In labs 1, 2, and 3 in this course, I have learned a handful of valuable skills using ArcGIS that I have confidence I could use for many different situations.
However, the skill I feel most proud of is my ability to comfortably manage creating polygons for a layer manually and creating a feature class. This may seem a simple job, but at first I found it very challenging conceptually in ArcGIS. However, now that I fully understand the theory of thought behind locating a correct coordinate system and attaching a layer to that coordinate system, the ‘creating a feature class’ skill seems the most valuable to me as it is so versatile. I now know how to create an entire class of polygons that I know how to build and edit, name and save, so that I can manually have control over the layers that I’m using. By learning how to create a new layer and having the responsibility to make sure it looked and behaved correctly in the program, I am now much more prepared to begin building maps myself.
In this lab, we found that 15.5% of Vancouver’s area is in danger should a tsunami occur that impacted areas of 15m elevation or less. We found this by finding the area of the Vancouvermask_Danger layer (20314735.555201 square kilometres) and dividing it by the area of the Vancouvermask layer (131033339.950334 square kilometres).