Week 5: Searching for data on the web for Gulf County, Florida

For this week's fortnight-long lab we were each assigned a Florida County - mine was Gulf County, which is on the northwest Florida coast - and were required to find data on the Web for that county. We had to find 11 separate kindsn of data: county boundary; cities and towns; public land; roads; hydrography (one line file, one polygon file); two of four landcover/plant/wetland data files (I chose strategic habitat conservation areas and land cover); and adjacent raster datasets that included any four (making up a full quad) digital ortho quarter-quads (DOQQs), any one digital elevation model (DEM) adjacent to the DOQQ, and any one digital raster graphic (DRG) adjacent to the DEM. We were allowed to create a maximum of three maps and three maps is what I created.

Providentially most of the files were available through the FLorida Geographic Data Library, in usable format with the Albers Equal Area Conic projection (which I kept). The first difficulty was in trying to find and then download the raster datasets (DEM, DRG, DOQQ). I still haven't mastered FTP file transfer, and had trouble unzipping some files. I also had some that I was unable to reproject properly, although it's not visible here. Unfortunately although each of my raster datasets is adjacent to another one of a different type, they're not adjacent in the order described above.

The other difficult thing was organizing my files in ArcMap and settling on a layout. I need to learn to manage my files better. I do keep a paper trail of what I've downloaded, but I need to learn how to manage new data layers (Do I need to open a new ArcMap document every time I want a different map? Can I make extra data frames invisible in the layout?) and I am now wary of the Bookmark function, since after I created bookmarks, in Data View, I pressed Bookmark while in layout view and it irremediably shrank my map. Back to square 1...

But on the plus side, I have learned quite a bit about finding GIS data on the web.

One note about the maps: I used the maximum permitted three maps because there was so much data in the hydrography maps (though I removed some values) and land cover (I generalized some categories). Some of the data in these files overlaps - wetlands, marshes, streams, conservation areas - so it's confusing to have it all on one or even two maps. Maybe if I were more proficient I could do it though!