Brooke's GIS Blog

 My link to ArcGIS Web Map: https://arcg.is/HHm8v0 I enjoyed how this lab gave me freedom to try out the most efficient way to match unmatched addresses. I found the best way was to have one monitor open on Google Maps, searching by school name to find the address. The second monitor was on my project, with the unmatched addresses open. I would select "locate" paste the Google Maps address, and assign a point by picking from the map. Overall, this lab went smoothly.

  The purpose of module 4's lab was to use water and roads data to find the ideal campsite avoiding conservation areas in De Soto National Forest. To accomplish this, I created fixed distance buffers for the roads (300 meters) and variable distance buffers for the water (lake - 150 meters, rivers - 500 meters). I used the intersect tool to isolate the conservation areas that overlapped with the ideal campsite areas, and remove them. For the map, I chose a landscape layout (but went back and fourth between landscape and portrait) because I wanted to show the major cities in the inset map and had trouble fitting everything in portrait mode. For the legend, I chose to show the roads with written labels as well as the water features. The camping sties are shown as an area as percent of total campsite area (including the overlap of the conservation zones) but I think that's a pretty confusing way to categorize a measurement. I chose the green scale for the possible camping sites bec...

 This week's lab was another challenging one, particularly the projections portion which took me 2 tries to complete. I'm glad I started early. On try #1, I did not realize my mistake until long after I finished the lab. My POLY_AREA was basically the same for all 3 projections, minus the final 3 decimal places. I went a few days thinking the point of the lab was to show that the difference in projections is minimal, so to pay attention which projection is used. I figured out my error when I emailed Brittany for clarification. I ended up starting the lab over again, and had much better luck the second round.    The field collection section of the lab was fun. I was actually surprised how user friendly it was to create a domain using ArcGIS. I found that I should have compared crosswalks across counties rather than Bonita Springs, because Bonita does a decent job at keeping up with their pedestrian crossings. I still found room for improvement, though.

For this map, I focused on alignment and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Fitting the UWF Logo/Title/FL Overview Map in a way that was visually appealing was a challenge. I like how I aligned the scale bar to the map title - both were long in relation to everything else. I had trouble with the legend, particularly the symbol sizes in relation to the text size. The legend originally had a massive blank space on the right, because I created it too large to start with. Instead of starting over, I did a quick google search and tried converting the legend to graphics, from there I was able to adjust the sizing. I ungrouped and regrouped the items to move them around. The only tedious part was I forgot to group the background color, so getting the background color to the right position was a little painstaking. I wish I could have gotten 0.5 of additional spacing on the top and bottom of the legend, though.