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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I chose this map because I liked the 3D perspective. This map shows the view from a specified point on the map. It was used to determine if you can see the red point from that location.
This lab was easy to follow and to complete. I had one small issue with the city type. I was able to convert the labels to annotations so I could move them. However, in the upper left corner of the map there were some labels that went with cities that are off the map. I could not figure out how to delete them, so I made them disappear by making them the same color as the county. I wonder what is the best way to handle this? I got lucky that the labels did not cross more than one color.
This was easier than I expected. The ESRI module took a lot longer than I expected, so I started this very late. The exercises in the module were very helpful.
This was so much easier than the previous lab. I think, mostly because there was only one main task. Anyway, I did not have too much trouble getting the raster maps to come close to matching the vector maps. There is one area on the left where there was still some distortion, but there was not much to match to on the vector map in that area. It was kind of fun to watch the map change as points were added.
This was the frustrating map. As with all 3 of the maps, finding the data was easy. (An editor at work recently told me that if I can't find something, it probably does not exist.) My problem was that I had too much data. These files contained every road type and hydrography down to the level of a drainage ditch. I played with this as much as I could, even though the server was very slow. I was able to eliminate several categories, but then I had trouble simplifying the legend. I wanted one entry for all roads, one for hydrography line, and one for hydrography polygon.
This map went well until I got to the conversion of the DEM. Even with the guidance of the discussion board, I struggled with it, but eventually I succeeded by using ArcCatalog. For the DEM, I flipped the scale, so the highest elevation is the darkest. I think it looks pretty cool.
I found this USGS map through the web site of the University of Texas Perry-Castaneda Map Collection. The opening page of this site usually has links to maps of current events, so it is often the first place I go for this type of map. I also find that it is very difficult to find things on government sites, such as USGS, so the University of Texas site is especially helpful.
This lab was a little more complex than the others. I felt like I still do not have the skills to design the map the way I would like. I was not able to label only the four relevant counties. I tried doing the SQL query, but was unable to format it correctly. Instead, I used color to designate each county.
Map #1: This map went pretty well. I did not have any difficulties and had fun playing with the color choices.
Map#2: This map was more challenging for me. I kept using the scroll wheel on my mouse to move around the map (like I do when fact-checking in PDF markup). I learned the hard way that this is zooms in and out. The map reloaded each time, so this took much longer than it should have and it drove me a little crazy. I need to retrain the muscle memory. :)
Map #3: By the time I got to this map I was pretty comfortable with the concepts we learned in the previous exercises, so it was not difficult.
This lab went more smoothly than the first, now that I am becoming more familiar with ArcMap. This map is missing a legend. I guess we will learn to create one later?
San Diego Tourism Map:
