Habitat Modeling: The Mexican Spotted Owls

Rasters, DEMs, Slope, Aspect, and Reclassification

Here is Map #1 or the Topo map. I took a topographic basemap, and layered on a green for the unsuitable habitat, and the orange for the suitable habitat. Suitable habitat is defined as shown below. I will be honest, it was difficult with all the information on the map above, I couldn't make my labels stick out as well as I wanted them to.

So then I wanted to try a little bit more creative cartography. I call this my "Venom" map after the titular enemy of Spiderman in Spiderman III. I put the same data as above on a dark gray canvas, but I used a sickly poison yellow "suitable" habitat raster to contrast with the essentially black "unsuitable" habitat. I did it a couple different ways, first without contours, and then with contours. Obviously it would be a little harder to find your way around with a map that doesn't have any landmarks but it does look nicer on an office wall.