Map of the Sacramento Area of California

The Map This map was made using QGIS and free sourcing from the Internet. Below is a brief description of how I sourced and modified each feature!

Cities:

I found a giant shapefile on cities in California with populations of 10,000+ at https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/06ce85b6fdf349d78c471d7c2ee8cb66_0/explore?location=36.750023%2C-119.376008%2C8.00. When I first added it to my map, I noticed that it was too crowded for my map, so I edited the attribute table to only include cities with populations of 100,000+. Additionally, I modified the markers and labels to make them stick out more.

Borders:

I formed the red border using two shapefiles (1: State Borders) at https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2023/STATE/ and (2: Coastline) at https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php?year=2019&layergroup=Coastline. The reason I used two shapefiles was because the ‘State Borders’ shapefile includes ocean waters that are part of the US and results in a weird bubble shape. Therefore to get a cleaner outline, I added the ‘Coastline’ shapefile and edited the attribute table of the ‘State Borders’ to solely include Nevada for the visible eastern border of California. Lastly, I made sure the color matched to make it appear as one.

Rivers:

I found river shapefile on https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/922a4e70eea14aeba2f3ff007b18fa98_0/about. I chose to make it blue and also made it thicker to be easier to distinguish.

Terrain Variation (Elevation):

I was given the elevation data from Canvas from https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/542aebf9e4b057766eed286a. After uploading to QGIS, I used a custom singleband pseudocolor of light-dark green with ~48% transparency to make it more visually appealing.

Legend:

Under Print Layout, I added my legend. I included each of the previous mentioned map features, as well as a North indicator and scale bar.

Background:

I used my pre-added connection ‘ESRI Ocean’ to make the ocean blue. I thought it was a clever add and flowed well with my terrain variation. Below, I include an alternative showing what it looks like without ESRI Ocean.