Final Project Computer Cartography

This was the most coordination of principles yet.  The assignment was to either take information provided to map academic test scores or to create your own project.  I chose to create my own project and answer my brother n law's question from March "which state Kansas or Missouri has more wheat".  It was challenging to find data on my own (usually provided or hints to locations of data).  The state and county shape files were downloaded from the US Census web site.  The was later projected to Albers Continental US to maintain area in the projection.  The wheat data was obtained from US Department of Agriculture Statistical Service.  I first limited the state shapefiles in the attribute table to the states I was mapping.  The intersected the limited layers with the county file.  I created a choropleth map from the harvest data from 2007 and a dot density layer for the planting for the same year.  I changed the dot to a diamond shape as it resembled the top of wheat.  I did an insert map to show the location of Kansas and Missouri in relation to the continental US.  The choropleth for the Missouri side was limited to 5 classifications where the Kansas layer matched Missouri's 5 and added 3 to show the significant abundance of wheat in Kansas.  A simple table was inserted to show the value of wheat from 2012 to 2017.  I elected to reproduce the wheat data in a separate spreadsheet as the downloaded data seemed to contain some links that caused issues (limited data showing back up later) in ArcMap.  The Kansas data contained planting data for all counties that provided harvest data.  However Missouri data had more counties that had harvest data than counties that provided planting data.  The missing planting data seemed to be conglomerated under an "other" category.  The "other" planting was calculated out to the missing counties based on a percentage of those counties harvest data.  The harvest data was standardized by area before mapping.

Just to get to this stage of the project took much longer than I anticipated.  Data had to be down loaded multiple times due to to technical glitches (layers took a long time to down load, would finally be available in the file explorer on my computer but would not show up in the file explorer in ArcGIS through argoaps for a day (apparently more for the water files I tried to download), and then if the download was corrupt it would not load the file in ArcMap.  I would get into mapping and run across another issue and have to back up to find a solution (choropleth symbolization when applied would make the counties in the state shatter all over the work space, I had to back up and project the layers to stop the problem, or the wheat data that I had limited by deleting what I did not need would all of a sudden have all the rows I had deleted back in the attribute table - finally my solution was to reproduce the data in a new spreadsheet).  Each step taking more work and more research to figure out what I forgot or what I had done incorrectly.

Once I transfered from ArcMap to Adobe Illustrator to add citations and finalize layout I realized it would have been good to have a surface water layer, maybe main streets and possibly a background for the main data frame that had the state outlines for them to be labeled for additional orientation.  I again backed up to try to find these layers to add.  I still have not been successful getting any of the water layers that I have downloaded to load in ArcMap.  I discontinued looking for the roads layer as I felt that that layer would block some of the data and not be all that helpful.  The state background layer I already had but to get it to transfer at the same scale as what I already had in Adobe Illustrator proved too time consuming .  Had I started with all of these layers already in ArcMap before moving to Adobe Illustrator I would have had more luck.

Over all I am pleased with all the information that I was able to obtain and coordinate together, while learning lots of lessons about timing and data correlation and transition from one program to another.