Week 10: Homeland Security

I had some small problems with this lab, but I was able to work through them with little trouble. I was uncertain about plotting the surveillance points. It appeared that part of the instructions were missing, but I made my best judgement and I think the analysis worked out.

Week 8: Crime in Washington, DC

Most of this lab went well even though it took a long time to get through all of the material. Certain tasks, such as setting the environments is becoming routine. I just wish they would not default to the D drive. I did have some trouble with the graph on the Auto Thefts map. I got an error message when I tried to save the summary table. I saved it as a different file type and that seemed to fix the problem.

Week 6: Where to live?

For the Equally Weighted map, I had some problems getting the type to cooperate. The properties say that the type for all of the cities are the same, but that is not how it appears. Otherwise, I had no problems with this part of the assignment.

Each type of analysis had its advantages and disadvantages. The equally weighted map presents the four criteria with equal importance. To me this is a "perfect world" scenario. I think this type of analysis would be useful for customers who are unfamiliar with an area and still need to refine their priorities. As happened with this scenario, once they become more familiar with an area, their priorities may change. The map that has the unequal criteria could be useful once the customers realized that they can't have everything they want and that they need to prioritize their criteria. However, it is interesting that the two maps were not very different. Two of the census tracts that I chose as the best location were the same.


The only real problem I had with this group of maps was getting the environment set. Every time I opened a new data frame the settings defaulted to the D drive. I discovered this was what was causing me problems from reading the discussion board.

Week 5: Impact Assessment/Urban Planning

In general, this assignment went pretty smoothly. The instructions were easy to follow. For this map, we had to join tables, add new fields to the attribute table, and do several calculations. The repetition will help me remember how to do this in the future.

This map also involved some manipulation of data, but less than for the economic map. I had no problems with this one.


Like the other maps, I had no problems with this one. While working on this map, we learned how to add a bar graph. The layout is a little different so that the subject area is at an appropriate scale.

Week 4: Oil Spill

The link to my animation is here.
Creating an animation was easier than I expected. It took me a few tries to get the projections correct, so that the oil spill layers did not appear at the equator. After that, the directions were easy to follow.

Participation Post:

The book, Confronting Catastrophe by R.W. Greene, discusses the role of GIS in the five stages of disaster management. These stages are planning and identification, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Identification and planning involves the identification of “the physical, human, and other assets in a community most in danger from a natural or man-made disaster.” For the Deepwater Oil Spill this includes the identification of the most sensitive coastlines, most vulnerable species and habitats, and the location of human activities that could be adversely affected. The collection of up-to-date data before the disaster happens is also a very important component of this stage. Agencies should have agreements to share data in place in case of a disaster. Preparation would also ideally include the use of a disaster modeling software package such as HAZUS.

Mitigation is the reduction or elimination of hazards identified in the planning and identification stage. GIS plays a role by analyzing the locations where the hazard risk is the highest. I’m not sure how this would apply specifically to this oil spill, since it appears to have been due to a mechanical failure and negligence.

The next stage, preparedness, is defined as “short-term tasks to be done to prepare for an imminent disaster”. This is opposed to the planning stage, which tends to be long term. At this stage, a GIS team can have basic maps prepared ahead of time. For the oil spill, some examples are maps of Gulf currents, winds, locations of human activities that could be affected, and Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) atlases. The ESI maps rank the vulnerability of shoreline habitats, biological resources, and socioeconomic resources. I think this stage could also include having a list of GIS volunteers in case an agency needs to increase staff on short notice and having a plan on where they would be located and given access to equipment such as computers.

Response happens immediately after the disaster occurs. This is where all of the advance planning in the earlier stages pays off. At this stage is important to keep very organized. This includes the use of a clear directory and file organization and a systematized way for responders to request maps. It is important to keep in communication with everyone involved at this stage, including the media. Maps, such as the animation on the New York Times web site are a very effective form of communication for the general public. Another example of maps produced shortly after the oil spill are the response maps that are updated daily on the BP web site and maps showing which fishing areas are closed.

The final stage is recovery. This is a longer-term stage that includes tasks such as clean-up, rebuilding and the distribution of recovery funds. For the oil spill, GIS can assist in making decisions on the distribution of recovery funds and where clean-up crews are most needed.

For this map, I decided to not use the topographic layer to make the map more readable. It was too difficult to see the locations of the animal types. This quad did not have any mammals. (I did not forget to add them.)

For this project, the biggest challenge was getting the raster topographic map to appear in line with the rest of the layers. It took a lot of trial and error, a phone call to Amber and reading other student's suggestions to get the projections to cooperate. It felt so good when everything finally lined up!

The graph for the length of the most sensitive shore types did not come out as well as I would have liked. I used the graphing function in ArcMap and either I missed something, or it has very limited functionality. I would have liked all of 10A to be one bar, etc. Maybe next time I will try doing the graph in Excel and importing it.

Week 3: Hurricane Katrina

This task went pretty smoothly. I had a little bit of trouble with labeling the interstates and U.S. highways, but I quickly figured out that I had to be in the "Labels" tab of the property dialog box.


I really like how this map looks. The color scheme makes it look almost 3D. The creation of this map was also uneventful. I had to play with the text properties a bit to make the text visible.




This map was a bit more complex than the others. We had to reclassify the land cover into fewer categories. I think this will be a very important skill to have in the future. After I completed this map and the bar scale, another student pointed out that there was a mistake in the instructions. The reclassification of the developed land and the barren land is backwards. We were told that we did not need to fix this for this exercise. Obviously, in a real life situation, this would have to be fixed. (I was disappointed that I did not catch this mistake myself.)