Assignment 3

(21GE602)

Thematic Maps

- by Advaith S Pillai
The area of interest that I had identified for this lab was the country of Sri Lanka. Despite being
a relatively small island nation, there is a lot of variation in topography & elevation within it. The
process of plotting thematic maps centered around Sri Lanka began with downloading the
shape-file vectors from www.diva-gis.org.

After this, the relevant DEM tiles (Digital Elevation Model) were downloaded from the dedicated
website of USGS & added to the existing project, after connecting to the relevant folder. A total
of 12 DEM tiles were downloaded to cover the entire region of the island.
Since working on 12 separate DEM tiles is not practical, the tiles were combined to form a single
raster layer. This was achieved by going to Analysis → Tools → Toolboxes → Data
management tools → Raster → Raster dataset & choosing the ‘Mosaic to new raster’ option.
The resultant raster was as follows :
To extract only the relevant elevation data from the new mosaic raster, the masking tool was
employed. The inputs for this tool were the mosaic raster & the shape-file vector, with the
resultant masked output being as follows :

The symbology of the masked raster was modified to make the output more presentable, which
resulted in the following :

From this raster file, two Thematic maps were created…

Thematic Map1 : Hydrology & Stream order

1. Firstly, the masked raster file was given as an input to the Fill tool (Spatial analyst tool →
Hydrology → Fill) generating the following raster file.

2. Next, the Fill raster was given as an input for Flow direction tool (Hydrology → Flow
direction) generating the following output raster file.
 3. Subsequently this output raster was provided as input for the Flow Accumulation Tool
(Hydrology → Flow accumulation).

4. The output raster from the Flow accumulation operation was fed as input to the Raster
calculation tool (Spatial analyst tool → Map algebra → Raster calculator) and the
following threshold was defined - “Flow_accumulation”>500.

5. The output raster from this operation was fed as input to the ‘Stream order’ tool
(Hydrology → Stream order) and the resulting output was as follows :

The different stream orders have been highlighted here with different colors.
 6. To make the resultant map more visually appealing and to consolidate the data from the
resulting output raster into a single feature, the ‘Stream to feature’ tool (Hydrology →
Stream to feature) was used. Input for this tool being the Stream order raster and the
output was as follows :

The mosaic raster layer was selected to yield the final stream order feature with a better
contrast, which appeared as follows :
Though the color combinations of the result was apt, the symbology of the different constituent
attributes were altered to reflect the order of the stream better. Streams with a higher order were
represented using a thicker line. The ensuing result was as follows :
Thematic Map2 : Drainage Basins
Finally, this Stream feature raster was fed as input to the ‘Basin’ tool (Hydrology → Basin) to
generate the different river basins within Sri Lanka. This resulted in the following output raster :
Thematic Map3 : Contour & TIN

The masked raster file was given as input for the ‘Contour’ tool (3D analyst tool → Raster
surface → Contour) and the contour interval was specified as 10m. This resulted in a very
detailed map that gave the variation in height with high precision.

However, as viewing this map for the whole island of Sri Lanka in a layout format would result in
a cluttering of details leading to an unaesthetic presentation, the conscious decision was made
to compromise on this high level of detail and a contour map with contour interval 50m was
chosen instead. Thus the ‘Contour’ tool was applied once again with this new parameter
resulting in the following raster file :
Despite the level of detailing being lesser than the previous case, this contour interval
represents the data better when considering the large area to be mapped.
Finally, the TIN (Triangulated Irregular Network) was created with the ‘Create TIN’ tool (3D
analyst tool → Data Management → TIN → Create TIN). The 2nd contour map was used as an
input for this tool & the 2 parameter details were given as inputs. Specifically for the contour
map (Height field=, SF_type = masspoints) & the area boundary map (height field= None,
SF_type= softclip). This resulted in an output TIN map which resulted as follows :

TINs are an effective means to represent surface morphology & are a form of vector-based
digital geographic data, constructed by triangulating a set of vertices to form a network of
triangles. ArcGis Pro uses the Delaunay distance ordering (triangulation) method which ensures
that no vertices lie within the interiors of any circumcircles of triangles in the network. Thus the
minimum interior angles of the triangles are maximized and thin triangles are avoided as much
as possible.

The three Thematic maps were drawn on Layouts & exported. These have been included as
attachments along with this report.