Week 10

This map shows lines of sight from the entrance of the NORAD building. It includes a graph that shows the extent of the line of sight, obstructed views are in red.
This map shows the buffers around the NORAD building and the heliport station.
I was a little unclear about the instructions but followed them to the best of my ability. I had the most trouble making the base layers project in the right way.

Week 8

This map shows the schools that are surrounded by the highest density of crime. There is a law that states anyone caught selling drugs within a thousand feet from a school gets an extra harsh penalty. This law is not effective because only four out of the one hundred and thirty schools did not have any crime activity within a thousand feet buffer. The schools with the most crime activity are centrally located. With increased funding and after school programs and more police on patrol in the area with dense crime activity I think we can lower the numbers.

This lab was very time consuming but straight forward and fun to do.

Week 6

The problem this analysis addresses is figuring out the best spot to relocate a pair of grandparents. The geographic area in the analysis is Alachua County. The criteria set by the grandparents is finding a high house value neighborhood with a high percentage of 65 year olds within close proximity of the University of Florida, North Florida Regional Medical Center, Local community centers, bus routes, and family. Using ArcMap spatial analysis tools, maps of weighted criteria were produced. These maps take each criterion into account and use calculations to find an area that best meets all the criteria. Before that was done distance analysis was done for reach criteria.

The maps above represent three of the criteria: distance to community centers, distance to the medical center, and distance to the University of Florida. The smaller numbers on the legend represent areas closer to the criteria’s location and the larger numbers represent areas farther away. Each ring is around 2.7 miles.


The map shows areas that best meet the criteria in green and areas that do not meet the criteria in red. The map on the left had criteria weighted as equally as possible and the map on the left is disproportionally weighted with stronger emphasis on the age of people in the area. Based on information provided by these maps I would recommend Alachua region would best suit the grandparent’s needs.

Week 5

This map displays where the Pewter city university students live. Gradual blue colors show the percentage in each neighborhood area. The tan color represents the areas where no students live.
This Map involved creating buffers and graphing building development traffic. If was straight forward and effective in teaching new tools. This week was a nice break from the week before.

Participation Assignment Oil Spill

Role of GIS in disaster response
Every day, the world transforms, shores erode, water rises and falls, and land wiggles and cracks. In order to keep up with the unpredictable nature of our planet, people have created computer programs to map the constant change. Maps provide guidance to the change. Geographical information system manages, manipulates, seizes, and analyzes geographical data to produce these maps. This program has provided aid to millions by creating order and structure to the chaos natural disasters bring to communities. More and more communities utilize the power of ArcMap to map growing neighbor hoods, provide information to the public, and aid in natural disasters.
At 10 pm on April 20th, another disaster struck in the Gulf of Mexico as the New Horizon oil drill started to release oil into the gulf. As every second passed, the situation worsened. Oil was spreading, new coastlines were being contaminated, new fishing water deemed unsafe, and new barricades were being built. GIS was made for helping these types of situations. GIS allows us to identify where help is needed, which allows for help to be allocated quickly and accurately. It is being used to determine clean up needs and costs of the oil spill. GIS was also used to calculate a flow rate of the oil spill from aerial photos. In addition, it allowed for the quick production of restricted area maps to the public. GIS also produced maps of the damage to be sent to the government for funding accounts. GIS role in disaster relief is priceless; without it there would be chaos.

ArcGIS Animation

http://students.uwf.edu/hkm3/participation3.avi

This video shows boundary lines of the oil spread over time. The layers represents the oil spill over six dates from April 29 2010 to March 26 2010. This animation was made through the animation feature on ArcMap. This lab was straight forward and simple.

This map represents vulnerable land to oil spills. The layers include sensitive coastal types, land ownership, booming operations, and socioeconomic points. The graph of sensitive coastal types represents the habitats in varying colors from the least sensitive green to the most sensitive red salt estuaries. Land ownership shows who is responsible for the management and the health of the different land types. The federal government is responsible for 4671 acres and the state government is responsible for 738 acres. Booming operations are protective measures to save land from oil spills by building barricades from the oil. There were 13,903 ft of booming in my study area. The socioeconomic points show where human access points into the water are which could be future causes of its spread. It also shows the location of an airport which could be used in the clean up efforts.




This map shows the location and lists the species vulnerable to oil spills in the Holley quad area. Oil destroys animals and their habitats causing massive death and destruction. This information will help volunteers identify and locate the animals in critical need. I added the sensitive coastal land layer also because where there is sensitive land there are going to be sensitive organisms in need of help.


I had a horrible time completing this lab anything that could go wrong did. I must of spent at least 20 hours on this lab. My job requires me to camp in remote areas four days a week so my time is limited. This is the best I could do with the time I had.

Oil Spill Maps

Hurricane Wilma

In 2005 Hurricane Wilma hit the Florida keys on October 19 2005 causing a surge of eight feet flooding the city.


This map shows elevation and bathymetry of Key West. Based on this map you can see the eastern half of the island is extremely vulnerable based on its low elevation.

This map of infrastructure shows how most structures are in the flooding zone. If all stucture below eight feet elevation flooded the town would not be sustainable without hospitals and transportation.

This map shows the type of land that would be flooded if the surge effected all land under eight feet. The type of land most effected would be developed land. It also shows how only a small portion of the island is out of the flood zone.

Final

Powerpoint

Summary

This lab consisted of managing labels, working with spacial analysis tools, and a brief introduction to 3D modeling. The lessons were completed through a ERSI training site. I like doing the exersizes becuase I always learn a great deal and the steps are easy to follow.

Week 10

This map shows the four top land owners in Gulf County. This lab was pretty straight forward. It involved creating new shapefiles from the original layer, joining raw data, calculating new values from the attribute table, and summarizing data.

Vector Analysis II 3/22

1) I used the intercept tool with the water buffer and road buffer layers to create a new class from the common intersecting features. There was no difference from its results and the results from the instructions.

2) I used the erase tool to exclude the conservation areas from potential camping sites. I used this tool because it allowed me to create a new featured class that excluded conservation areas.

3) There were 79 features in the layer. The area of the largest feature was 7765034.49356 square meters. The area of the smallest feature was 748.114462 square meters.

Week 7

This Lab involved editing feature shapefiles and classes, and digitizing features using many new ArcMap tools. Although the ESRI virtual campus courses take a lot of time to complete I enjoy doing them because the lessons are thorough and helpful. By the time I finished all four lessons the map was easy to create.

Georeferencing

This map involved georeferencing a jpeg image with a shapefile in arcMap. The Northern map is 1st degree polynomial with a RMS error of 7.35389. The Southern map is 3rd degree polynomial with a RMS error of 5.04779.

Data Search Lab

I had a very difficult time completing this lab. The problems I had completing this first map was finding shapefiles in the right format that were not too large. Some files had so much detail that it would block any other layer displayed on the map. The map on the left shows hydrology, roads, railroads, and cities. The map on the right displays public land, invasive plants, and habitat conservation areas. I grouped related layers in two separate maps to reduce clutter.




I had more troubles with this map than the previous one. The DEM file coverter that I downloaded would not recoginized my file. I downloading a couple different converters to find one that worked, but none did. Eventually I found a way to unzip the files with out using a program. I also had trouble figuring out how to display the DEM file in arcmap. It first appeared as a large empty block, in order to display the data I had to go into symbology click custom and connect the data with the image.

Map of Haiti

This is a map of Port-au-Prince which is located in the south east corner of the Golf of Gonave in Haiti. I found it on a personal web site. Each red dot represents a crowd. The purpose of the map is to show the location and density of crowds in the Port-au-Prince. This could be useful information to people allocating supplies, assigning volunteers in addition to officers of peace. Some things that would make the map clearer would be a legend a scale and a north arrow.

Week Four

Week Three

World Map

This lab was a good introduction to setting color preferences.

Lab One

Planning a Trip to San Diego

This exercise was a good introduction to GIS desktop. It involved steps that helped create a general knowledge of tools and navigational skills. I learned how to zoom, switch data views, and obtain data from many different features. What I found was extremely useful in this lab was reading ahead before completing the steps I didn’t at first and it cause me many problems. I completed step nine before I saved the map I don’t know if it caused any changes to it.




Find Potential Sites for a Youth Center

This exercise was a lot more involved than the previous one. This lab teaches you how to use GIS tools to make use of data to solve geographical questions. I found a potential site for a youth center by combining layers and excluding areas without the needed attributes. A problem had with this lab was some of the lab material did not match up perfectly with my arcMap so I had to figure out different ways of obtain the same result. For example my Zoom Whole Page button would not work so I had to use the zoom tool and pan to center my map. I am starting to realize a large part of learning this program is problem solving.