Module 3: Terrain Visualization

 For this week's lab, we explored different approaches to visualizing terrain information. We focused mainly on raster-based data and creating data from the rasters, i.e.: Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN), and then contours created from the DEM data. This lab also focused on hill shading, mainly to portray elevation data accurately. Our figure deliverable for this week's lab is a landcover map of Yellowstone National Park. The goal was to accurately display the land types and the elevation within the park. Here is the resulting map: 

My goal was to give this map a feeling that it came straight from the National Park Service, so I used scales, a north arrow, and fonts that either came straight from their styles or were closely related to it. For the colors of the land types, I wanted to use colors that closely related to their leaf colors, for example, aspen being orange for the color of the aspen tree's leaf. The other trees however are similarly all green, so I tried going with greenish colors that didn't contrast with each other. At my job, I do a lot of land cover type maps, and almost always nonforested areas are made into a neutral color that easily makes it clear that it is an outlier compared to the other land types. So, for this map, I made the non-forested areas a neutral light grayish brown. To make the map pop out more to the reader so that they know where to focus, I gave the map a sort of 3-D effect. Due to the park's awkward dimensions, I thought a landscape map would be best. This made it easier to fill in white space with the essential map elements while also making clear what the focus of the map is for the viewer.