April 16, 2016

Predicting landslides in San Bernardino

This week we took the same map used last week, but we had a different focus for what we were trying to accomplish with the presentation.

This was actually rather straight forward in that the most important aspect of this map is to show the viewer where potential landslides are in conjunction with the type of land that exists in a given area.  For instance water, industrial, residential, commercial, and so on.  So for this map more than some others I have done, it was especially vital that the colors at least had a feel for the feature it was representing. Water being blue is the most obvious. But forestry having a green or brown and maybe even industrial having a gritty ugly color might make some sense too.

Lastly it was absolutely vital that the landslides stuck out like a sour thumb. So when I need to do that, I typically will revert to a bright yellow. Luckily most of the landslides occurred over the "chaparral" areas, so the light green/tanish color was perfect to allow the landslides to be quite evident.