GEOG 121 Project 5:
Census Thematic Mapping


Robert Drone

 

Reference Map
 

This is a reference map of Dunmore, PA, which is a suburb of the more well-known Scranton, PA.  This is a road map of Dunmore and the surrounding towns.  The purple areas represent urban towns.  The town boundaries are the thick red lines.  Each town's name is shown in small black lettering.  Roads are represented by the gray lines, and major roads are labeled.  Rivers and lakes are shown in blue.  The blue blob in the southwest quadrant is Lake Scranton.  I lived here for 7 years on the road represented by the black line that runs east to west a couple of blocks south of the road named Sherwood St.  I downloaded this map from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Fact Finder website, found at http://factfinder.census.gov.  The map scale is 1:74,168.

 

Thematic Map
This is a thematic map of Lackawanna County, PA.  This map depicts the percentage of the number of residents age 65 and older.  The green color represents the age of the general population.  The lightest colored areas have 9.9-12.8 percent of the population 65 and older.  The darker the color, the higher percentage of the population that is 65 and older, to a high of 26.6-31.7 percent.  I downloaded this map from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Fact Finder website, found at http://factfinder.census.gov.  I used the Natural Breaks data classification scheme because it seemed to be the best choice to represent the data how I wanted it to be, which is as it is above.  The map scale is 1:688,699.  I chose to use a map based on elderly population because Lackawanna County has a high number of elderly residents.  Therefore, it seemed like the most obvious choice to pick out of the available data choices.  I was curious to see where most of the elderly population was concentrated.  As you can see, high concentrations are scattered about the southwest-to-northeast running urban area, but the highest concentration is in the northeast corner of Lackawanna County.  I did not expect to see the highest concentration in that part of the county.  Well, you know what they say, "live and learn." 

 
Sources
DiBiase, David (2002) Understanding Geographic Data. Module 6: Census Data. ESRI Virtual Campus http://campus.esri.com Accessed 23 July 2002.
United States Bureau of the Census (2002) American FactFinder. http://factfinder.census.gov Accessed 24 August 2002.

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