Lab One: Documenting the Variety of Cultural / Physical Geography in El Paso
County, Colorado using the Virtual Globe 'Google Earth'

Screen capture of GE - El Paso County outlined in red

Lab One Goals:
  1. to gain experience navigating and using tools in the Virtual Globe Google Earth (GE)
  2. to utilize web map service (WMS) offereings (e.g., base maps, roads, landforms, and other geographical content) found in GE
  3. to explore and contrast the variety of human and physical geography in El Paso County, Colorado, in terms of your theme of choice: population density, the built environment, climate, geology, landforms, land use, vegetation, etc.
  4. to write a concise map report and to identify and annotate images that illustrate the County's variety
  5. to refine your directory structure organization, web publishing, and image editing skills

Overview (READ THIS CAREFULLY): Google Earth is a free, downloadable "Virtual Globe" application that combines satellite imagery, maps, 3D terrain perspectives, and 3D buildings to create highly realistic scenes. Released in 2005, GE works well for generating custom content at different scales, viewing different topographic perspectives, and viewing different combinations of overlays. GE allows users to easily save and share content using "Keyhole Markup Language" (KML) files.

In this lab, students are responsible for creating a short (one or two paragraph), well-written, map report that elucidates the range (contrast) of a type of geographic variety found in El Paso County Colorado. Students must use a minimun of four (4) images saved or captured from GE THAT SHOW THE LANDSURFACE to support the map report. Each image MUST contain a descriptive caption (immediately below the image) that interprets the scene and explains why that particular section of El Paso County was captured. Lastly, students are responsible for answering the questions below in red. All work (introduction paragraphs, images, captions, answers to questions) must appear on the Lab One web page.

Background:

El Paso County, from north to south, ranges in elevation by about 2,500 ft. The northern section of the county supports a Pondersoa Pine forest while the southern section is covered with predominately short-grass prairie, pinion, and juniper. Northern El Paso County receives more precipitation than southern El Paso County. From west to east, the county varies in elevation by about 8,000 ft. The west section hosts a section of the Rampart Range, Ute Pass Fault, Fountain Creek, and Pikes Peak, while the east section contains semi-arid erosional landscapes and rolling short-grass praries. From north-to-south and from west-to-east, the county displays a remarkable variation in weather, climate, soil, geology, flora, fauna, landforms, transportation networks, land uses, development, etc. As stated in the overview, the singular task is to contrast, through landscape images and through image captions, a component of this remarkable variety.

Due Date: This is a one-week lab. The work is due online (Lab One) the evening before class meets next week (either Sunday, Feb. 21 by 5:00 p.m. (for the Mon. class) or Monday, Feb. 22 by 5:00 p.m. (for the Tues. class).

Tools used in Lab One:

What I grade: I will check to see if...

Getting Started - Before you begin your Lab One work, be certain that in GE you can:

Steps to Complete Lab One:

  1. Save (right click > save target as) this Colorado County Boundary GE (.kml) File to the working directory on your z: drive (ges205/working). The source for this file is here (Colorado.gov).
  2. Open GE. In GE, open (File > Open) the cntybndco.kml file that you just saved to your 'working' directory.
  3. View only the boundary defining El Paso County (you'll need to uncheck all counties but El Paso)
  4. Locate and zoom to El Paso County.
  5. Make sure the 'Terrain' layer is turned on in GE (far left bottom of GE window).
  6. Spend a significant amount of time (30 min. minimum) exploring the county's geography. Zoom in. Zoom out. Rotate your perspective so you can see the horizon. Cruise around. Look at Pikes Peak. Find the Calhan Paint Mines (39.013949, -104.268901). Find areas with different land use and land cover patterns (agriculture, mining, urban, forests, grasslands, riparian). Find UCCS. Find your house/apartment/dorm. Find the intersection of I-25 and County Line Road. In other words, begin to explore various sections of El Paso County (east, west, north, south).
  7. From your explorations, pick a theme that you think best illustrate the range of a type of geographic variety in the county. Be creative - remember - you are the expert and you can use ANY theme you'd like, such as geology, flora, landforms, physical geography, cultural geography... to capture and demonstrate variety.
  8. To fully elucidate the variety of your theme, use four earth images (NOT PANORAMIO PHOTOS) each showing a different location in the county.
  9. When you find a place in the county you'd like to capture (and save as a .jpg image for your Lab One website), you can either A) use GE to create the image (File > Save > Save Image) or B) you can 'print screen' (copy the display on your monitor to the computer's clipboard) and then paste the image into Adobe PhotoShop CS4 where you will crop the image and save the image for the web (ask Brandon for a demonstration of this process). ALL IMAGES WILL BE NO MORE THAN 500 PIXELS WIDE. Save your images to your Lab One images directory.
  10. Place the images on your Lab One web page. Create captions for the images. Include a one to two paragraph introduction that describes the contrast in variety found in El Paso County.
  11. When you are finished with your Lab One web page, you are not done! Remember: you must upload your work to the UCCS web server (using Secure Shell) so it is visible on the web.
  12. Test your new Lab One page in a web browser. Make absolutely sure all of your images load and that your Lab One page is linked from your main GES205 web page.