Creating Colour Coded Vulnerability Map

[MeganSutton]

I'm very new to ArcGIS (and GIS in general), and I'd like to create a map of the Caribbean region colour coded for certain indicators. I need each island to be a different colour depending on that indicator. Would anyone be able to direct me towards resources that might help me with this?

[StephenM]

Esri Training would be a good starting point for an introduction to ArcGIS and GIS in general. There are a lot of free courses available there. For example: Getting Started with GIS.

More specific to the map you want to create, you might search for guides and tutorials on creating choropleth maps. A few examples:

Choropleth map - GIS Wiki | The GIS Encyclopedia

Creating a Basic Choropleth Map in ArcMap

Choropleth Maps

Choropleth Mapping in ArcMap - YouTube

Basically what you'll have to do is:

1. Download the geography you want to map (oftentimes these are shapefiles), and the data for the indicators you want to map (could be in a number of different table formats)
   • Natural Earth has boundary shapefiles that may be useful here, like countries of the world
2. Identify/create a common field (like country name) in the two datasets so that you can join the geography to the table that has the data you want to map
   • Essentials of joining tables—Help | ArcGIS Desktop
3. Modify the look of the map, including data normalization, projection, classification scheme, and symbology