Choropleth Mapping

In this week's lab we continued to learn about making choropleth maps.  This week we also learned how to work with proportional and graduated symbols.  Choropleth maps are maps with shaded sections to convey the intensity of a phenomenon.  These maps must be normalized by area so when comparing different enumeration units you are making a comparison based off of density and not raw data. 

The goal for this week's lab was to create a map that showed the population density throughout Europe in a choropleth format as well as the consumption of wine per captia.  The map was primarily constructed in ArcGIS Pro with some editing in Adobe Illustrator. 

For the population density, I wrote a SQL exclusion to take the countries of Gibraltar, Jersey, Malta, and Monaco out for when classifying the breaks between populations.  This is because those countries are very small, and thus densely populated - making them outliers in the data.  I classed the remaining countries using the natural breaks method into four different classes.  This created a map with a good amount of contrast between countries. 

The wine consumption was shown through a set of graduated symbols with its associated country.  I decided to take on the extra challenge of using custom symbols for this section.  I downloaded a wine glass icon by Thengakola from the Noun Project.  I then edited this icon in illustrator so that it would have a different fill amount for each of the different classes of consumption.  Again I used natural breaks to divide up the data.  I classed the data into five separate groups to create a range of very low consumption to high consumption.

I used ArcGIS Pro's labeling and annotation feature to generate labels for each country.  Some countries are very small and do not consume significant quantities of wine so they have been omitted.  These include: Gibraltar, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Monaco, Jersey, and San Marino. 

In the final map, I created an inset for the countries near the Adriatic Sea.  This is because in the overview map the information in that area was crowded and difficult to read.  The inset allows for clearer interpretation of the data.

A comparison between the population densities of European countries and their per liter wine consumption.  The population density is shown with choropleth mapping and the wine consumption is showed with overlaid graduated wine glass symbols.

Overall, the take away from this map is that wine consumption correlates a lot with the cultural and agricultural practices of a country.  Vatican City beats all other European countries in wine consumption with a whopping 73.78 liters per person (if an average wine bottle is .75 liters, that's about 100 bottles a year!).  This is in large part to the all-Catholic population of the country that takes part in drinking wine for communion.  Appreciation of wine is also cultural as it is popular in France and Italy.  This is in part because they have a long tradition of growing grapes for wine and have the perfect climate and soil conditions for it.  Other countries may not prefer wine as much but that does not mean they are altogether dry.  Countries with low wine consumption tend to have foodways that put more emphasis on other forms of alcohol such as vodka in Russia and Lithuania.

The most challenging part of this map was placing the wine glass symbols and the country labels just so that it was obvious what they were in reference to without occluding anything else.  I now have great appreciation for cartographers who did this work in the pre-digital age.  As a bonus, I think I now have a much better sense of the geography of Europe too.