Intro to GIS Portfolio

Intro GIS Portfolio

Starbucks Map

This is the first ever map I made. I made this map quickly on January 9th, 2017 using the "My Maps" function of Google Maps. It maps Starbucks locations in Michigan (shown by the Starbucks logo), as well as 7 counties of Southeast Michigan, which are shaded in grey. I also display whether the Starbucks is company-owned (e.g. an actual Starbucks building) or licensed (e.g. Starbucks inside of a Target store, etc.)

I can think of many ways to improve this map, but I have made the decision to leave it as-is. This is my first-ever attempt at using a GIS, and I am going to leave this here to show how much my skills have improved thanks to Intro to GIS and simply practicing map-making in GIS!

The Starbucks data came from Socrata and can be found Here. The data on the counties (shaded in grey) came from SEMCOG and can be found Here. Both datasets are available publicly and can be freely downloaded.

Mapping Schools of Detroit

This is the first proper map I made. Like the Starbucks map, this is the starting point for all subsequent maps I make with ArcGIS. Unlike the Starbucks map, which was made in just a few minutes, I spent hours getting this map to a state that is presentable.

For this project, I was instructed to map the distribution of public and private schools in Detroit and relate them to a feature of my choosing. I chose median income by block. The darker the green value, the more money! I was also required to include major roads and waterways of Detroit (if I was not required to include them, I probably would not have included roads, as they don't really belong in the context of this map.) I was also required to create an inset map that showed the location of the main map in a wider geographic area, and of course the essential map elements (one of the proctors said that she liked how I constructed my legend.)

To analyze this map, it seems that charter schools are more concentrated in areas that have less median income, such as the south side of Detroit. Private schools are more concentrated in areas with higher median income, such as the northern side. Public schools seem to be widespread in their distribution.

As this was my first major project with ArcMap, I of course ran into some difficulties, particularly with shapefiles not agreeing with each other. While I initially thought this was a problem with transformations, it ended up being that the shapefiles overlapped. I had to make a difficult decision on what to do with this problem, and I ultimately chose to keep them, so that one layer overlapped the other. This was also why I left Canada white (although I realized-- too late-- that I could have changed the color by changing the background color of each frame. If I ever need to do this again, I certainly will, but I hope these problems will be more easily resolved in the future.)

Despite the flaws with this map, I am satisfied with the way it turned out. I think it is a good map for my first true attempt at using a GIS. I hope that by the time the semester ends, I will look back at this map and see how far my GIS skills have progressed. At least, that is my goal!

The entire class voted on every map made for this project, and my map came in second place out of 29 students.

Data came from Data Driven Detroit and the Michigan Open GIS Portal.

Optimum Locations for an American dating service

For this project, I had to use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to find five counties that would provide the most income for a hypothetical dating service, based on demographics such as marital status. At least one county had to be in a male-dominated region, and at least one county had to be in a female-dominated region. Also, no county could be within the 400-mile radius of another county.

To accomplish this, I created a new field in the attribute table which calculated income. The top 3 counties by income were outside each other's radii so they were chosen. The next highest county outside the radius of those other counties was also chosen, and finally a male-dominated county was chosen to satisfy the requirements.

I mapped these data and gave the description of my decision process. It should be noted that we could choose any layout we wanted, and I chose a poster size. This means some of the finer details of the map will not be able to be seen on this website.

Overall, I am happy with how this map turned out. There are some flaws with it, of course, as no map is perfect. The legend in particular could be done better, as could the scale bars. However, I consider the project successful.

I was also required to import some aspect of the data into a Google map, which can be found below. I decided to simply map the chosen counties. I thought this would be very simple to do, but it was MUCH harder than I anticipated (or than it should have been!) The data was completely incompatible with Google maps, showing locations way off (as far away from the actual location as South America!) To fix this, I had to find new county data from the Census Bureau's website which contained lat-long data, and manually import the data for the 5 selected counties into Excel.

Urbanization report

For this project, I was tasked with mapping urbanization in three American cities: Las Vegas (NV), Orlando (FL), and Austin (TX). The completed project is shown to the left. Note that the margins have been slightly cut off during the process of uploading to this website.

I examined urbanization in the three cities by getting data from the National Land Cover Dataset. I then used the Extract by Mask tool in ArcMap to clip to the boundaries of the three cities, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau TIGER.

I was required to show each city's level of urbanization in 1992 and 2011, as well as one additional map. I chose the areas of each city that became urbanized compared to areas that became ruralized, and areas that stayed the same (urban or rural). Raster manipulation was done both in the process of standardizing what was "urban" between 1992 and 2011 (as the sets were different in that regard) as well as determining the areas that became urbanized, ruralized, or stayed the same.

I chose to present my findings in graph form using ArcMap's graphing feature. However, since the project had to fin 11" x 17", the graphs were very small, hence the legends for each graph as well as the text explaining each graph. While I am disappointed with the graphing feature, this project gave me experience with it, despite not requiring to use them.

I am very happy with how this set of maps turned out, as well as my ability to use both vector and raster datasets to manipulate data and answer questions.

Proposal paper

For the proposal paper, I was tasked with writing a comprehensive proposal for a geospatial analysis of a topic of interest to me. I decided to propose the analysis of the relationship between light pollution and LED streetlights. While at first I thought this would end up being very vague, I did some research on the topic and found an idea for a very specific project. I am very proud of how this project turned out. You can find the proposal paper in its entirety Here. (I put it on a separate page so it would not clutter this page).

analyzing sea level rise in tampa, fl

This is the final project done for Intro to GIS. It was designed to be a challenge, as I was tasked with using ArcMap to analyze sea level rise in the Tampa Bay (FL) region. I used ArcMap not only to make maps showing the effect of sea level rise in this region, but also to calculate which types of land would be the most displaced, as well as how many buildings of certain types would be submerged.

The final product is a poster that is 42" x 52". It was made in PowerPoint, and the graphs were made in Excel, since it is much easier to do this type of work in these programs than it is in ArcMap. Aligning the poster was a pain, and some areas still wouldn't align, so I just left them. Also, I had a lot of blank space, especially on the right side of the poster, so I had to add what may amount to filler. Despite these flaws, I am very happy with how this project turned out. No poster is perfect, after all!!

I am very pleased with how much I learned in Intro to GIS. When I started, it was a struggle to make a map of Starbucks locations in Michigan using Google. Now, I can use ArcMap to perform complex data analysis and geoprocessing. I really enjoy GIS, and I may even pursue a career in this field after I graduate!

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