Final Project - GIS5050 - Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line Project

 

This final project was an accumulation of all the skills we learned in this class. I had to use a lot of skills from previous modules that was easily forgotten. I found that creating the layout was one of the most challenging tasks consider what I have learned about neat lines and things such as placement of legends, or scale bar divisions. The above map is a map with all the layers I generated for this project! It looks very cluttered but honestly the parcels part of this project was a very hard task to work on. I also decided to use arcgis story map instead of powerpoint for the presentation which added a lot of extra time to learn. I finds that story map UI is not very user friendly to uses when creating textbox compared to powerpoint. I want to go over the 3 main maps I made for this final project in this blog post and my overall process/experience with them.

The environmental land map was a good introduction on how to use the clip tool to isolate the conservation lands/NWI layers into the Preferred Corridor (PC). I relearned how to use the "calculate geometry" aspect of attribute table to calculate the acres of conservation lands/Uplands/Wetlands. I also familiarized myself again with using the "Select by Attribute" tool to isolate the wetland/uplands data into a layer. I think the pie chart took me the longest as I could not figure out why creating the Pie Chart was not an option in my ArcGIS Pro. I eventually figured out that ArgoApps is running an outdated version of ArcGIS Pro which is why the create pie chart function was not available. I made the decision to transfer all my files from my macbook into my windows PC just to make the pie chart, which I think was worth it.

    The school map was probably the easiest of the 3 maps that I generated. Since there was a video on how to generate the Manatee schools .csv file, I used the same video to generate the Sarasota schools .csv file. One thing I did manually for the schools within Manatee County that was within the study area, I manually use the Edit>Modify>Replace Geometry>Replace Point tool to further increase the accuracy of the points. Finding out that no schools was gonna be impacted by the transmission line was a huge surprise.

The parcels/home map was probably the most time consuming aspect of the project. It was very easy to digitize the homes from the provided imagery but making a map that was easy to the reader to visualize the 6 different layers of parcels in both counties was a nightmare. I had to run many "Select by Location" tools with a bunch of different "Relationships" to test out various theories on how to generate parcels that was specifically only within the PC or only touching the Buffer. In the end, I was not very successful in isolate the parcels mentioned above in my opinion. I had to use how ArcGIS Pro layers are projected in a map, how layers can overlap one another, to showcases to the viewers how the different parcels was presented on the map. This map is very cluttered, I did not like how my color choices was very similar to each other. It is also very hard to see the affected houses in this map. 

Overall, I thought this final project was a very well design project that reinforced all the different modules topics learned throughout the class. It allows you to freely think on how to approach a problem, how to demonstrate/visualize the data without giving you steps by step guidance which I greatly learned was detrimental to learning ArcGIS Pro. I believe this class was very helpful in my GIS Career, I learned that steps by steps instruction is not the best way for me to learn, and that this final project allowed me to learn in the most effective way by simply letting troubleshoot all the problems/decisions myself.