Overview Map

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10-14-2015 09:24 AM
RickeyFight
MVP Regular Contributor

What layers are essential for a good overview map?

I am thinking about the scale of a sub-watershed.

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5 Replies
IanMurray
Frequent Contributor

Rickey,

This question is very open-ended.  It is highly dependent on what you are overviewing, what sort of data you want to show.  You should consider who your audience is, what information you want to convey, etc.

Could you give a better example of what you are trying to accomplish?  Also, sub-watershed level is very vague, since watersheds are broken down by level already (at least in US you have HUC-2 level to HUC-12 level).

RickeyFight
MVP Regular Contributor

Ian,

I am thinking something like this.

overview.pdf

Am I missing anything major that you can see?

I am thinking a general map that shows location of lots.

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DarrenWiens2
MVP Honored Contributor

As Ian Murray​ says, this is quite open-ended, but here are some subjective opinions I have:

- I think a good map should function as a standalone product (e.g. if it fell out of a report and someone picked it up, would it still make sense?). The first thing that strikes me is that if I didn't happen to know where Ashland is, this map would lose me immediately. I would add an inset map showing Ashland in its larger context, at least within the county, probably within the state.

- add the coordinate reference system. While you're at it, some other useful info would be, date, author (you), reviewer, data sources, client name, etc.

- it's a little hard to differentiate between forest plan units (e.g. where does Cottle Philips begin and end?). I don't know if that's important to your story.

- Should add labels, at least, for Ashland and I-5

Feedback can go on and on. You need to decide what you need to say and how others not as close to the project as you are, will view it. If you have a client or supervisor, ask them - they probably already know what they want and no matter what you do, there will be changes.

You may be interested in checking out Cartotalk, where you can upload maps for feedback.

RickeyFight
MVP Regular Contributor

Thank you for the feedback.

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IanMurray
Frequent Contributor

I'll go ahead and mention a few things as well

  • I would make your lake the same color as your streams instead of the color ramp.
  • Your roads show fine in the urban environment but once out in the more rugged areas are difficult to see due to the amount of contours and how wide they are.
  • Depending on audience, I might increase the number of contour labels by using the Maplex Labelling Engine.  If they are not use to reading topography, the fewer labels makes it less intuitive.
  • Are you using a color ramp on your terrain?  It seems green near the top and greyer near the bottom, which can lead to confusion.  When I see green on topo maps, I automatically think forested areas, which doesn't seem the case here.
  • Your Forest Plan Units(FPUs) have grey lines running through them(parcel lines?) I think they would look better as a single unit unless you have a good reason for the lines in there.
  • Either make the FPUs more transparent or move the streams to draw on top of the FPUs, since it is easy to lose them right now.
  • Streams seem a bit wide, especially the more minor ones.  If you information on stream order, perhaps graduated line thickness based on the stream order.  Also labels for major creek/rivers could be a nice touch.
  • If possible, see if saving as a reduced size pdf doesn't interfere with data quality.  A 60Mb pdf is rather large to work with, and from my experience, using reduced size pdfs can save alot on file size without impacting the quality much.