Geog 1800 Beginning GIS

Final Project
Gary Whitton
Project Goals
My intention from the beginning was to answer some fairly basic questions about a series of
dinosaur track sites that I was aware of, north and south of Moab, in the southeast corner of
Utah. The first goal was to find the two sites I had not yet been to. I also wanted to pin down
both the age of all four dinosaur track locations, as well as who owned the land under each.
I already knew the answers to these questions were online, but I wanted to see if I could
verify everything using several data layers in ArcGIS. I experimented with quite a few,
especially several base layers to use for aesthetic reasons, as well as convenient labeling of
geographic features.

Layers Used:
Visitor Information Guide to fossils in Utah (Utah Geological Survey)
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=5f458f2107164e4cb8e54c26ebf93e1f
Geologic map of the Moab and the eastern part of the of the San Rafael Desert 30x60
quadrangles, Grand and Emery Counties, Utah, and Mesa County, Colorado
http://ugspub.nr.utah.gov/publications/GIS_maps/Moab3060.zip
Utah AGRC
Land Ownership Layer
http://gis.utah.gov/data/sgid-cadastre/land-ownership/(Land Ownership Layer)
Roads Layer
http://gis.utah.gov/data/sgid-transportation/roads-system/(Roads Layer)
ESRI ArcGIS Services
Elevation/World_Hillshade
http://services.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/services

Data Analysis
Site

Lat

Copper Ridge

38.829
96

Willow Springs
Mill Canyon
Poison Spider

38.700
75
38.712
11
38.533

Long
109.76324
6
109.64227
5
-109.73946
-

Rock Age GIS

Rock Age
Official

Owners
hip

Holocene/Pleisto
cene

Jurassic

Federal

Jurassic

Jurassic

Federal

Jurassic
Jurassic

Jurassic
Jurassic

Federal
Federal

11

109.60865
8

As noted in red above, one of the sites did not match up age-wise with what is officially
reported by BLM. I have attached a graphic below that might indicate the reason. This
particular GPS point is particularly close to a Jurassic layer (yellow/orange) and a
Holocene/Pleistocene Layer (Gray). So I am wondering if it is off slightly. That said I almost
thought a second site (Mill Canyon) was off, but it turns out there are two dinosaur sites at
Mill Canyon, one is a track site and other is actually bones in the rock face of a cliff and the
former is from Cretaceous and the latter is from the Jurassic. They are pretty close to each
other, and near a boundary between rock layers of different ages.
Copper Ridge Close-up of Geology Unit Boundary.

Project Outcome
I think the first issue I ran into was a conflict that other people using ArcGIS probably
encounter, especially if they have competing goals. My original goal was to answer some
spatial questions, the answers to which arent necessarily conducive to the creation of a
professional printable map. I say this, because I realized quickly that bringing in multiple
layers, with all the labels and symbols included made for a really messy map, which I would
never want to send to a tourism department. But at the same time those labels and symbols
answered the questions I noted above. In the end this was probably the simplest part of this
exercise.

Creating an aesthetically pleasing map on the other hand proved more difficult. This
required adjusting the transparency on various layers, and ordering them appropriately. A lot
of this was intended to control the information overload. I made some adjustments to labels,
including associating the right colors with what was displayed on the map and changing
some names of things in the attribute table to shorten them. At one point I just completely
turned off the geologic unit labels because even changing their colors to light gray didnt
control the overcrowded nature of them. I almost left them off the map completely, and
focused on putting the information in the legend, but eventually I figured out a way to
reduce the number of labels by using a query function to limit the labels displayed to larger
geologic units.
The only other issue I ran into dealt with a horizontal legend for land owners, something I
didnt use in the end. The default legend in ArcGIS is vertical, and fixing it isnt really
intuitive. But once I adjusted the number of columns, figured out how to get some the labels
to go away with the styles function and figured out how to change the size of the patches I
got it work.
There was one last thing I did try purely for fun, and that was to see if I could get the
hyperlinks that are associated with the Dinosaur Tracks layer point features to make it
through the conversion of the map file to a PDF. I did some research online to see if I could
answer this question, and came across one idea, but in the end, everything else I read said it
wasnt possibleeven when you use the export features to PDF function.