Lab 5: Development of a Field Navigation Map

Introduction

If technology once again fails you, it is important to be able to know how to get from place to place by using an "old school" map. In order to do this though we first must make this map. We will go into greater detail about making these maps later on in this blog post, but the major factor which will make this map usable is the grid we will be adding to it which will have a set amount of feet/degrees between each grid mark. This map will be used to locate points at the Priory in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We will use a pace count to create a trail to locate the said points at the Priory.

Pace Count: A pace count is a set number of steps, starting with either your right or left leg, and then counting every time your opposite foot hits the ground. So if you start with your right leg, you count every time your left food hits the ground.

Methods

In order to understand a map we must know roughly how many paces were in 100 yards. Walking 100 yards and counting every time you go one pace I had a count of 62 paces per 100 yards. This information will be useful in the next lab as that is when we will be going out into the field.

The second part of this lab was to create two base maps, the first using feet as the unit of measurement and the second using degrees. In order to create the maps we used data from the Priory Geodatabase created by Dr. Joseph Hupy of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Geography and Anthropology Department. The information I used for my maps was aerial imagery from ESRI ArcMap and then the Priory Boundary to indicate the study area. A 50 foot by 50 foot grid was over laid on the map as well.

The two maps also contained very important elements such as;
-North Arrow
-A Scale Bar in meters
-Relative Fraction Scale
-Projection and Coordinate System
-Grid, properly labeled in correct units
-Background layer (aerial imagery)
-Data Sources Used
-And lastly a Watermark (creators name)

Results


Map 1 uses the NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15 projection
Map 2 uses GCS_WGS_1984

Map 1 has 50 foot grid dividers
Map 2 has the same but instead of feet it is listed in Degrees