This week’s lab introduced us or had us revisit, contours, hillshade, and land cover. For the land cover map, I included an elevation layer that I used a raster function Hillshade on. In the Hillshade function, I created two new layers, first the traditional followed by a multi-directional hillshade type. The multi-directional, in my opinion, did not work as well visually as the traditional. I left the traditional hillshade type in the map using the default settings of 315 for the azimuth and 45 for the altitude.
The next layer was the land cover to determine the symbology for. This type of land cover was set in Yellowstone at altitudes of a few thousand feet with ground cover having trees and without trees. The land cover layer is a raster layer with 15 different features in the attribute table. When setting the symbology I grouped similar attributes, for example, lodgepole pine with lodgepole pine. This resulted in three groups making it easier to classify, which makes it easier to understand. The land cover layer has a transparency set at 25%, it was hard to determine what was best at first and it does take time to find out the best percentage. This was optimal because of the elevation colors. The elevation has no transparency, I chose the ESRI elevation #2. It does not have the distinctive greens and browns but still properly conveys elevation. Hypsometric tinting shows relative elevation but in this map, it was intended to be more supportive of the land cover layer. A method recommended by Cynthia Brewer is curvature to “deepen the valleys and highlight the ridges.” I tried it out but I will need to work on it more, it did not make very much sense when looking at it compared to the Hillshade function.
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