GIS 1 Lab 1

Goals and Background: The goal of this first lab was to take the skills that I had practiced in the earlier weeks through Tutorial 1 & Tutorial 11 from the book, Mastering ArcGIS and apply them to different data.  The purpose of these tutorials and the lab was to gain a good understanding of geographic and projected coordinate systems along with their differences.  Another goal of this lab was to use my knowledge of coordinate systems to fix data sets that were improperly created and did not have a coordinate system assigned to them.  The final idea of the lab was to be able to see and identify projection errors and fix the errors correctly to produce a high quality and accurate map.

Methods:  I started with data that was supplied to me by my instructor.  This lab was broken into 4 parts.

   Part 1:  The goal of this section was to become familiar with world projections and dataframes.  I imported the country and geogrid data given to me by my instructor.  Then I changed the color and line thickness to make the map more visually appealing and readable.  For the assignment I had to create a total of five maps setting each map to five different projections.  Every one of the maps had its own data frame and used the country and geogrid data mentioned before.  I was required to use the following projections:  Geographic Coordiante System (WGS 1984), World Mercator, World Sinusoidal, Equidistant-Conic, and one of our own choice, to which I chose Azimuthal Equidistant.

   Part 2:  The goal of this section was to become familiar with state level projections and dataframes. I created a new data frame for this section and imported the states shapefile.  Then using the selection tool I created a new layer of the state of Wisconsin only.  I then deleted the states layers leaving only the state of Wisconsin on this dataframe.  I then changed the projection to UTM NAD 1983 Zone 16 using the project tool.

   The next part of this section required me to import the states shapefile again in a new data frame. Then I had to import stroads_miv5a, which was the state roads of Michigan.  Though they appeared to overlay correctly they were not in the exact same projection.  So I had to project the road data into the same projection as the states shapefile.  Then for the final step I changed the projection of the data frame to North American Lambert Conformal Conic per the instructions.

   Part 3:  This section required me to take the previous seven maps and arrange them on one page in the layout view of ArcMap.  I arranged them to fit nicely onto one page and then labeled them accordingly,  I added north arrows of different varieties to each one of the maps and a title to the top of the page.  I also added a background color to help make the map more visually appealing.

   Part 4:  The main goal of this section was to identify and fix projection problems with data that was given to you without the proper labeling or identification.  I imported the Central_WI_Cts shapefile given to me by my instructor.  This file turned out to not have any Geographic or Projected Coordinate system assigned to it.  I was then given the Metadata information and used the Define Projection tool and applied the correct Geographic & Projected Coordinate system to the file.  Then I had to choose the best projection for the data.  I choose the NAD 1983 State Plane Wisconsin Central FIPS 4802, as this would give the best map with the least amount of distortion.  I then had to import Central_WI_rvs shapefile into the same data frame layer.  This data had the correct Geographic Coordinate system assigned to it but it didn't have the any projection assigned to it.  I again used the Define Projection tool to assign the correct projection to the file.  Then, again using the project tool I projected the file into NAD 1983 State Plane Wisconsin Central FIPS 4802 as I did the previous file.  Finally, I changed the data frame layer projection to North American Equidistant Conic so that you could see the entire map on a flat surface.

Reference
Price, M. (2014). Mastering ArcGIS (Sixth ed., pp. 9-326). 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.