Cartography Student Spotlight

GIS3015 Cartographic Skills, Instructor, Mrs. Penelope Bishop Mitchell

Isarythmic Mapping

The Isarythmic Lab is designed to work with the varying isarithmic symbolization methods as well as use the Spatial Analyst extension to establish contour lines over raster data.  Students applied the hillshade effect to both contiguous tone and hypsometric tint symbologies, creating an informative map of Washington state precipitation.

Student Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the PRISM Interpolation Method
• Work with continuous raster data
• Implement continuous tone symbology
• Utilize the Spatial Analyst Extension
• Implement hypsometric symbology
• Employ hillshade relief
• Use the Int Tool to convert floating raster values to integers
• Manually classify data
• Create contours using the Contour List Tool
• Use the Spatial Analyst Toolbar to create graphic contours
• Compile maps using craftsmanship to create unique and polished Isarithmic maps
• Summarize and present lab objectives and outcomes

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT AWARDS

The following student was chosen for their exceptional work on the Isarythmic Mapping assignment:

Laura Simpkins

About Laura: Laura lives in Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia with her husband and 2 kitties. She has an undergraduate degree in environmental science from University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Laura has interned with the park service at Grand Canyon NP and worked for the WV dept. of environmental protection in watershed management. Currently she is an environmental educator at a children's museum. She loves working with kids, but is ready for a new adventure. Laura joined this GIS program to gain some technical skills to help her set out on a new path hopefully in environmental resource management. She is interested in native plants, wetlands, rivers, streams, creeks, cricks, and playing in the woods. Welcome back to the spotlight, Laura!

What we like: This lab focused on different methods of isarythmic mapping and emphasized the use of the hillshade effect with two different symbologies.  Armed with precipitation data acquired from PRISM, the students were tasked creating contour lines of rainfall values for the state of Washington.  Laura was selected for this week’s spotlight due to her attention to detail when creating these deliverables.  Her legend was very neat and displayed the color ramp at equal intervals, she also made sure to include the necessary projection information, not leaving any data out!  When using the create contour lines tool in ArcMap, the contour interval is not automatically noted in the final output.  Queuing into this detail Laura goes the extra step to label the contour lines as to paint the complete picture for the viewer!  Finally with the deliverables met Laura establishes the relative geographic extent by placing a basemap and labeling larger cities.  These reasons paired with extraordinary craftsmanship is why Laura was chosen for this week’s student spotlight!  Great work Laura!