A. Starling's GIS Blog

Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) intended to build a transmission line that traveled through Manatee and Sarasota Counties in Florida and started making their determination on the placement in 2006. They wanted, of course, to implement the transmission line in an area that would be least affected. The objectives were to place it in an area that least affected environmentally sensitive lands, homes and land owners, as well as the schools in the area. Too through this project, we elected to determine the total cost of the transmission line. Did FPL hit these objectives? Click the below Presentation and Project Presentation Transcript links to discover what came from this Final Project!  Transcript Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line Presentation  

University of West Florida campus georeferenced maps indicating UWF Gym (Bldg. 072) and Campus Lane road, as well as the location & buffer zone of a protected eagles nest.  Module 6 focused on how to georeference. The goal initially for this lab was to create common points between the known (in this case, Building & Road feature classes) and unknown (raster image(s), or the University of West Florida campus maps-). We started by working with University of West Florida campus maps – one for the north campus, and a separate south campus map. This allowed us the opportunity to figure out how to piece together relatively simply two separate maps with a known layer ( Buildings layer and Road layer) Choosing the Control Points wasn’t too difficult once I got started and took time to examine the map(s). While I kept the UWF North map in the First Order Polynomial transformation, I felt like the UWF South map was best aligned in the Second Order Polynomial transformation. Af...

Adding XY Data to ArcGIS Pro We used the Latitude and Longitude of (3) known eagles’ nests in Santa Rosa County, Florida (in degrees, minutes, seconds format) and input them into a Microsoft Excel file. We converted into decimal degrees format by using a formula, and then added the data to an ArcGIS Map as XY Point data.       I work with Excel often in my day-to-day, so found this assignment to be a very familiar experience!  Online ArcGIS Map View of Schools in Manatee County, Florida  Geocoding In order to geocode for the address of Manatee County, Florida schools, we first cleaned up the Manatee County, Florida school addresses dataset from the Florida Department of Education in Microsoft Excel. I ended up having 88 school listings – however, several of those lacked address information (which showed up as “unavailable” in Excel, which would then show up as an “unmatched address” later on in the lab-). The US Census Bureau provided the Road and Count...

  Suitable Campsites in the DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi within 1) 150 meters from lakes, 2) 500 meters from rivers, and 3) 300 meters from roads     Module 4: Vectors Analysis lab focused on utilizing Buffer and Overlay tools to show the most suitable camping locations within the DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi that were 1) within 150 meters from lakes, 2) within 500 meters from rivers, and 3) within 300 meters from roads. Once we had our road and water buffers properly calculated and put through the Union tool, we used the Erase tool to exclude areas that were within conservation areas.      When applying Symbology near the end of this project to figure out the best way to communicate the information I wanted to show (area in hectares of possible camp site locations in the DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi) I elected to use the method Natural Breaks (Jenks) and 4 classes of area ranges. The colors depict lightest being the least amount of a...

      Module 3 lab allowed us to look at the difference between map projections when projected on the same area. Each map highlights four Florida counties (Alachua, Escambia, Miami-Dade, and Polk) that are projected in three different map projections: Albers Conical Equal Area ,  NAD 1983 UTM Zone 16N , and NAD 1983 HARN State Plane Florida North FIPS 0903 (US Feet). Not only is there a slight visual difference amongst the map projections, the Area in Square Miles table shows us that there is mathematically a difference between each projection.      While we started out initially with data in the Albers projection with this project, we then used that dataset to reproject into UTM 16N and State Plane Florida North respectively using the Project tool located in the Geoprocessing Pane. The UTM 16N map shows Florida rotated more counter clockwise and distorted compared to Albers & State Plane Florida N projections. Florida is in two UTM zones (1...

In Module/Lab 2, we were tasked with creating a map that was able to convey to audiences where the main campus of University of West Florida (UWF) was located within Escambia County, Florida. The map I created (above) hopefully is designed in such a way that accurately conveys that idea. Using blue for rivers, red for interstates, green for land areas, and including symbology to indicate key points helps portray the title of the map (“University of West Florida Main Campus”) to the best of my ability. Including essential elements such as the scale, legend, north arrow, data sources, mapmaker’s name & date made, border, and (most importantly) the title, give additional and necessary information to the map-reader. While that can be a lot of extra bits on the map, it’s important to be able to place items in a way that isn’t overwhelming or too distracting for the map-reader. We looked through the metadata of several shapefiles ( UWF, FL_Cities, Interstate, Major Rivers, FloridaCount...

 Module 1: ArcGIS Pro Overview The first lab set the stage on what to expect from this Geographic Information Systems course overall. We walked through how to properly manage and save our data and files – an important step to make sure we are choosing the right information to add to any projects we do, both in this class and in the future. After following the correct path to the Repository (R:) drive and copying and extracting the pertinent project data into our own Student (S:) drive, we were able to start a new project in the ArcGIS Pro application. Two shapefile layers ( Cities and World_countries) over the basemap of our choosing allowed the opportunity to finagle and get more reacquainted in ArcGIS Pro and map building. For me, the symbology of Circle 1 being used to denote Cities caused a hang-up – my circles were huge, and did not seem to match other work I had seen for this lab. They covered a great deal of the map, making it difficult to see what the data was trying to...