Lab 7: Joining Data in ArcMap

Above is a map of the United States divided into counties of each state. Highlighted purple are Arizona and Colorado, the two states that I am collecting data for. Highlighted red are the three states I chose to include to reference the location of my two states on a smaller scale.

Above is a map of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. As mentioned above, my two states, Colorado and Arizona, are highlighted in purple to show that these are the two states that I am gathering data for. Again, the red states are simply for reference.

Above is a map of my two states separated into counties which I have collected population data for. In this lab, I have imported my gathered population data for every census year since 1900 into ArcMap and calculated population change between each of those years.

For my projection, I chose Albers Equal Area Conic projection based on the USGS. This projection is widely used to represent the United States of America It is hard to tell what it looks like from my small scale maps, so here is a picture of what North America looks like in this specific projection:

According to the ArcGIS website, "This conic projection uses two standard parallels to reduce some of the distortion of a projection with one standard parallel. Although neither shape nor linear scale is truly correct, the distortion of these properties is minimized in the region between the standard parallels. This projection is best suited for land masses extending in an east-to-west orientation rather than those lying north to south."

Definitions

.xls File- denotes that the file is an excel file.

Select by Attributes- This is a function in ArcMap that allows the user to highlight specific areas based on what they need out of a certain source of data. For example, we did not need the entire US map for our individual states, so we highlighted our specific states from the select by attributes menu and created a new layer from that containing only our select states.

Query- Query expressions are used in ArcGIS to select a subset of features and table records.

Field & Record- In ArcGIS, rows are known as records and columns are referred to as fields.

Attributes- Specific coding in the Select by Attributes menu that tells ArcaMap to perform a specific function, such as highlighting specific states.

Relational Database- a series of standard database tables, column types, indexes, and other database objects

Join Function- Allows you to, Through a common field, associate records in one table with records in another table.

Field Calculator- Allows you to perform a function similar to excel that will calculate the relationship between selected fields using different math functions understood by ArcMap.

Lab 6: Intro to ArcGIS

Above is the world map that I made in the first part of Lab 6. It is a world map that shows Terrestrial Biomes, Water Bodies, and boundaries of all the countries.

Above are my two maps which show population by zip code in the state of Colorado. I created two custom color scales for these maps, one green and one red. The maps also include an Interstate Highway overlay as well as other highways and less major roads. It also shows mountain peaks, which I thought would be interesting to include to show how the geographic location of the mountains may affect population as well as placement of the many roadways.

The Document Map is a separate display that helps you navigate through a long Word document and access different parts of it.

The Table of Contents is a list of titles of the parts of a book or document, organized in the order in which the parts appear.

A Data Frame is used for storing data tables.

Map Layers reference a dataset and specify how that dataset is portrayed using symbols and text labels.

An Attribute Table corresponds to a certain zone of cells having the same value.

Using ArcGIS was very interesting. This was my first experience and I certainly have much to say. First of all, the amount of data that application has is incredible. Absolutely everything relevant about the world is on there. Any one could use the application and know exactly what they need to. That said, it could take them a while depending. Since everyone in my class was using it at the same time, the application ran very slowly and made a lot of tasks particularly difficult. That said, though it took a while, the end results were really cool. I was really excited to finally have actually made a map and I am even more excited to make my own map with the data we spent so long collecting.

Upon visiting the ESRI website, I took particular interest in the Sustainable Architecture section. I opened an article that talked about how the Republic of Singapore is using ArcGIS to explore different options for sustainable infrastructure for future construction in their cities. This is a topic that I have spent a lot of time researching not only in college but in high school as well. I actually almost went to school for sustainable architecture, but ultimately decided against it.

I also took interest in the Environmental Management section, where I found an article that talks about how Italy uses ArcGIS to monitor the amount of hazardous materials released after an earthquake. Truth be told, my family comes from Italy so I had a sort of bias on which article to pick, but it turned out to be very interesting. Using ArcGIS, the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research was able to assist the Italy Department of Civil Protection for emergency response activities by helping prevent or manage any potential loss of containment of dangerous substances from industrial plants in the area hit by the earthquake.

In summation, I found it very interesting that ArcGIS could be used in so many ways. ArcGIS is so much more than an application to make maps, it can be used to do so much more.