APA Exploration: Maps on Maps!

As I was exploring the APA's website, I noticed a tab on the left that said "maps/GIS." What I stumbled upon was a great plethora of maps of the Adirondack Park, tracing everything from wireless availability in the park to places that are within a days drive of the park. I loved browsing through all them. Maps are great because they can give you the same amount of information as a paragraph or two, but in such a succinct and visual way! After taking a quick look at the wireline and wireless maps (just for fun), I clicked on the this map showing the 2010 Census Population of Towns within the park. What jumped out at me right off the bat was the fact that the couple most populated towns seemed to be roughly in the middle of the park, instead of on the outskirts. I figured the more populated towns were to more likely be on the outer edges of the park where they would be more accessible to potential homeowners. I also thought it was interesting that the most populated towns were not nearly the biggest towns in terms of square meterage. Some of the towns to the south of the most populated towns, such as Long Lake and Webb, were larger in terms of their land space, but smaller in terms of population.

Another map that I found interesting was the forest preserve map. This map shows not only the increased amount of forest land that has been preserved, but also shows the increased boundary of the park in 1890 vs 2002. I had never really thought about how much the actual boundary of the park has grown in these past 100 years. It would be interesting to overlay this map on top of the census population of towns map to see how development and establishment of towns effects the forest preserved lands.

Maps from: http://apa.ny.gov/gis/index.html