Lab 1: Base Data

Goal and Background:

In the spring of 2012 Clear Vision Eau Claire announced a public-private partnership between local developers, UW - Eau Claire and the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center that is developing new construction at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers in the heart of downtown Eau Claire.  This plan is called the "Confluence Project." The Goal is to develop a new community arts center/university student housing and commercial retail complex in downtown EAu Claire.  It is to start in 2014. The goals of this lab is to:

1.  Explore various datasets for the City and County of Eau Claire.
2. Digitize the Size of the Confluence Project
3. Understand the Public land survey system
4. Create a brief legal description of the two parcels
5. Build a layout with each of the major thematic features classes

Methods:
 The method I used was by reading up on all of the different terminologies that are being used in the lab.  This helped a ton when I came to understanding all of the different steps or questions being asked of me as the lab went on.

Objective 1:

Objective 1 was to become familiar with the information about the Confluence Project.  This was obtained by using data available in the city and County of Eau Claire websites.  These websites were used to provide us with the information also.

Objective 2:

For these objective I had to digitize the site for the confluence project.  This included two building southeast of where the confluence of the Eau Claire and Chippewa river are.  To be able to do this I had to create a New Geodatabase named "ec_confluence" To digitize I had to open up the digitizing tool bar and create nodes of the edges of the building.

Objective 3:

 In this objective I had to learn about the Public Land Survey System.  I had to create to add a basemap to a new data frame and add the feature dataset PLSS_Township from each geodatabase. These helped to teach me what township Eau Claire is part of along with understanding how the Quarter-Quarter system works.

Objective 4:

I had to create a legal description of the proposed site. I had to use the identify tool to do this because I need to find the parcel ID along with the owner of the property and other information given in the attribute system.

Objective 5:

This objective was the most fun because of how interactive it became with putting all of the information together into one exciting 6-part map.  I had to create maps showing the Civil divisions, Census Boundaries, PLSS Features, Eau Claire Parcel Data, zoning, and Voter Districts.

Sources:

City and County of Eau Claire 2013 geodatabases.

Eau Claire Regional Arts Center. Confluence Projected Site Plan. Retrieved from:
http://www.uwec.edu/alumni/confluence.