ArcMap

Basics

The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with Arc's basic menu structure, tools, select functions and thematic mapping capabilities. [Important guidelines: Do not use spaces or other special characters when naming files or directories; stick with lower-case letters, digits and the underscore character--no spaces! Make sure any new layers that you create get written to the geodatabase on it. Under File--Map Document properties, check the "Store Relative Pathnames" box. Then when you end a work session, you can "save" the state of your session as a Map Document (MXD) file on your USB drive. Note that an MXD file does not contain actual GIS data; it just references the source files.

Getting started Open an ArcMap session with empty Table of Contents and Map frames, add a Catalog frame on the right, and make a folder connection to geodatabase on your USB drive. Specify as the default geodatabase. Then open it and drag its five layers--counties and lakes (polygons), rivers and roads (lines), and cities (points)-into your map. The initial display will treat the lat-lon coordinates as if they were planar coordinates, so this unprojected map will look pretty distorted. Right-click on "Layers" (the default name of the Dataframe) at the top of the Table of Contents frame, and select its Properties menu; under the "Coordinate System" tab choose a decent-looking display projection (any of the Predefined--Projected--Continental--North America--USA Contiguous projections should look okay). Zoom your map to just the continental US. If you click the display order tab at the top of the table of contents frame, you can re-sort (drag and drop) the layers in the legend so you have the following display order (bottom to top): counties, lakes, rivers, roads, cities. Now display cities as tiny (1- or 2-pixel) green dots, highways as thin red lines; rivers as blue lines, lakes as blue, and counties with light gray outline color and whatever fill color you like. If the map looks too busy, uncheck the display box for the cities and/or roads so you don't see them in the map. Each layer includes a database table of attributes for the geographic features in it. Open the attribute table for the counties layer. I included a lot of data from the 2000 Census and some other sources. Dissolving counties to create a states layer Use the Dissolve geoprocessing tool to create a new states layer by dissolving boundaries between counties using STATE_NAME as the Dissove Field. In the Statistics Fields pull-down, select POP1990 with Statistic Type SUM, and POP2000 with Statistic Type SUM. After the Dissolve is completed you should see the states layer appear. Open its Attribute Table to check that the sums of POP1990 and POP2000 are included. You will see that "Shape_Length" and "Shape_Area" fields were automatically created by the Dissolve tool, but the measurements are useless because they are in degrees. And add a new field of type "Double" named "AREA." Right-click on the new field header and use "Calculate Geometry" to calculate true areas (in square miles) based on the projected coordinate system rather than lat-lon. Display the states with black outlines and no fill color on top of counties with a light gray outline and whatever fill color you like.

Selection problems

For each of the following problems, zoom the map frame to the relevant features and use File--Export Map to create a PNG-format image file of your map. Adjust the resolution so the image width and height are the desired size. A simple map can be as small as 350 pixels wide; a detailed map could be 1000 pixels wide or bigger. (Note that Maps displayed side by side look best if their heights are the same, and maps displayed in a column look best with equal widths.) 1. Calculate the total area of the five Great Lakes (units are square miles). How many US counties border the Great Lakes? (Note that Arc's Select-by-Location has lots of alternative criteria: share a boundary, intersect, etc., that may yield inconsistent results.) Calculate the overall population density in 2000 of the counties bordering the Great Lakes. (Note that the average of these counties' population densities is not the same as their overall population density.) Zoom to these counties and export a .PNG map image. 2. How many counties intersect some major river portion of the Mississippi River System (not just the Mississippi itself)? What was the total population of these counties in 2000? Zoom to the selected Mississippi counties and export a .PNG map image. 3. How many counties in the US had negative population growth between 1990 and 2000? Set the display to encompass just the continental US and export a .PNG with these counties selected. 4. Use Select-by-Location to select the counties "within" 200 miles of your county. (Note how the spatial selection methods let you apply the "within 200 miles" criterion in different ways that yield different results!) Now use the Geoprocessing Buffer tool to create a 200-mile radius ring feature around New Castle County. It will look egg-shaped, because the Counties layer is in lat-lon coordinates and the Buffer tool only works correctly on projected features. With New Castle County selected, right-click on Counties and use Data-Export Data to create another layer with New Castle County in the coordinate system of the data frame. Rerun the Buffer tool on this projected county feature; you should get a correct near-circular buffer. How many counties are completely within this buffer? How many have their centroids within this buffer? How many intersect this buffer?

Thematic mapping methods Go to the Symbology tab of the US counties layer's Properties, and create a Graduated Colors thematic map showing WHITES normalized by POP2000, using 10 classes and a cool-to-hot color ramp like this one . (If you click "Symbol" you can flip or reverse a color ramp.) The default classification method is "Natural Breaks (Jenks)." Save a 350pixel-wide .PNG image of the continental US. Now change the classification method to "Equal Interval" and save a .PNG image

of that map. Now change the classification method to "Quantiles" and save a .PNG image of that map. Notice how the choice of classification method determines the spacing of the blue break lines that define how the counties are grouped into 10 classes. Once you have mapped WHITES normalized by POP2000 using the Natural Breaks, Equal Interval and Quantiles methods, create three maps of BLACKS normalized by POP2000 using the same three classification methods. Finally, create three maps of HISPANICS normalized by POP2000 using the same three classification methods. Display the uniformly-sized PNG images of these nine maps in a 3x3 table in your webpage report. Which classification method shows the truest-looking geographic distributions of whites, blacks and Hispanics? Finally, create a county dot-density map of POP2000 (no normalization variable), with one-pixel dots where each dot represents 10,000 people. Export a nice .PNG image of this. More tricks Use the Geoprocessing Clip tool to clip the States layer by the 200-mile-radius buffer around New Castle County that you created earlier. Open the attribute table of the new clipped features. Note that the fields, including the AREA field, are simply imported from the States layer. Add a CLIP_AREA (type Double) field and use Calculate Geometry to calculate the area of each clipped polygon. Calculate the proportion of each state's area that is within 200 miles of New Castle County. The one cartographically complete map you will make in this course: Check the county attribute field definitions and create a thematic map of counties in the continental US showing the geographic pattern in some Census variable(s). Once you get a good-looing map in the Data view of the map frame, switch to the Layout view. Switch page orientation to landscape, and position the map so it fills most of the frame. Add the other map elements around it: a title that explains the story in the data, a legend explaining whatever thematics you use, a scale bar, north arrow or compass rose, a text box specifying the map's projection, additional explanatory text, photos or other graphics to fill empty areas... Export your finished map as a larger-scale PNG (800-1100 pixels wide) image file. Editing tables: Add a new field "ELDERLY" in the US_Counties attribute table and use the Field Calculator to add FEMAL65UP and MALES65UP. Create a thematic map of ELDERLY normalized by POP2000 (i.e. percent

elderly) across the continental US. Export a PNG image of this map. Now add a new field "PCTELDERLY" in the US_Counties attribute table, and use the Field Calculator to divide ELDERLY by POP2000. There are two counties with zero populations that will mess up the calculation (divide-byzero error). Figure out how to get PCTELDERLY calculated correctly for all the other counties, skipping these two. Summarize tables and Table Joins: In the counties layer's attribute table, Summarize on the STATE_NAME field. Include Sums of the POP2000, WHITE, BLACK, HISPANIC, FEMAL65UP and MALES65UP fields, and the Average of the PCTELDERLY field in the output table. This will create a free-standing table with these fields summarized by state. Create a new field in this table, and calculate (FEMAL65UP + MALE65UP)/POP2000 by state in it. Note that these percent elderly numbers are inconsistent with the averages from the US_counties. Explain why. (Make sure the overall population density you calculated for the Great Lakes counties is correct!) Right-click on the States layer in the legend, and join the free-standing Summarize table onto the end of the states layer's attribute table, matching on the STATE_NAME fields. (Do not join the layer attribute table onto the end of the summarize table.) Map the true percent elderly by state, and export a .PNG image of this map. Create a PCTBLACK field and calculate percent Black by state. Now remove the Summarize table join from the States layer. Which table retains the PCTBLACK field that you calculated--the Summarize table or the States layer's attribute table? Editing tables: Select the 12 northeast states (ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, PA, NJ, DE, MD, WV). Add a new text field to the States layer's attribute table to hold these 2-letter state abbreviations. Open the Editor toolbar, and Start Editing in the directory containing the states layer. Type the abbreviations into the state abbreviations field. Then Stop Editing, saving your edits. The only time you will ever use ArcMap's horrible chart utility: Create a bar graph with labeled columns showing percent changes in population in just the 12 Northeast states between 1990 and 2000. Put the 2-letter state abbreviations as labels under each column; include gridlines and an appropriate title. Save a PNG image file of this graph to include in your web page. (So much for Arc's charts; next time, use Excel instead!) Editing features: The counties layer includes "counties and county equivalents" from 2000. Create a copy of the counties layer and update it to reflect the following changes: Dade County, Florida (12025) got renamed as Miami-Dade County and given a new FIPS code (12086). Edit the attribute table. In Virginia, Clifton Forge independent city was dissolved into Alleghany County, and South Boston independent city was dissolved into Halifax County. In Montana, Yellowstone National Park got split between Gallatin and Park Counties. Split this feature and join the pieces to the adjacent counties. In Colorado, Broomfield County (08014) was created from parts of Adams, Boulder, Jefferson and Weld Counties. Download the boundary shapefile for Broomfield County. Union the surrounding counties with the Broomfield polygon, delete the pieces inside Broomfield and then Merge Broomfield with the remaining counties. Since we're focusing on the continental US, don't worry about the changes in Alaska. Save small PNG's showing the Virginial, Montana and Colorado features before and after. Now download my county-level compilation of the 2010 Census data. This Excel file has two tabs, one with the data and one with variable definitions. Join the data ply to the counties layer. Check through the variables for some interesting cross-sectional comparison or 10-year change that you can represent in a thematic map. Create a final map of counties in the continental US that tells this story as effectively as possible.