GIS 1 Lab 1

Goals and Background: The goal of this first lab was to apply my knowledge of geographic and projected coordinate systems I have learned in this course so far. I demonstrated my understanding through my conversion of files of different geographic and projected coordinate systems, and my defining of projections in files unlabeled, in order for correct mapping. I created seven data frames with different scales and areas, and therefore different projections that were appropriate in each instance. For example, I projected my Wisconsin shapefile (which I created from a larger shapefile that included all of the states) as UTM, NAD 1983, Zone 16N, and my central counties of Wisconsin to NAD 1983 StatePlane Wisconsin Central FIPS 4802. In the end I created maps of high cartographic quality in the layout view of ArcMap and with editing of symbolization.

Methods: I used data that was given to me by my professor. Steps in this lab were broken into 4 parts. Before part 1 I set my environment so that my data was being stored in the right folder by default and set ArcMap to store relative pathnames.

   

   Part 1: (Each time I added a shapefile in part 1 I set custom symbolization) I first set my data frame to the WGS 1984 geographic coordinate system under data frame properties. I then added my country and geogrid shapefiles to ArcMap that were supplied my professor. I then labeled this layer Geographic Projection. I then made four more world scale data frames with my country and geogrid shapefiles in which I changed the data frame projections to Mercator, Sinusoidal, Equidistant-Conic, and World Flat Polar Quartic, naming the data frames accordingly at each step (see figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

   

   Part 2: Working in the same document I now created another data frame for the state of Wisconsin named Wisconsin UTM. I added the states shapefile and then selected Wisconsin with the select features tool (see figure 1.2 for this tool’s icon). I then right clicked on the States layer and created a layer from the selected feature, then right clicked on that created layer and clicked Export Data, saving the file in the same coordinate system of the current source data layer. This new shapefile was the only layer I kept in the current data frame, and I now set the data frame coordinate system to UTM, NAD 1983, Zone 16N (see figure 1.3) I now created another data frame, “States”. In this data frame I imported a shapefile of the US and a shapefile of MI state roads. These two shapefiles, being of different projections still lined up because of on the fly projection, but as a good practice I still projected the state roads file to the geographic coordinate system of the US shapefile. I did this using the Project tool, under the Data Management Tools, and Projections and Transformation folders in ArcToolbox (see figure 1.4) Lastly I changed the data frame projection to North American Lambert Conformal Conic.

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

   

   Part 3: In the layout view, I added labels to each map lining them all up and rescaling them to fit on one sheet, and added my name and date and a title to the page.

   Part 4: I added a Wisconsin central counties file to a new data frame in a new map document. This shapefile has no projection defined, but is according to external metadata to GCS: North America_1983 and Datum: North America_1983. With the Define Projection tool also seen in figure 1.4, I defined this file as the GCS in the metadata. I then imported a stream shapefile for the counties which also had an undefined coordinate systems, but which matched up right on top of the counties, never crossing the outer county boundaries so I defined it as the same GCS. Next I used the projection tool to project both of these shapefiles to NAD_1983_StatePlane_Wisconsin_Central_FIPS_4802 in order to display them in an appropriate manner for the area of Wisconsin.

Results: My resulting maps of these parts are shown in figures 1.5 and 1.6. 1.5 was created from Parts 1, 2, and 3, and 1.6 was created from part 4.

Figure 1.5

Figure 1.6

Reference:

Price, M. (2016). Mastering ArcGIS (Seventh ed., pp. 9-378). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Data used was given to me in a zip file and downloaded to my computer.  Available upon request with the permission of my instructor.