Week 4 - Participation Activity

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a major role in disaster response. With any disaster, obtaining spatial information is a crucial element. The use of GIS can help with planning and recovery efforts. With regards to the Deepwater Oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico, GIS is a vital tool utilized by all entities involved with the clean up efforts. The maps produced through GIS provide useful information about wildlife and plant species, which in turn has guided desicions made by these entities. It has also illustrated the location of the oil as well as it's possible path.

Week 4 - Oil Gush

This week's focus was the Deepwater Horizon Oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico.

Part I: For part one, we were to delineate a fishing closure boundary within ArcGIS then import the shapefile in to Google Earth. There were a few projection issues along the way, but I must say, in the end I thought it was a very useful project.

Part II Map 2: This map illustratees the environmentally sensitive areas and creatures of Okaloosa County. I am not too happy with how large the legend is vs the map but I felt that the data contained within was useful and chose to keep it in tact.

Part II Map 1: This map shows the booming operations, management authorities, and the socioeconomic areas for Okaloosa County.

Week3 - Earthquakes

Deliverables 4 and 5: This map and table depict the infrastucture and health facility destrction by Hurrcane Katrina. Most steps were fairly simple. I just could not figure out how to properly label the streets. If I made one small change, the map would take several minutes to reload, even with all layers turned off.

Deliverable 1: This map shows the land cover areas that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina in three coastal counties of Mississippi. I am still having issues with the Legend. I cannot get the headings right.

Deliverables 2 and 3: This map shows the flooded land areas from Hurrcane Katrina. The table shows the percentage of each area flooded.

Final Project...

Here is the link to my Powerpoint Presentation...

http://students.uwf.edu/ecg13/BobwhiteProject.EG.ppt

Paper link...

http://students.uwf.edu/ecg13/FPS_EG.pdf

Week 10 - Geocoding

Week 8 - Vector Analysis

This week we learned how to buffer and overlay areas of a map. The project went smoothly until I tried to fine the area of the possible sites. I used a suggestion from the discussion board and came up with some numbers, I hope their right.

Question 1: For this step I used the intersecting overlay tool. I did not see a noticable change.

Question 2: I used the erasing overlay tool for this step because it was the most logical. The instructions asked to exclude one area from another which is exactly what this tool did.

Question 3: There were 79 features in this layer. The largest area was 7,765,034 sq. miles, and the smallest area was 748 sq. miles.

Week 7 - Data Editing

This map should have been fairly easy, if only I would have taken my time in the beginning. After an hour or so from adding the athletic field shapefile and creating the new features, I realized it was a line feature instead of a polygon. Well, lesson learned. Other that that, it went okay.