Grand Canyon GIS Mapping
The Grand Canyon National Park located in Arizona and founded almost one hundred years ago back in 1919. As one of the earliest National Parks and World Heritage sites it is easy to see why the park has been inscribed on the UNESCO List of World Heritage sites in that it demonstrates significant outstanding universal value through its massive canyon system.
Using the QGIS GIS software I have created several maps illustrating the nearest City, nearest river, topographic relief and a satellite image of the site.
To start off I downloaded the World Heritage point data from the UNESCO Website and separated out the Grand Canyon’s point data onto another shapefile in my GIS project. Next, I downloaded the Natural Earth country shapefile to overlay the United States boundaries onto the map. Also on the Natural Earth I downloaded the rivers shapefile and overlaid that on top of the state map. I added in point data for the largest cities in close proximity to the Grand Canyon then added reference information such as labels, a north arrow, and scale bar.
To create the topographic map of the landscape I downloaded the NASA DEM file of the area and colorized it to differentiate the different altitudes represented from the air as well as converted the DEM file into a hillshade in the QGIS program. I chose to colorize the map with red being lowest elevation and green being the highest elevation. I changed the transparency of the hillshade and adjusted the look of the map until I found it acceptable.
For the last two maps I inserted the Natural Earth topography and the Google Earth satellite imagery from the opensource layer plugin of the region and just overlaid the parts of the map that I thought best illustrated the parts of the map I was trying to highlight. Mainly, the Colorado River and the National Park boundary .
