Weeks 7 & 8 Lab: Data Search

This week's lab was part scavenger hunt, part learning a new stitch-lot's of start over and repeats!      First, I went on the search for data. I went to the Saint Johns County, Florida website. They provided most of my data. They have a Data Depot Section with tons of free, downloadable data available. I downloaded their creek data file for my hydrography. I went this route instead of downloading major rivers, as I didn’t really see any in the county. I also downloaded their city data verse FGDL.org. Well, I downloaded FGDL.org too, but after adding that data set to my first map, and trying to build a query to only include cities in St John’s county, I decided there was too much useless data that made the map messy. I also chose the county layer from the Data Depot, to save time from having to clip the county boundary from the entire state of Florida. They also provided an already clipped DEM Raster layer which totally saved my life…or a lot of time, anyways. I did use the major highways data file from FGDL.org. I was not fond of the roads file that the Data Depot provided-it was all streets, all 14,000 of them. I only wanted major highway systems to keep my map cleaner. I downloaded the NW quadrant of St Augustine for my second map from the Labins website. I chose the Transverse_Mercator projections for Maps 1 and 2. It saved a lot of time just clipping the data layers to the county boundary. Of course, I spent a lot of time on my first map figuring that out. But hey, isn’t that part of the GIS learning process??!! The one area I ran into huge trouble and just could not figure out was the Land Cover Raster-I followed the Raster Project data tool steps to a T, and it clipped it-just not to any county boundary I added…it was noticeably larger. Thus, I decided to just go with the Basin Catchment layer that good ole’ St Johns County GIS Data Depot provided. This counts as land cover, right? One could argue? I feel like I am on the precipice of getting this whole Projections game down but I am not quite there yet. Practice makes almost perfect, though! Here are the maps I projected!

Map 1: Conservation Parks, Creeks, & Wetlands

 Map 2: Aerial View of Saint Augustine, Florida

 Map 3: Topography & Basin Catchments of St Johns County