Data Gathering

Goal and Objectives
The main goal of this assignment is to familiarize ourselves with downloading data from several sources on the internet, as well as importing this data to ArcGIS by building a geodatabase. We completed the following objectives: Downloading the data from several websites, importing the data and joining tables, and finally building a geodatabase while projecting all of the data.

General Methods
First we downloaded all of the necessary data. In total, we downloaded data for railroads, land cover, elevation, cropland land cover, and SSURGO data. Along with the SSURGO data, we used a master drainage index table to analyze the drainage levels in Trempealeau County.  We downloaded the data from resources such as the USDA NRCS Web Soil Survey, the USGS National Map Viewer, the USDA National Geospatial Data Gateway, and the US National Atlas. A File Geodatabase was then created with ArcMap, and each feature was imported into the database. I had to project each feature so that they the coordinate system was universal for each feature class. For this exercise, I chose the NAD 1983 Wisconsin Transverse Mercator projection. Figure 1 below displays all the data that we gathered.

Figure 1. Clockwise from upper left: Cropland data and Railroad data, NLCD land cover data, Digital Elevation Model, and the soil data with Drainage Index being displayed.

We then had to look through t he metadata for each piece of data that we used and find the following information: Scale, Effective Resolution, Minimum Mapping Unit, Planimetric Coordinate Accuracy, Lineage, Temporal Accuracy, and Attribute Accuracy. Figure 2 displays a table with this information.

Figure 2. As can be seen in this table, there wasn't much to work with, in respect to the data's metadata.

Conclusion

I thought that this exercise was very important, because it revealed to us valuable resources of acquirable data. With these sources at our finger tips it should be a lot easier for us to access any necessary data for further research and mapping.