Introduction to Projections

Week 5 – Projections Part 1

For this week’s assignment we learned about map projections and how they work. As part of our lab assignment we were asked to show three different projections side by side:  Albers, UTM and State Plane.  We were also asked to highlight four counties in Florida. The counties were Alachua, Escambia, Miami-Dade and Polk. We were asked to show the projection comparison by area in square miles for each county.

Albers Equal Area Conic: Is used by the US Geological Survey (USGS) for maps of the conterminous United States.

UTM: Universal Transverse Mercator is one of the most used map projections; mainly used for rectifying remotely sensed data and large scale topographic mapping.

State Plane:  These are individual state’s projections; they are based on the state’s shape and geographic location.