GIS 1, Lab 1

GIS 1, Lab 1

Goal and background:
          As a student in GIS 1, the purpose of completing Lab 1 was to incorporate the skills I have obtained accomplishing tutorials 1-3 from Mastering ArcGIS by Maribeth Price and analyze different map projections. Utilizing the knowledge gained about geographic and projected coordinate systems, data was examined for projection errors and corrected accordingly.

Methods: 
          To start the lab, I unzipped lab1_data.zip to release the files to my personal GIS folder for easy access during the lab. To further simplify access to the data, I set my current and scratch workspace to my Lab 1 folder and stored relative pathnames to data sources from the geoprocessing menu and file menu respectively.
           For Part 1, I added country and geogrid data from my World folder to the map, making sure the country layer was above the geogrid layer. I named this layer Geographic Projection and set its coordinate system to WGS 1984. I saved the map to my Lab 1 folder as a good habit for protecting work in progress. Next, I added a new data frame to the map and named it Mercator Projection. Once again, I opened the data frame's property window and switched the data's coordinate system from the coordinate system tab, this time to a projected World Mercator Projection. I repeated these steps for three more data frames - named Sinusoidal, Equidistant-Conic, and Azithumal Equidistant and displaying them with the projected coordinate systems that matched the data frames' name (all in under world projections).
          For part 2 of Lab 1, I created a sixth data frame and named it Wisconsin UTM and added the states shapefile from the USA folder to the data frame. I used the select features tool to highlight Wisconsin from the layer. I right-clicked the states layer and selected "selection - create layer from selected feature." I then exported the selected feature using the data layer's current coordinate system to my Lab 1 folder and named in Wisconsin. The new shapefile was added to the data frame and removed the states layer so that Wisconsin was the only layer. I changed the projected coordinate system to UTM, NAD 1983, Zone 16N to best represent the state.
          For section 2 of part 2, I created a seventh data frame called States and added the states and stroads_miv5a shapefiles to the data frame. Although these shapeless do not have the same coordinate system, the data overlaid each other in a on-the-fly projection. I used the project tool to change the stroads_miv5a shapefile coordinate system to match the state shape file's by importing its coordinate system. Afterwards, I projected the data frame onto a North American Lambert Conformal Conic projection.
          For part 3, I created a map displaying all seven of my data frames by manipulating them in the layout view format. I labeled them accordingly, added a title, north arrows, name, date of creation, and scale information (Figure 1). The completed map was exposed to my Lab 1 folder as a .jpg.
          For part 4, I opened a new blank map and added the Central_WI_CTS.shp to the map. I warning appears because this shapefile has no defined coordinate system. Using the shapefile's metadata, I defined its geographic coordinate system as a North American 1983 GCS and its projected coordinate system as NAD 1983 Stateplane Wisconsin Central FIPS 4802 because of the counties location in central Wisconsin. Next, I added the Lower_Chip_strms.shp to the data frame but it has no projected coordinate system. Therefore, I defined its coordinate system by importing Central_WI_CTS.shp's projected coordinate system into the Lower_CHIP_strms.shp so they would be in the same coordinate system. In the layout view, I customized the map by adding labels, a title, a legion, a north arrow, netlike, name, and date created (Figure 2). Lastly, I exported this final map as a .jpg to my Lab 1 folder.
Results: 

                 Figure 1: The final product of part 3, which includes all seven data frames         encompassing the work done in parts 1 and 2, displayed under different map projections.

                    Figure 2: The final product of part 4 showing Central Wisconsin counties and rivers in
NAD 1983 Stateplane Wisconsin Central FIPS 4802.

Sources:
Michigan Department of Transportation (2017) [downloaded file] http://www.michigan.gov/mdot/ [Feb. 17, 2017].


Price, M. H. (2016) Mastering ArcGIS. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.