Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Communicating GIS Lab 7

This week we spent time learning about terrain elevation an how we can visualize it effectively in ArcGIS. We started with elevation data and in this example added land cover polygon data. The elevation data is useful by itself, but it is hard to visualize what is high terrain and what is lower terrain. To give a better picture I executed a hillshade with the standard altitude and elevation to shed a little light on the terrain. With the hillshade you can see the actual ridges and valleys of the area and determine slopes better than the flat gray scale data. Then I took land cover data and adjusted the symbology to show the different types of features in their actual colors (for the most part), some are altered to distinguish between types of vegetation easier on the map.
Finally with both layers displayed correctly I adjusted the transparency of the land cover layer to allow the hillshade layer to be visible underneath it. This creates the illusion that the 3D hillshade is colored with the land cover data. Then by adding the standard map elements and trying to balance the awkwardly shaped area as best as possible, I was able to produce an effective map representing elevation and land cover data in one.

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