SARASOTA SEAGRASS COMMUNITY COMPOSITION

Sarasota seagrass surveys -- This map is from a project looking at the abundance and composition of seagrasses in Sarasota Bay. We have three main types of seagrass here; Thalassia testudinum, Halodule wrightii, and Syringodium filiforme. At each of the locations indicated by pie charts on the map, we dove and measured the abundance of each species, plus macroalgaes. This is a site located on the western shore of Sarasota Bay, just off Longboat Key.

MAP FEATURES:

1.) I used a plain old true color DOQQ from the Florida LABINS website. There are much higher resolution photos the water management district uses for seagrass mapping, but it's a pain to get them. This one is fine for my purposes.
2.) I used to data frames in one layout; a data frame to show the general location of the samples, and a larger one to show the details of the site (you can clearly see there is a sandbar running northwest to southeast in this larger view).
3.) I like the pie chart option in ArcMap (used for point locations with abundance data, under the sybology tab). In this case, the locations east of the sandbar have Syringodium; I think this is a nice way to show that.