Module 2- Geographic Information Systems- Cartography

The purpose of this week’s assignment was to learn how to create a map displaying all the essential map elements. We began by learning what considerations should be made to create an appropriate map for our data, including the purpose, audience, layout and organization of the map. The map created focused on the location of the UWF Main Campus in relation to the Escambia County and other landmarks in the area.

I worked with multiple map frames to create this map. There had the main map, which was a zoomed-in view of Escambia County including interstates, rivers, and cities that were near the campus. The most important feature of attention was the UWF Main Campus which was indicated using a large brightly colored star. Additionally, I used an inset map of all the counties in the state of Florida with Escambia County highlighted to give the larger map context. I used the clipping tool to only highlight the rivers, interstates and selected cities in Escambia County.

After the basic map layout was established, I then went on to add important features to the map. This included adjusting the symbology of key features, labeling cities and interstates, adding a title, cartographer name and date, data sources, scales for each map, the north symbol and a legend.

Here is my interpretation of this week's map assignment.

Map of Escambia County showing location of UWF's Main Campus in relation to major landmarks

Module 1- Geographic Information Systems- Overview of ArcGIS

This was my first experience using ArcGIS Pro. The purpose of this lab exercise was to gain familiarity with accessing data, creating file paths and to orient oneself to ArcGIS Pro. I began by creating a file path for this class and downloading the data provided for the lab to a folder created specifically for this exercise.

I created a new project, uploaded the data to my project and familiarized myself with the interface and some of the tools available in ArcGIS Pro. The two shapefiles I was working with were major world cities overlaid on a layer that established the boundaries of the world’s countries. I learned how to turn layers off and on, adjust the way they are stacked, alter the symbology of the cities, the colors of the map, create a map layout and export it to the file path I created.

Here is my resulting map.