Lab 1 Global Population Change

Lab 1 Global Population Projections

This week in World Regional Geography we discussed the origins of geography, a word derived from the Greek terms geo meaning "the Earth" and graphia meaning "to write" literally translating to writing about the earth. The "Father of Geography" is considered to be Eratosthenes, who wrote a book on the subject in the 3rd century B.C.  Although his map of "The Known World" is rudimentary, it is still quite an accomplishment.   We discussed the spatial perspective and Relative Location versus Absolute Location, with relative indicating a position in relation to a known object or place and absolute being in Lat and Long.  We discussed Geographic Information Science (GIS) using computers and satellite data which we would use in the lab for this week.  We learned about plate tectonics and how the movement of different plates cause different types of landforms across the surface of the earth.  The book also discussed how you can use GIS to observe global data such as climate change of population growth, the second being the topic of our weekly lab.  

Lab 1 for this week, we worked with GIS to observe global population projections. We downloaded the data and created the layer.  What we observed was Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to have the most population grown along with parts of the Middle East, New Guinea, and Guatemala.  These countries were highlights in red for most growth while Russia, Eastern Europe, Greenland, Japan, and China were all highlighted in blue indicating the least population growth.  We used the attributes table to determine the top 10 countries with the largest projected population in 2050:  India, China, Nigeria, U.S., Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. We utilized the click on country function to access population data from the attributes table.  I chose Mexico having the following information: Multiple 1.25, Petgro 24.65, Pop 2015 125,235,587, and Pop 2050 156,101,764.  Finally, we used other features of GIS to customize the colors and change different attributes of the map to make it more intuitive.  




 

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