California's Population in 2007

For this assignment I decided to construct three different maps displaying California's populationi in three different ways. For my first map I organized and displayed population according to zip codes. I decided to omit border outlines for each zip code for two main reasons. The first reason was that in densely populated areas with many zip codes having small areas, such as in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, it made it difficult to read the map for the boarder lines were too close together and took away from the overall color of the zipcode representing population size and thus was hard to read. The second reason was that it made the map feel very rigid with strict boundaries which isn't the case with zipcodes. Thus by omitting zipcode boundary lines there is a flow to the map showing the distribution of California's population. This map clearly demonstrates that California's largest populations are concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley, and along Southern California's coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
My second map displays population by county. This map shows population density to a degree, however, the map displaying population by zipcode does a better job of showing areas with higher populations. Nonetheless this second map is consistent with displaying areas with larger populations such as in the Bay Area and Southern California. My last map displays California cities which have the largest populations. This map allows for comparison between the different city sizes and their populations relative to one another. I think that alone this last map is not the best representation of California's population, however, used in addition to the map of population by county, it add more detail and insight into the distribution of population in California.

Election 2008

The first map that is displayed is a replica of a New York Times map of the 2008 United States Presidential Election, followed by a map I made making improvements to the original. I did not feel the need to make very many changes due to the fact that I think the original map is quite clear in conveying its message. My first improvement, however, was brightening up the red and blue colors from their originally muted shades in order to emphasize the contrast between the republican and democratic states. I also enlarged the fonts a bit for easier reading and the states of Alaska and Hawaii are bigger too. In addition to this I changed the labels of the states to their official two letter abbreviations for the original map lacked continuity in how each state was labeled--some states had two letter abbreviations while others had their whole name. The final thing that I changed was the position of the legend and inset maps to create more balance within the entire frame.

Again, I did not feel the need to make many improvements on the original map for I found it to be quite good. I especially liked how the bar separating the heading from the map of the Continental United States also doubled as a graph for the number of electoral votes Obama received versus McCain. For the original map visit: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

Well, today I am thrilled that the Bush regime has finally come to an end and now after this historic election, Barack Obama is our 44th President. CHANGE has finally arrived :)

Cartography Lab 1 - Census 2000

For this project I joined county-level race data from the 2000 Census and used it to create maps showing the population density of various races across the continental United States. I made three individual maps displaying Asian, White and Black race categories. I used the Lambert conic projection for all of my maps. I also chose to classify the race data by using natural breaks to model the data. I feel that using natural breaks instead of a preselected range of percentages yields a more accurate representation of the data that I am displaying.

When looking at the map of black race data it shows that in the year 2000 a higher percentage of blacks lived in counties found in the Southeastern states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Also near Chicago, Illinois there is a relatively large black population. Conversely the map of whites shows low population densities in these areas with high black populations. The maps look to be almost opposites of eachother. The map of Asian race census data shows that the highest population densities of Asians are found on the West Coast, especially around the San Francisco Bay Area. A guess to why this is could be that since the West Coast of the United States is closer to Asia, it would make sense that when Asians immigrated to the US that they would choose to live in the place that required the least amount of travel.

Geography Awareness

I stumbled across this great ad yesterday in a magazine for National Geographic's My Wonderful World campaign, which promotes global knowledge for children and the expansion of geographic learning in schools. Too many people these days forget that there is much more beyond America and are either too afraid to explore beyond our borders or too egocentric to care.

To see this and other ads along with more information about the campaign visit http://www.mywonderfulworld.org/

Iraq and the Number of US Casualties

To begin this project I took a CIA jpeg image of Iraq from 2003 from the University of Texas Map Library website and used ArcMap to georeference the image in the Lambert Conformal Conic projection. I then digitized the map by “drawing” over the georeferenced jpeg image and thus made my own map of Iraq. To then make a thematic map of the casualties that the United States has thus far sustained in the war with Iraq I went to the icasualties.org website and found a map with this information. Then to the provinces layer’s attributes table I joined an excel spreadsheet data table which I made from the information I found.
From the resulting map that I made of US casualties in Iraq, the provinces of Baghdad and Al Anbar are by far the most dangerous provinces in the entire country. This would make sense since Baghdad is the capital city of Iraq, and thus its province has seen the most combat during the United States invasion of the country. Also the city of Fallujah in Al Anbar has been a hotspot for conflict between US troops and Iraqis which is demonstrated in the high number of casualties.
In the northern provinces of Iraq there are far less American casualties which is probably due to the fact that the Kurds claim this region as Kurdistan, which the United States supports. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that less fighting in this region occurs between Iraqis and American forces since the Kurds who make up the majority of Iraqis who live here are not in conflict with the United States. The central provinces of Iraq, which include Al Anbar, Salah Ad Din, Diyala, Baghdad, and Babil, fall within the United States’ occupation zone, which is why there would be more US casualties in those regions.
The provinces of Karbala, Wasit, Al Qadisyah and An Najaf are occupied by Polish-led multinational forces while the southern most provinces of Al Muthanna, Dhi Qar, Maysan and Al Basrah are occupied by British-led multinational forces. Consequently since the United States has fewer troops stationed in these provinces the map reflects the obvious conclusion that there are less American casualties in these regions. Al Basrah, however, as the southern-most province of Iraq, is also where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers meet at the Persian Gulf, and thus is a key point of entry for troops into Iraq. Thus Al Basrah has a slightly higher casualty rate than the other southern provinces which could be due to the fact that is was one of the entry points for invasion by US troops from vessels stationed in the Gulf.

Iraq

Willow Fire Analysis

In 1999 there was a fire in San Bernardino County which burned various vegetation types. This lab’s goal is to determine the total burn area, which types of vegetation were affected and to what degree. To answer these questions it required that I upload data which showed representative polygons of the burn areas over a six day time span. These various polygons sometimes overlapped at certain points, indicating that these areas continued to burn between the time periods in which the data was taken. To remove these overlaps, I combined these six polygons into one overall burn area boundary feature. Next, I merged the data containing California’s vegetation types to fall within the boundary of the burn area. I used ArcToolbox to intersect these two layers—California’s vegetation types and the burn area boundary—and thus created a new layer which showed the different vegetation types that burned in the fire. By opening the attribute table for this layer it showed ten different vegetation records, however, there are only six vegetation types. These vegetation types are Coastal Scrub, Desert Scrub, Juniper, Montane Harwood-Conifer, Pinyon-Juniper, and Urban-Agriculture. To merge the duplicate vegetation types, I used the Dissolve tool and thus concluded with an attribute table that showed the six vegetation types and the total area for each type that burned. Since the map projection being used in this project is the Universal Transverse Mercator Zone 11, measurements are all taken in meters. Our results, however, are supposed to be shown in acres, I found a website with a unit converter and converted all of the areas originally measured in square meters into acres.

In my analysis of the Willow Fire burn area in San Bernardino County, we can see that the total area of the burn site was 68,725 acres and consisted of various types of vegetation being affected by the fire. For the Urban-Agriculture vegetation type 2,052 acres were burned, which consisted of the smallest percentage of the total burn area, only about 3 percent. More significantly 21,974 acres of Pinyon-Juniper and 17704.8 acres of Desert Scrub burned in the fire, accounting for about 31 percent and 25 percent of the total burn area. It would make sense that Urban Agriculture would account for the smallest percentage of the burn site, since agriculture sites generally are well irrigated and thus could be protected better from fire damage. Desert scrub on the other hand is very dry and thus susceptible to fire. The other types of vegetation which burned in the fire were 9,655 acres of Coastal scrub accounting for 14.1% of the total burn area, 9,660 acres of Juniper which was also about 14.1% of the burn, and 7,678.3 acres of Montane Hardwood-Conifer which made up the remaining 11.2% of the fire. Ultimately we can see from the map and the analysis that it provides that there was a significant amount of damage caused by this fire. Since this area of San Bernardino County contains several vegetation types that are more flammable, such as Desert scrub and Pinyon-Juniper vegetation, fire in this area was able to spread quickly and burn tens of thousands of acres.