Module 1: World Country Population Density and City Locations Map

This week's lab focused on the introduction of ESRI's ArcGIS Pro software. The main goal for this lab was to learn the ArcGIS Pro interface and create a simple map of the world's city locations and differentiate countries based on their population density.  

Map Setup:

In order to keep the map uncluttered and keep the focus on the intended map's purpose, the city and country locations, I chose a world topographic basemap. As for the map orientation, a landscape orientation seemed to fit the map extent the best.

Data:

To start out, we were given two shapefiles, a "Cities" shapefile (point data) and a "World Countries" shapefile (polygon data). These were layered so that the country polygons were overlaid by the city locations. If the layer order was reversed, the city locations would have been hidden underneath the country polygons. Therefore, this shows the importance of choosing the correct layer order for your map. 

Symbology:

The symbology for this map was kept simple. The "Cities" symbology was set to small, black points. A larger point size would have made some cities overlap with each other and a smaller point size would have been hard to see. In addition to city locations, the map was intended to differentiate countries based on their population density. By changing the symbology to "Graduated Colors" and setting the classes based on the population density attribute, each country was automatically assigned a shade of blue, with white having low population density and dark blue having high population density. This allows the viewer to see, based on this data, the countries that have the highest population density are China and India. 

My Thoughts:

This was a good intro map to get used to ArcGIS Pro setup. There are a lot of tools available and it can be overwhelming to try and sort through all of them when you're first starting out, but this week's lab really showed the main buttons and toolbars that I will likely use for all my future projects. 

New Skills Achieved:  

• Adding shapefile data via Catalog folder connections
• Editing symbology
• Creating a new map layout
• Exporting a map layout as a PDF