Lab 5

Interesting ArcGIS Lessons

estimate storage capacity with drone imagery

This is a very similar lesson to the things we are doing in the lab currently but uses different processing and modeling software to achieve similar results of finding the volume of a water basin.

predict floods with unit hydrographs

This lesson was about predicting potential flood areas around rivers. This is interesting to me because floods are a devastating event to infrastructure. 

classify land cover to measure shrinking lakes

This lesson is about showing the decreasing surface area of lakes which is an important part in the preservation of fresh water.

where does healthcare cost the most

This lesson is about showing where healthcare costs the most. this is important information for comparing poverty and low-income data with the costs of healthcare.

global measures of hunger

This lesson shows global statistics for hunger.

Get Started with ArcGIS Living Atlas

One thing that makes ArcGIS such a good program is its huge Living Atlas. Although it's great to have such a huge archive most people won't be able to understand how to use it to its maximum potential. This is where ArcGIS comes in with hundreds of tutorials on ways to manipulate and use the data to your advantage. This tutorial shows us a very beginner level of info and how to manipulate it. 

The first thing this tutorial wanted us to do was to get a starter base map to work with. After that, we added a layer called "land cover." This layer shows water, developed land, all kinds of plant coverings and other smaller environments. The beginning map looked like this.

Then we zoomed in to Las Vegas, Nevada to inspect the land development between 2005 to 2006. 

You can see the differences and the density of reds increases from 2005 to 2006.

The next thing we did was remove all of the other colors except for red which symbolized land development. Then we zoomed in on the Maryland area so we could see DC and Philadelphia and the land in between. To better distinguish between the areas of low development and high development, we change the color symbology to a cyan to purple scale.

This really helps the highly developed areas to show up. You can even see how the development follows the interstates out of Baltimore. 

The next thing we did was bring in the counties of the area to show the counties and how the counties follow the developed areas.

The next project in this tutorial was to show the nursing homes affected by Hurricane Irmas predicted path. We started with an overlay of the predicted path. We brought in a database that shows all of the nursing homes that are in the southeast. To me, it was pretty awesome that a database like this would even exist. Then, what was really awesome is that you can highlight the hurricane area and calculate all the nursing homes that are in the projected area, and it was really simple. 

This was the end of the tutorial. 

Next we were asked to go into the living atlas and to select five layers that we thought were interesting and would all work together.

for this, I started off with a topographical base map to show where elevation will be. The next layer I added was colored topographical map to help show where the highs and lows were through the united states. After that layer, I added a layer that showed the soil runoff areas. This was the first step in showing the damages of the runoff of the agriculture industry. After that, I added a layer to show where the farmland is. It was interesting to see how these layers worked with each other and coloring them so they work together. 

This video shows prime farmland in the white and the not prime farmland in blue and underneath it is the runoff in red and orange. This shows high much we force our improper farmland into farmland and this is causing huge amounts of unneeded runoff.

This next video is going to the runoff in white to red and the flat areas in green and the mountains and valleys in orange. 

As you can hopefully see in the video that high areas of runoff is in the areas of the most areas of terrain variation. this one makes sense cause water is going to flow more on unlevel terrain. 

These different videos show that we are forcing poor terrain into being farmland which causes huge amounts of runoff.