Introductory Exercises for GIS Using ArcMap & ArcCatalog

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There are global environment settings applied to all functions used in the project. To view the globalenvironment settings: Right click in the “Toolbox” display area Select “Environments…”.Environments set here will apply to all tools used in the project. Environments for individual tools canalso be set when running that tool if the global settings are not appropriate for some reason.Click on “Workspace”The default “Current Workspace” is a geodatabase where you installed ArcGIS, which meansthat geoprocessing outputs will be stored there. Change this file path to your current GIS workingfolder. Many geoprocessing tools also provide the option to save outputs to a specific location(which can be different from the input data folder).If you specify a particular folder here, as suggested above, all geoprocessing outputs will be storedin the specified location. This may be useful if you want to have a folder that contains onlyderived data layers, for example. The “Scratch Workspace” is where temporary files will be written during geoprocessing tasks.You are not likely to access these files, so you can specify a particular folder if you like, or leavethe default. Click “OK” to close the Environments dialog box.Adding a Data LayerA data layer is a representation of a class of similar features drawn within a data frame. Each datalayer within the data frame has a legend that describes the features. Its attribute table can be queried torepresent only chosen features. The data layer can also be restricted to a certain feature class fordisplay. Click on the Add Data icon or select File Add Data.8
Navigate to the correct directory and select the hydrography, road, and town boundary layers all atonce. This is done by selecting the first data layer, and then while holding down the Control key,select the other layers. Add the full suite for the data frame by clicking “Add”.Notice that the icons for each data layer represent the data type. Vector features are shown by points,lines, and polygons, respectively. Raster data are shown by a grid icon.To display layers in the map view simply click on the check box next to the appropriate data layer. Bydefault all layers will be displayed when added.Repeat the process to add the soils data. When you try to add these data, you will notice that youare presented with a warning message about differing coordinate systems:Here, the data are provided in a different datum, which is system of fixed, very well known locationsaround the world used as permanent reference points for geolocation. The shapefiles we addedpreviously are in World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 83) and here we have data in North AmericanDatum 1927 (NAD 27). Geospatial researchers have devised equations that allow data transformationfrom one datum to another, and we must employ one here to ensure that all of the layers we want toprocess are registered to the same coordinate system. As the warning indicates, differences amongcoordinate systems could lead to erroneous calculations.Click “Transformations”Select “GCS_North_American_1927” from the list under “Convert from”Select “GCS_WGS_1984” from the dropdown list under ‘Into”9
Page 1 and 2: Introductory Exercises for GIS Usin
Page 3 and 4: Now scroll to the section labeled
Page 5 and 6: Using ArcCatalogArcGIS shapefiles c
Page 7: Click “Add”, then “OK, then
Page 11 and 12: Notice that ArcMap asks whether you
Page 13 and 14: In the toolbox window, select “Co
Page 15 and 16: There are several lakes found throu
Page 17 and 18: Click on the edge of Beseck Lake in
Page 19 and 20: Part II: Locating Prime Farmland in
Page 21 and 22: Prime Farmland Soils Prime Farmlan
Page 23 and 24: You have now located and effectivel
Page 25 and 26: Choose Aggregated Farmland and Buff
Page 27 and 28: You have now identified the most su
Page 29: Each element can be edited individu

Introductory Exercises for GIS Using ArcMap & ArcCatalog

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