Lab 1

Ethan Nauman

In 2012 Clear Vision Eau Claire joined partnership with University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and it's GIS students to help construct the development of the Confluence Project located in downtown Eau Claire. This plan is to make ground on a new community arts center/ university student housing and commercial retail complex.  The arts center will also house three performance spaces, galleries, offices, classrooms, studios, and much more. 

    The goal of this lab is for the GIS students to become familiar with spatial data sets used in public land management, administration, and land use methods to prepare base maps for the confluence project. A few objectives are to digitize  the Confluence Project site, learn about the Public Land Survey System, create a brief legal description of the two parcels that are given, and build a map layout of each of the major thematic feature classes. 

    This next section I am going to try to explain some of the major steps that I used to set up the maps for the Confluence Project and how I came about my final maps for this lab. I started by adding the data frame for the city of Eau Claire, this is the base for all six of the maps I created. From there I was able to add data for each of the different maps from parcel data, roads, zoning quarters, voting districts, and even civil boundaries. I needed to outline the area of proposed site for the project, once I completed the boundaries for one of the maps I was able to save the proposed site so I could upload it to all the maps. This saved me quite a bit of time rather than having to outline the site for every map. One unique tool that I learned to use in this lab project was the transparency tool. I knew there was a tool used for this but I never used it before, I used this tool on three of my maps I created: census boundaries, voting districts, and civil boundaries. This tool allowed me to show the underlying layer of the aerial view of the city of Eau Claire while still allowing my top layers to show what I wanted. 

file://localhost/Users/EthanNauman/Desktop/Screen%20Shot%202014-02-22%20at%201.03.11%20PM.png

For the Parcel Data map you can see the proposed site, the waterways that it is located on and the parcel areas for the map. The PLSS features map shows the quarters and quadrangles for the city of Eau Claire and where the proposed site is located. The civil boundaries map shows the three different boundaries along with the proposed site. The census boundaries map is my favorite because you can see the population of the surrounding area around the proposed site. The zoning map shows the different zones located around the proposed site, and the voting district map shows the different voting zones located around the proposed site. 

I am overall happy with how my maps turned out besides the zoning map, I feel that I could've added more or made it more appealing to the eye to make it jump off the spreadsheet better. This is my first lab for this course and I am hoping that I will be able to contribute the information and techniques I used on these maps to other labs and my job, that I hope to have in this field in the future.

 

Ethan Nauman