Lab Write-Up

Torsten Niegmann
Geography 167
Lab 1
Census 2000

Looking at the Asian population map one can see that there are the heaviest concentrations(by percentage) in California, or even more general, the west coast. The heaviest concentration appears to be in the Bay Area/San Francisco areas. The Midwest has an almost uniform low concentration of Asians. For the classification I used the natural breaks mode while changing those breaks to easier and cleaner numbers. I used this because in order to fully get a picture of the breakdown of the Asian population it was best to use a method that truly showed the correct concentrations. With this method you can see clearly where the pockets of high Asian percentages are while also seeing low percentages. However, the heaviest concentrations of African-Americans are in the southeast and southeast coast. California also has a greater percentage than most of the Midwest as well. A general trend is that California contains a higher percentage of non-white groups we studied than the rest of the country, for in each of the 3 cases California had a high percentage of that group. I used the natural breaks mode again for the same reasons as above. It had the best breaks because it allowed the different concentrations to be clearly distinguished and for patterns to be recognized. I changed the break values to be easier read, and to further give a clear projection of the population concentrations.
After viewing the last map one can see the trend for California continuing as it has a high concentration of some other race, also concentrated towards southern California. The west coast again has a higher concentration than the Midwest or the east coast although the regions of the Sunbelt seem to have a greater concentration of some other race than the previous two groups. There seems to be a somewhat higher concentration around large cities, such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; all busy places of industry and commerce. For this map I chose the natural breaks mode for its easy and clear representation of the data. This mode tends to accurately represent the different percentage concentrations so that all the areas are weighted equally.