I began using Africamap by zooming into the map so that Tanzania was in the center of the page and as large as possible while still fitting on the page. When I began to add layers to my map that is when I started to run into some problems. The layers were showing up on the map but I had no idea what they meant because for the life of me I could not find any key to the maps when I was viewing them. After a few minutes I figured out that if I went back to the list of map layers and clicked legend next to the map, the key would appear on that page. To see the legend on the map just hit the view tab at the top of the page and the key should appear on that page, you can then change the parameters of the key and move it so that it is not right where you need to look. This may have been straight-forward for everyone else it was something I hadn’t really played around with when I had checked out Africamap before so it was useful to discover that.
In keeping with what we talked about in the last class, I applied map layers to Tanzania that would give and indication of the landscape in that region. One of the maps I applied to Tanzania was the 2006 Population by Cell map. It showed that in most of Tanzania there where 26-50 people or less per 30” cell, the exceptions being North-west Tanzania, near Lake Victoria and on the East in the city of Dar es Salaam. This tells me that these areas are economic centers. Trade has historically been brought through water channels and it makes sense that these two areas would have the largest population densities. The vast spaces in the heart of the country that had the lowest population densities also coincided with the areas that were either protected or had little or no water sources near them. One thing that I was unable to get Africamap to do was put the names of lakes on the map. When I tried to find them through google maps I wasn’t able to either. Does anyone know how to do this?
