Lyme Disease Occurrences in Baltimore County compared to Green Areas

I haven't posted in a long, long time because the semester was a lot of work but now it is over and so is Christmas so now I have a bit of free time. This post is going to be about my final project in my mapping course. The project takes a look at Baltimore County, Maryland and looks at Lyme disease occurrences by zip code and normalized by populations. Here is a map of what that looks like:

The next step was to areas that isolate areas where the deer tick that spreads Lyme disease would be most likely to thrive. The white tailed deer is the main host of the deer tick and they like to live in areas such as: deciduous and evergreen forests, crop lands, and shrub or herbaceous lands. To simply everything I deemed these areas to be "green" and other areas such as residential or developed were "not green". Using a map of land use from the USDA I was able to simplify it to this map:

From this map using Microsoft Excel I was able to find the percentage of land area in each zip code that was "green". After that I made a simply chart that showed the affect of the percentage of green areas has on the number of Lyme disease occurrences in each zip code. Here is that chart:

The chart clearly shows how as the percentage of green spaces in a zip code increases the occurrences of Lyme disease also increase.  

All of the maps were done in ArcMap. If anyone wants to actually read a paper about this I have it. The rest of paper goes into ways of educating the public and other ways to lower occurrences of Lyme disease. Hopefully I will start posting on a regular basis again. 

Baltimore Cartography

This post is going to be mostly pictures because I am having a hard time finding information about these maps. I found a bunch of really interesting historic maps of the City of Baltimore. Some of these maps are almost 200 years old. I live right outside of Baltimore and I really like seeing places I've been to being depicted by someone who was living here a century before I was.

This one is from 1872 and was published by John F. Weishampel Jr.

This is from 1954 and published by The Savings Bank of Baltimore. It is depicting Baltimore as it was a century before the map was published. I recently came across a very similar map of Baltimore County hanging in the Towson Public Library. Here is a link to a higher quality version: http://www.library.jhu.edu/bin/f/h/SavingsBankHistoricalMap1854.jpg Also, here is a link to the Baltimore County map I came across: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls3irnG3Bn1r2baauo1_r1_400.jpg I took the picture with my phone so the quality isn't great. Sorry.

This is the oldest map of Baltimore I could find even though I'm sure there are ones even older. It is dated as 1792 and just labels Baltimore City as "The Town of Baltimore" and the Harbor is simply labeled as "Basin".

I was unable to find a smaller size but I really enjoyed this map of Baltimore. It is a 1905 map of the Harbor area. The city looks very similar to what it looks like today.

This is a modern map of Baltimore City who those who are unfamiliar with its layout.