Finishing Up

So I talked to Dr. Krygier and we tried multiple things with the legends, but couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the number in the heading. I just had to print out all maps with legends that way. In the old GIS you could get rid of that part of the heading entirely by choosing which legend you wanted to use. You can still choose your legend, but every legend has that heading in there, there are no legend choices without it. Now I am finishing up the writing part and I will be finished with my GIS project. It has been great, I have some regrets, like that I did it as an independent study, because I am lazy and would have done the work in class but doing it on my own is not something I am very good about. Now I know what I am and am not capable, I still got all of my work done, except the blogs about the Schurmann book, which I still plan on getting finished by Thursday! Well going to go finish up the writing now. Goodbye.

Making Maps Part 1

I started out by just making a regular map with all the wells.  I added a census tract layer, just to have some background for the wells to be placed on.  I also added the main layer from the hydrodetails folder.   I thought since we are working with wells that the layer would fit the best.  I labeled this layer water systems, cause I didn’t think it was just rivers or creeks, or runs, it kind of makes up all the water, so I just named it water systems.  I gave the map the simple title of Wells in Delaware County.  I added a legend and a north arrow. 

Interactively Matching Addresses

Okay, so I attempted this, but had no idea what I was doing and the GIS text was no help.  I had 8 addresses that needed to be matched so I wrote down those addresses and went to google directions and typed them in and got all of them fixed.  It took me like 10 minutes if that compared to the hours it would have taken me to try and figure out to interactively match the addresses in GIS.

Project: Processing Data

I am doing my project on the wells in Delaware County.  I have received my data from Dr. Mann in three separate Excel spreadsheets.  The first is general information: well number, owner name, owner address, city, zip, well depth, casing depth, depth to bedrock, monitoring, comments, the estimated top of the casing, the distance from a certain well, the coordinates, and the depth of the pilot test.  The second spreadsheet has information on the depth of water prior to pumping and at various stages in pumping.  There were three stages of pumping and net change in the water level was calculated after each step.  A change was also calculated after the pumping was completed, to measure the recovery.  The third spreadsheet showed the quality of the water data taken at various stages in the pumping.  The problem with this data is only about 25% of the wells had the quality of the water tested.  I don’t think I will be using the quality of water data for my project.

Tutorials ch. 18, 19, 20

Ch. 18  Making maps and templates

   Making a map that’s accurate, informative, and nice to look at usually takes time.  Sometimes, however, you have to make a professional-quality map on short notice.  ArcMap comes with a number of templates to help you do this.  In a template, the map elements you need are already in place.  All you do is add data and the map is ready to print.

Tutorials ch. 15, 16, 17

Ch. 15  Creating features

   Much of the vector spatial data used in a GIS has been digitized from paper maps and aerial or satellite photographs.  Digitizing data involves placing a map or photo on a digitizing tablet and tracing features with a puck, which is a device similar to a mouse.  In a variation called heads-up-digitizing, features are drawn with a mouse directly on the computer screen by tracing an aerial photo, a scanned map, or other spatial data.

Tutorial ch. 12, 13, and 14

Ch. 12 Analyzing spatial data

  Most of the problems you solve with GIS involve comparing spatial relationships among features–in one layer or in different layers–and drawing conclusions.  Problem solving in GIS is called spatial analysis, and it can include everything from measuring the distance between points to modeling the behavior of ecosystems.

Tutorial ch. 11

Preparing data for analysis

   GIS analysis projects usually begin with several data sets and the plans to process them to get a result.  When you perform an operation on spatial data that creates a new data set, you are doing geoprocessing.  Geoprocessing tasks are accomplished with ArcToolbox, a collection of tools that you add to the ArcMap or ArcCatalog interface from the Standard toolbar.

Tutorial ch. 10

Selecting features by location

    In this chapter, you’ll select features by location– that is, according to their spatial relationship to other features, whether in another layer or in the same layer.  The four types of spatial relationships that can be used are distance, containment, intersection, and adjacency.

Tutorial ch.9

Joining and relating tables

   Layer attribute tables contain descriptive of features, and they also contain spatial information, which is what enables ArcMap to draw a town, a house, or a flight path in the right place on a map.  Spatial information, stored in the Shape field, specifies the type of features in a layer and defines the location of each individual feature.