Spatial patterns of fisheries using a grid

[MorvenRobertson]

Hello,

I am a complete novice at GIS and am carrying out some spatial analysis for my masters thesis in Bermuda and have come across some difficulty in finding a method to use! I am attempting to show spatial patterns of change for their spearfishing and lobster fishery which they have statistics for covering the past 10 years. The statistics are recorded in relation to grid cells which are displayed on a map given to all fishermen. For instance, for the year 2011-2012 103 lobsters were caught in gird cell D5.

I am assuming I need to create the grid and clip it to my base map of Bermuda- but I am unsure of how to input the statistics data so that each cell shows in a color coded form the amount of lobster caught for each year.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated!!

[curtvprice]

Elizabeth,

I don't see any reason this would be done with a raster dataset. You probably just need to make a polygon dataset from the grid cells on your map (even digitize the map) and join your gridcell polygons to data in a table using the key ("D5" for example).

If the join is set up, you can symbolize the counts easily in ArcMap using the classified renderer.

You may want to spend some time with some of the tutorials provided with the software to get familiar with mapping data in ArcMap.