Understanding and Choosing Projections

As mentioned previously in Chapter 1, How Maps Get Made, spatial data availability has skyrocketed in the past few years. Governments, non-profits, private companies, and individuals around the world are measuring and recording data, and tying that data to a location. The problem GIS professionals run into a lot is that all these different datasets have different ways of describing their location on Earth. If you have spent any time doing GIS, you may have run into issues when displaying data with different coordinate systems or projections. Working with projections is hard, and involves a lot of math. Luckily, ArcGIS Pro handles the math for you, but will do the wrong math if you tell it to. The software is very smart in converting projections, but is dumb, as it relies on the user to tell it what math to use. In this chapter,...