty but hopefully it meets all the requirements!