Always Be Prepared (GIS 4048- Applications in GIS)

Continuing with the Department of Homeland Security trend, we come to preparing an MEDS. What is an MEDS? It is an acronym for Minimum Essential Data Set. This is a geospatial guidance that outlines the use of GIS in respect to homeland security operations. The key objectives that were outlined are:
1. Preventing terrorist attacks within the United States.
2. Reducing the nation's vulnerability to terrorism.
3. Minimizing the damage, while speeding the recovery from natural or terrorist cause disasters.
Other initiatives include:
1. The need for quality, accurate data.
2. The ability to optimize data so it may be shared across different agencies and jurisdictions.
3. Using GIS to provide situational awareness across all stages of homeland security operations.

An MEDS is comprised of eight essential data sets, Orthoimagery, Elevation, Hydrography, Transportation, Boundaries, Structures, Land cover, and Geographic Names. Our goal with the lab was to prepare such a database, the results of which can be seen in the image provided.

After setting the mapping environment, Group Layers were created to help organize the data. Then work began on manipulating the transportation data. The U.S. Census Bureau classifies the various types of roads using the Census Feature Class Codes (CFCC). These are a capital letter followed by a two digit number that signify the type of road. This information needed to be joined with our roads layer. Select by Attribute was used to pull the local, secondary, and primary road classifications, along with changing their symbology. The scale range was also changed, this way depending on what scale you are working in, the appropriate layers would display. The land cover needed to be masked, this was done using the Import a Colormap option under the symbology properties. Finally, the Geographic Names, which are physical and cultural structures in the U.S., needed to be imported. The file was a text file and needed to be modified to be read in ArcMap. Once done, a new feature class was created using the X and Y coordinates and projected. This feature could then be further narrowed with Select by Location to only those Geographic Names in the six counties that make up the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area.

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