Group Participation Project #1

Group Two: North America

Group Summary

February 28, 2013

Ellen Markin, Elizabeth Moso, Douglas Rich, Dennis Davis,

David Hunt, David Stewart, Colin Turkington, Chelsea Vaughan

INTRODUCTION

For our Introduction to GIS course our group, Group Two, was required to create maps for individual UNESCO World Heritage sites. The maps were to be made using ArcGIS Online, and were compiled on our group's online page to create a map gallery as a means of showcasing our assigned continent of North America. By sharing our maps as a group using ArcGIS Online we are able to have quick and easy access to the maps of the locations and the information provided by group members. For editing purposes, comments can be made to fellow members and all members can edit and re-save the maps separately.

In the ArcGIS Online gallery visitors can find a map of each of the below listed sites as well as a brief description of each site. Useful links to further explore these sites are also included. Upon visiting the gallery, note that each map is created by a different user, so the maps may not all look the same. Each map is, however, an accurate geographic location of the site. The sites depicted are merely some of the many interesting and important aspects of North America's environment and history of its peoples. North America has sixty-eight World Heritage sites, sixteen, thirty-one, and twenty-one in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, respectively. Of those sixty-eight sites only one, the Everglades National Park, is flagged as one of the worldwide thirty-eight sites 'in danger,' meaning they are threatened by things such as war, natural disaster, pollution, or human impact. Group Two was assigned sites in North America to research and present in online map form. Those ten sites are as follows:

1: Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, Montana, USA and Alberta, Canada

2: Rideau Canal, Ontario, Canada

3: Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, USA

4: L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

5: Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Nova Scotia, Canada

6: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, Hawai'i, USA

7: Great Smokey Mountains National Park, Tennessee and North Carolina, USA

8: Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan, State of Mexico, Mexico

9: Everglades National Park, Florida, USA

10: Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, USA

Due to unforeseen circumstances, certain group members were unable to participate in this project, resulting in the absence of maps for the Great Smokey Mountains National Park and the Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan (sites seven and eight).

 Group 2 Map Gallery Link

CLOSING REMARKS

At first glance it looked like we would be working on a mapping project as a group. It soon became obvious there would be much more to this exercise with many skills and teamwork required to complete it.

Research capabilities were used to identify the geographical feature shown in the photograph of our assigned World Heritage sites. Internet skills were needed to obtain photos, links and text. Creating and posting our site maps in ArcGIS Online using mapping tools and concepts were other major components of the project. Group communication was integral to editing material and making decisions. Project management skills were used to assign tasks and maintain the objective deadlines. In addition, we learned more about the geography of our planet and a good background on the World Heritage site system.

This assignment was a very important part of the class curriculum. The project itself turned out to be a good example of what most of us will see or have seen in GIS jobs.

REFERENCES

General World Heritage Site Reference:

UNESCO World Heritage Center, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list Information on all World Heritage sites. Good basic information about the importance of each site and general site information.

Individual Site Resources:

Site One: Rideau Canal, Ellen Markin
Wikipedia, Rideau Canal. Accessed on 2/18/2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rideau_Canal Site coordinates, additional information and photos.

Site Two: Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Elizabeth Moso
Joggins Fossil Institute. Accessed on 02/15/2013. http://jogginsfossilcliffs.net/ This is the official website for the Joggins Fossil Institute and has a vast range of information about the location. It is a good site for information about tourism and research.

Wikipedia. Accessed on 02/15/2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joggins_Fossil_Cliffs#Joggins_Fossil_Cliffs This web page has a lot of useful information on the geology and history of the location.

Site Three: L'Anse aux Meadows, Warren (Douglas) Rich
Parks Canada, L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site of Canada. http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx Brief description of the site.

Hirst, K. Kris, L'Anse aux Meadows: A Viking Colony in the New World. http://archaeology.about.com/cs/explorers /a/anseauxmeadows.htm Much more in depth explanation of the site and some of the archaeological work done there to describe the site in more detail.

Site Four: Mesa Verde National Park, Dennis Davis
Wikipedia. Accessed on 2/18/2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Verde General information a site coordinates.

National Park Service (NPS). Accessed on 2/18/2013. http://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm Additional information about Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park. Accessed on 2/18/2013. http://www.mesa.verde.national-park.com/
Additional information about Mesa Verde National Park, including a detailed account of its history, flora and fauna.

Site Five: Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, Dave Hunt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterton-Glacier_International_Peace_Park


Site Six: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, David Stewart
National Park Service, Hawai’I Volcanoes National Park, http://www.nps.gov/havo/index.htm

Wikipedia, Hawai’I Volcanoes National Park, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Volcanoes_National_Park

Site Nine: Florida Everglades, Colin Turkington
USGS, Florida Everglades. Accessed on 2/21/2013. http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/circular/1182/

Wikipedia, Florida Everglades. Accessed on 2/21/2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades

Site Ten: Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Chelsea Vaughan
National Park Service, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, http://www.nps.gov/cave/index.htm

Proportional Symbol Mapping

This week in Cartography we learned about proportional symbol mapping.  This is basically the idea of presenting a symbol (as simple as a circle or something more representative, like a bottle) that is scaled in a manner that reflects scale to the user. The first map above was created entirely in ArcMap.  It is not much to look at, but it was quick and fairly simple to create.  The symbols are scaled to the cube root of the actual value, which allows us to see a value for every country.  I also applied a halo effect to the labels to make them a little easier to see.  I'm not sure why ArcMap insists on labeling islands within a country individually (see Greece Greece Greece for example).

I'm happier with this map created in Illustrator, though it would be a lie to say that I am happier with Illustrator.  Illustrator does allow for some powerful "post processing" of a map.  In this case, marrying the partially transparent circles (wine colored!) with a bottle gif and circular text for good measure.  But Illustrator comes at a cost. It seems unnaturally difficult to make simple color choices for example. The big challenge with proportional symbols seems to be finding the sweet spot where the max value looks appropriately "max" but the smallest values are not lost visually.  In this case, Luxembourg was the real challenge as tried to find a size that eliminated some of the crowding but not so much to lose Luxembourg entirely.  At the same time, the circular text often collided with the country borders in the background.  In the end, I also applied a halo-like effect to the "Belgium" text to prevent it from getting too entangled with the coastal border.

Data Search

The assignment this week involved using various GIS data sources (FGDL, Labins,org, etc) to find data for our assigned county, such as boundaries, roads, cities, surface water, and public land.  We also needed to find two sets of environmental data (I chose land cover and wetlands) and include an aerial raster and a digital elevation model. This could be presented in 1 to 3 different maps. In a way, this presented a difficult problem as there was no communication goal for the map(s), just an ingredient requirement.

I decided to put most of the "typical" map elements in the first map. I thought of this map as more of a political map (in the cartographic sense) with roads, towns, and parks. The public lands data was the most difficult to find and I ended up using two datasets, one with parks and one that highlighted state parks so I could get some definition.  I would have liked to add public beaches or other sorts of public space data, but couldn't seem to find the right term to search on.

For the second map, I combined the environmental elements.  One map shows the Land Cover color spectrum and the other wetlands.  The land cover map presented a bit of a dilemma as it doesn't really tell the user much with the color scale from the LandSat data.  I'm not sure how useful that map really is.  I also embedded the aerial requirement into it, mostly just to show that the projections are all working. The right side map is also from a raster. I had to pare down the classes of data points as 4 of the 8 data classes were "not wetlands" classifications.  Of the remaining 4 classes, only 2 occur in Flagler county, so there are really only two classes of wetlands in Flagler county by this dataset (excluding actual water bodies). I also included lakes and rivers as I felt that gave a sort of anchor points to the maps that are side-by-side.

The final map uses the digital elevation model.  As it turns out, Flagler county is pretty low and flat.  Nothing in the county exceeds 12 meters in height, though the DEM peaks at over 100 meters.  So I had to manually reclassify the legend and chose six classes in two meter increments. Notice the patches in the legend are all stacked together as a sequential classification system should!

Choropleth Mapping

A choropleth map using color

A choropleth map in grayscale

This week in Cartography our assignment was to use a simple map of the USA state and a spreadsheet of US Census data from 1990 and 2000 to create two choropleth maps.  A choropleth map is a map that uses shading intensity proportional to the data value to visually communicate the results to the reader.

In the color map, I presented the percentage in population change for each state, grouping the states into five color groups using a classification method called Natural Breaks. In the grayscale map, states were grouped by regions and again presented in five groups using just variations in shading intensity.  Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results.  The maps look clean, convey the central message and are approachable.

Projections, Part Deux

Hands down this was the most challenging lab assignment to date in the GIS program.  The overall learning objective was to get used to collecting various datasets and re-projecting them into a common map projection.  In this case, we used aerial images from Florida agencies as well as raw data from an Excel spreadsheet and needed to convert them all into the same map projection.  In the case of the data points (the  STCM point data) this involved a two-step conversion process.  We also needed to clip the major roads and STCM data to only present the data that applies to the two quads we chose to map.

This is a lot of data to get on one page.  I'm not super fond of double inset maps as I think they tend to take a lot of real estate for minimal return, but I was happy with the end result here.  The key communication goal is the location of the tanks and their relationship to major roads seems clear and the scale is not imposing.  The middle section looks well balanced, left to right, and the items of lesser importance fill the bottom panel.

Typology

This week's emphasis was on Typology as it relates to Cartography.  There are many conventions when presenting text (either as titles, legends or feature labels) that has been standardized in maps over the centuries.  Expert cartographers have gone before us and established the "rules" of where and how to best place text on the complex and challenging background that every map presents.  Over time, many of these "best practices" have been recognized and codified.

Our task with this map was to place 17 labels that follow these conventions and best communicate the goal of the map.  I've kept the overall title and legend quite simple.  All the key (island) names/labels share the same style and color and blend in to match the overall "sandy" tone of the keys.  As much as possible, I placed these "on land" if I could avoid overprinting. Some of the keys are quite small or busy so it was necessary to place their labels "on water".  Aquatic features are in blue and italicized. Most of these are slanted to fit their geographic positions. Symbols were placed for Marathon and Key Colony Beach "cities". Marathon Shores is technically a neighborhood, not a city/town, so it didn't get a symbol but followed the color/style used for cities. The airport and country club were two features that required call-outs to pinpoint their exact location.

It is interesting to note that Google Maps and Bing Maps have slight differences on where exactly some of these features are. It took a while to figure out Vaca Key is actually the whole of the center island.

Projections Part 1

This week we are focusing on map projections.  Choosing the correct projection for a map is an important consideration.  To demonstrate the variation that occurs between map projections, we highlighted four Florida counties and calculated the area represented by their respective geometry.  As you can see from the side-by-side maps above, there is considerable variation in the areas of each county in the differing projections.  The UTM Zone 16N projection shows the most distortion in Miami-Dade county as UTM 16N only really covers the panhandle portion of the state. Since Miami-Dade is furthest east from the 16N/17N boundary, it exhibits the most distortion of the four counties.

Map Composition

Our assignment this week was to take a rather jumbled map and rearrange it in a manner that follows map composition principles and will best communicate the desired information to the user.  To do this, I primarily relied on the principles of screening and visual weight.  The most important element is the weighted coloring of the counties.  These fill most of the available space and utilized a sequential color scheme that intuitively communicates "higher" population percentages with darkening colors. The title also has a high visual weight and cements the contract with the user of what we are trying to get across.  The legend also takes a prominent position as it is needed to interpret the counties in more detail.

All the other items on the map (the insets, scale bar, north arrow, author, date, data source) are supplemental and would detract from the main message.  To minimize their visual impact, these elements have been set to 40% gray and place in less prominent positions on the page. Also, any color was removed from the inset maps except for the rectangles that show the area of interest.

The double inset created a bit of a dilemma, as I'd not seen many maps that utilized two insets.  I ended up placing the USA inset first and furthest from the counties.  Then, I placed the Florida inset map between the USA and county maps.  This seems to provide a visual hierarchy of sorts and a linear progression.  Overall, I am pretty pleased with the outcome and look forward to seeing how other students tackled this problem.