Final Project

Class 16: Final Class

Today we worked on and completed our final projects, and Pete lectured for about an hour. He went over our last tests and covered some material he thought we should know before leaving GIS 111. We talked about the difference between a Shapefile and a Geodatabase. Apparently a lot of people working in the field with GIS don't understand the difference, which is kind-of a scary thought because if you change the area of a polygon (or any other feature) in a Shapefile, the area field in the attribute table does not update. It makes me wonder how accurate a lot of the data out there really is, and how I would know if I downloaded data that was edited as a Shapefile.

I feel like my final project turned out pretty good. I wish I had printed the maps in color, but I'll try to get them posted here over the weekend. I hit quite a few walls, but learned a lot during the troubleshooting process. And while I would by no means call myself a GIS pro, I think I learned enough in this class to be able to do some mapping and simple analyzing in the real world.

Class 15: Final Project Day

Began our final projects today. I've decided to do the option that Pete has laid out, for simplicity's sake. For this project I will be looking at the Reed Creek watershed in Asheville, North Carolina. Streams in this watershed have shown high concentrations of sediment and other chemical runoff during periods of rain. I will be quantifying landuse and impervious surfaces in this watershed by:

Determining percentages of landuse within 300 feet of streams in the watershed;
Determining the percentage of impervious surfaces in the watershed;
and determining total length of roads (feet and miles) in the watershed.

I feel like I got a pretty good start on the project in class today. I've got all the data downloaded, and all my layers clipped to the Reed Creek watershed.