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!