Exercise 1

ACTIVE LEARNING EXERCISE 1

Scenario

The NC Geological Survey has been investigating a landslide at the Blue Ridge Motel in Asheville. They have found the landslide area to be unstable and a threat to public health. They are working with you, the Buncombe County Public Health GIS Specialist to determine all people living within 1/2 mile of the landslide location. Create a map for this project using data available from the Buncombe County GIS website using ArcMap and upload map to blog.

Exercise

1. Go to the Buncombe County, NC GIS site (http://www.buncombecounty.org/governing/depts/GIS/dataDownload.asp) download the following layers: Parcels, Street Centerlines, and Landslides. Put these in your folder for this work. (also need Buncombe County boundarylayer for overview map)
2. Open these layers in map data view window
3. Select the Blue Ridge Motel landslide record using the "select by attribute" query and export record to be used as layer.
4. Create a 1/2 mile buffer around the Blue Ridge Motel landslide location using the ArcToolbox->Analysis Tools ->Proximity ->Buffer function
5. Select parcels within half mile of Blue Ridge Motel landslide location using select by location query using 1/2 mile buffer layer. Open attribute table of parcels query to find out number of parcels in buffer zone (n=386)
6.Create the map of landslide area
7. Insert new data frame containing layers for Blue Ridge Motel landslide, Buncombe County boundary and Class 2 streets from streets layer (I-26 and I-240 provide visual frame of reference for overview map).
8. Go to Layout view to compose map with various map elements including study area map, overview map, legend, north arrow and scale bar.
9. Export map layout to Jpeg file and upload file to blog.

Summary

1. Aquired data from Buncombe County GIS website
2. Explored file management issues using ArcCatalog -mapped flash drive directories, put extracted files in same directory
3. Explored ArcMap capabilities in data view including adding and organizing layers in the file directory, using ArcToolbox to create buffer, querying data by attribute and by location, performing simple analysis using query attribute table to find number of parcel in buffer zone. We also customized symbology and display properties of map layers.
4. Explored ArcMap capabilities in layout view including basic map composition using data frames and inserting various map elements -title, legend, scalebar, overviw map, nnorth arrow.
5. Exported JPEG file of map and upload JPEG file to blog.

This was a good introductory tour of ArcCatalog and ArcMap that produced a map which we exported and uploaded to our blogs.