Data Downloading, Interoperability, and Working with Projections

Goal/Objectives

This lab was the one referenced in my first blog post that was, until recently, unaccessable due to the government shutdown. This was supposed to be the first part of a multi-leveled lab course aimed at the sustainability of Frac Sand mines in Tremealeau County, WI. This  lab is now part three in the installment. The purpose of this lab was to learn how to download data from online government sources, making these data collections interoperable and to fix them with popper projections. Several different government web sources were utilized in the creation of this lab. They were as follows: National Atlas, USGS National Map Viewer, Web Soil Survey, and the USDA.

General Methods

The general methods that were utilized here consisted of many different services. While downloading data from the online resources I had to use the web explorer device to unzip and save the data into my folder in our classes folder. Some of the sources allowed data transfer straight from their sites to my destination, while others offered an email containing the data. After all of the data was downloaded a personal geodatabase was created to store all of the tables and shapefiles. I assigned the NAD_1983(2011)_Wisconsin_TM in order to get the best picture of the whole state. I didn't only have information covering Trempealeau county so I had to use a common coordinate system for the whole state that would accurately portray all of the data. A feature dataset was also created to help in creating a relationship between the soils data and the component table. The soil data went under a process of joining both component data and a layer that contained a legend as well. Importing of a SSURGO geodatabase into access was also done to give the table a reference. Feature classes, tables and rasters were all imported into my ArcMap in order to create my final product. As all of the data was added to my database it was projected on the fly using my above coordinate system.

Results

The result of this project was several maps that were projected into the same coordinate system to best reflect the data in the Wisconsin region. The below data in Figure 2 shows the all of the data that I download: railroads, DEM, soils, NLCD, and NASS cropland. Figure 1 shows all of the data quality/metadata from the data that was downloaded as well.

Figure 1:

 

Figure 2:

Conclusion

So far in our investigation we have created the tools to have a strong database for analyzing the spatial connections of Wisconsin, it's mines, and the effects that they are having on people and the environment. We now have several databases full of data on the physical features of Wisconsin, along with knowledge of what frac sand mines are. It will be interesting to see how our investigation continues to progress as we compile and analyze data more acutely.

References
Lo, Chor Pang and Albert K.W. Yeung. "Concepts and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems." (2006).