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):