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.