Project 3

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National Atlas Data

The theme of my maps focuses on the land cover of the five states I have lived in throughout my life. They are Massachusetts (where I was born,) Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Rhode Island (where I live now.) I am studying Biology and Environmental Science at Sweet Briar College and some of the classes I am currently taking, Plants and Human Affairs and Field Natural History, inspired me to look at vegetation growth in these areas. I also wanted to look at the effects of population growth. I chose a ten year period to compare—from 1990-2000. Knowing that population is increasing exponentially almost everywhere and the impact that humans have on the environment, I decided that the average vegetation growth would potentially decrease over time. I found the information I needed at www.nationalatlas.gov and used it to create one layout with two data frames showing average vegetation growth in MA, RI, VA, NC, and GA for 1990 and the same thing for 2000. Then using the population data, I made a double bar graph to compare the populations for the five states for the same years. What I found was not what I had expected. In fact, as population increases in those states, it appears that so does vegetation growth.  It would be interesting to find out why.

My second layout has four data frames showing different types of (vegetative) land cover. The first and third are classification and causes of forest fragmentation which can be due to urbanization of naturally forested areas because of population growth. The more people there are, the more space is needed to provide them with homes and other impervious surfaces, and forests are often cut down or broken up (fragmented) in order to accomplish this. The second data frame shows the species of trees that make up the forest types, and the fourth is invasive species cover, which could be one reason why vegetation growth has increased—introduction of non-native plants.

This project was actually difficult at first to get the data to show up properly in my map document. But it was easy to fix and once that was taken care of everything that followed was a breeze. I had fun doing this project because I did not get behind right off the bat like on the second project. I liked the information I was working with and the maps I made, especially because it got to choose a topic that was specific to my interests and not do the exact same thing as everyone else. Finding the data, downloading it, and unzipping it took a long time and a lot of patience because of Lazlo’s slowness at times. Also, making the graph was a little bit hard but once I figured it out I had no problems. I really enjoyed this project and am proud of my maps!