Coastal Populated Places

Ocean Reports

2016 TIGER/Line® Shapefiles: Places

Populated Places

TIGER2010DP1_DEC2010_IslandAreas.zip

TIGER/Line® with Selected Demographic and Economic Data

Lookup table for total population, United States Census Bureau - American FactFinder

Starting with US Census data - Place_2010Census_DP1 & DEC2010_IslandAreas.

Shapefiles were downloaded for the US & Territories (which were separate)

All feature classes were then Projected into World Mercator

Each feature from the downloaded geodatabase had to be run through Feature to Point Tool-to make a point file for the centroid of the area

Created: State_Name, State, Place_Name & Census2010 columns & populated them accordingly.

Merged the 4 territories into one Census2012Territory Points shapefile.

Fixed exotic place names that did not come into ArcGIS correctly because of unrecognized characters.

Utilizing the Populated Places layer from - U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics's (BTS's) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). Feature class was Projected into World Mercator

Layer contained many points so to make it easier to work with any point that was farther than 50 miles from the SLA (Submerged Land Act, BOEM layer) was removed to make processing easier-resulting layer was called Populated_PlacesCoastalCities.

Created State_Name, State, Place_Name & Census2010 Columns & populated them accordingly.

Then Selected by Attribute cites based on population and export them into 4 independent point files with appropriate names - 4 levels of importance: Huge Cities >100K , Big Cities >10k but not including Huge , Medium Cities > 1k but not including Big & Huge, & Tiny Cities > 0 population but not including Medium, Big, & Huge. I called these layers, PP_CCHUGE, PP_CCBIG, PP_CCMED, & PP_CCTINY.

Allow the 4 new layers of cites to be added to your map.

Created a 5 mile buffer for the 3 largest layers.

Before Removing any cites from these 4 city layers, duplicate each one of them & name it with REMOVED at the end. Remove the original layers= PP_CCHUGE, PP_CCBIG, PP_CCMED, & PP_CCTINY from your map so that you do not remove cities from them as it will be easier later to add a city back in from one of these layers if needed.

Working with your PP_CCHUGE_REMOVED, PP_CCBIG_REMOVED, PP_CCMED_REMOVED, & PP_CCTINY_REMOVED - Utilized the Huge_5mileBuffer to remove any city from the Big, Med, or Tiny falling within the Huge buffer using the select by location tool.

Utilized the Big_5mileBuffer to remove any Med & Tiny city within the Big buffer using the select by location tool.

Utilized the Med_5mileBuffer to remove any Tiny city within the Med buffer using the select by location tool.

Merge Census2010TerritoryPoints & each of the 4 removed layers into one layer which I called PLACE.

If any areas appeared too sparse after this was completed I was able to return to the PP_CCHUGE, PP_CCBIG, PP_CCMED, & PP_CCTINY layers to see if there is a city to add, if no city existed look in the Place_2010 Census centroid point file.

Utilizing the Raster Navigational Charts from NOAA as a base map systematically start at Alaska & worked down around the coastline removing/deleting, using the editor tool, any extraneous cites from the center of land out to the coastline from smallest to largest, assuring that cites that existed on the RNC remained, or a city with the largest population near the coast & close to an RNC designated city remained.

You are left with cities of differing sizes guaranteed to be 5 miles apart, but bunching will still occur with cities within the same layer.

For all areas where the coastline had a dense population of larger cites to utilize I deleted smaller sized inland cities (as we originally had a 50 mile buffer inland & moving forward only want coastal cities)

Connected the ACS 2013 3YR total population estimates via the GEOID's provided & re-creating Place_Name within the ACS table. Copied population estimates to a created ACS_2013_3YR_Estimate attribute in Populated Places. Visually inspect information & fill in possible missing estimates using AmericanFact Finder for 2013 census data.