Nicole's Geographic Journal

  Final Map: Hypsometric Tint Continuous Tone     For this week's lab, I explored two different methods of making isarithmic maps; hypsometric tint, and continuous tone. I first started with continuous ton e, which uses  a smooth transition between values. The above map uses continuous tone symbology to show the steady change in precipitation through regions. I then moved on to making the same map, but with hypsometric ti nt. Hypsometric tinting is used to enhance elevation zones. In this map, it was used to highlight the elevation zones around the precipitation layer, since elevation is not shown in that layer. I also learned about PRISM, which is an interpolation method that is used for making maps that have several environmental factors at play.

      In this week's lab, I was tasked with creating a map to represent population densities and wine consumption in Europe. I first imported the data and changed the symbology to graduated colors, to better reflect population density. I also excluded Monaco, Gibraltar, Malta, and Jersey from this map because they have high density values and low wine consumption; including these countries would have skewed results. To represent wine consumption, I used gradual symbols because the proportional symbols were so large they took over the entire map. This lab was interesting, and more challenging than previous labs in this course. 

      For this week's cartography lab, I created a map of the distribution of Miami Dade county's senior citizen population. I used four different data classifications; quantile, standard deviation, natural breaks, and equal interval. The use of the four different classifications was to show how the data can be displayed in different ways, and how this can alter how an audience views a map. According to the attribute table, Census Tract 58.02 was the area with the highest percentage of senior citizens, and this is displayed the best in the equal interval map. The equal interval map distributed the data into equal ranges, which concentrated color into a few areas that have a large senior citizen population. If someone wanted to learn more about the demographic of the county in relation to senior citizens, the equal interval map would be easiest to interpret. I enjoyed this lab because it was interesting to see how the different data classifications can make a map look so...

      In this week's lab, I was tasked with creating a map of Ward 7's public schools in ArcGIS Pro. I used some skills learned from last week's lab to differentiate between the elementary, middle, and high schools. I added additional features to this map, such as local roads, interstates, major highways, and the names of neighborhoods to this map. I used different symbology to make the more important features stand out. For example, instead of leaving the default labels for the major highways, I used the shield  labels, so it was obvious that the label was for the road, and this also prevented those labels from getting mixed up with the other labels. For some reason, I could not get this to work for interstate 695, so I made it bold and bright red to match the color of the road. I enjoyed this lab because it gave me the freedom to create my own map based off of the guidelines provided in the assignment. 

      For this week's lab, I created a map of Florida that highlighted some of the state's popular areas. I learned how to use the labels tab to label these areas, and how to make those labels stand out. The most important thing I learned from this lab was how to remove unwanted layers. The major cities  layer had too many labels and too many cities listed. I found that all of the cities I needed for my map were classified as county seats , and the other classification was populated places. I used the symbology feature to remove those labels and extra cities to clean up my map. I used a light green color for the Florida counties so that the other map features look bolder and easier to read. I made Tallahassee pink instead of red like the other cities to highlight that it's the state capital. Overall, I enjoyed this lab and it was a good introduction to cartography.