Lesson video

Hello, my name is Mr. March, and I'm here today to teach you all about GIS: Visualising the Human and Physical Geography of Nigeria.

So grab everything that you need for today's lesson and let's get going.

So by the end of today's lesson, you'll be able to use a geographic information system, or GIS, to visualise the human and physical geography of Nigeria.

There are three key terms for today's lesson.

Those are visualise, geographic information system, and finally, layer.

Visualise refers to all means to form a mental or physical image of something, making it easier to understand.

Geographic information system, or GIS, is a computer mapping system that captures and displays geographic data to help understand spatial patterns.

And finally, layer is a visual representation of geographic data on a digital map, such as population density, income levels, or land use.

There are three learning cycles for today's lesson.

We're gonna start with learning cycle one, which is all about visualising the size and location of Nigeria.

Now the six photographs in front of you were all taken in Nigeria, and they really do show a variety of different landscapes.

We have the city of Lagos in the top left, we have a small village in Imo State, we have Jos Plateau, we have a waterfall in Ekiti State, we have a busy market, and finally we have the Lagos coastline.

Now photographs are a really useful tool for geographers to visualise what a place looks like.

Now my question to you is what other methods can be used to visualise information? Now, you may like to pause the video here whilst you consider your own answer to that question or better still, have a discussion with someone near you.

So what did you come up with? Well, one particular tool that we can use in geography are graphs.

Now the type of graph that you can see on the screen in front of you is a climate graph.

This can be used to show the temperature and the precipitation in a particular area or region.

We can also use diagrams to show how a physical process is happening.

For example, the formation of a waterfall.

And finally, maps we can use to actually understand the location of a place or perhaps the spatial distribution of a particular set of data.

So time now for a learning check, and it says to name a method that can be used to visualise geographic information.

Now you may be able to think a four or more, so what you need to do right now then is pause the video whilst you try to recall this information.

Best of luck.

And the four different methods we're looking for are graphs, diagrams, maps, and finally photographs.

Really, really well done if you were able to recall those four different tools that we can use in geography.

Geographic information systems, or GIS, overlay data onto digital maps to actually allow us to visualise the world and help us understand how things change over space.

The ArcGIS Geography Visualizer actually allows us to visualise the location and size of Nigeria.

Let's have a look at that now in the following constructional video.

In this video, we're going to use the ArcGIS Geography Visualizer to investigate the location and size of Nigeria.

And the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to change the basemap.

So I'm gonna come to the bottom toolbar and I'm going to click on Basemaps, and I'm gonna change this to a Chartered Territory Map.

And the reason I'm going to do that is it essentially takes away a lot of the physical geography information and gives us a political map showing really clearly the countries and their borders.

We now need to find Nigeria.

So I'll close the basemaps down.

Now, I could search using the search button in top left hand corner and type in Nigeria.

But as you may be aware, Nigeria is in West Africa, so we can see Africa kind of in the centre of the screen and we can see Nigeria just here kind of right in the centre.

And I can zoom into that if I like.

Now the useful thing about the chartered territory map is it's got some geographical reference points.

So what I mean by that is things that we can use to help us describe the location of Nigeria using directional or geographical language.

So we can see the equator, for example, running along around the world here.

And we can see the position of Nigeria is just north of the equator.

We could maybe use this information that we can see, we can see that Nigeria's in West Africa and it's essentially between the equator, the northern hemisphere between the equator and the tropic of cancer.

Now you may think that a good way of looking at the size of Nigeria or thinking about the size of Nigeria is just to visually look at it.

You know, you can see the size of Nigeria here, and maybe we could compare it to another country like France, looks about the same size as France there, doesn't it? And we could compare it to the United Kingdom and look at it, the United Kingdom looks a bit longer north to south and it's significantly longer north to south and but a bit thinner.

However, there is a real problem with that on these maps, and this is because map projections tend to distort the size of countries north to south or east to west depending on the type of map projection it is.

And the reason for that is it's very difficult to take a sphere, like the world, and project it onto a 2D flat surface.

And now this is on the Mercator projection, and it does distort the size of countries quite significantly.

So we've got some useful tools in the Geography Visualizer to help us navigate this issue.

Now, one of the most useful tools to do this is what we call the Measuring tool at the bottom.

So if I zoom in a little bit and click on the Measure tool and then I'm going to click on Measure, and you can see a little pop-up comes up and can see Measure line, Measure area.

I'm gonna choose Measure area.

And if I zoom into Nigeria, what I can do is I can click around the border of Nigeria and start to put the area together.

Now, I'm gonna do this quite quickly.

I could zoom in and really take a lot of time going on every slight change in the border of Nigeria, but I'm going to do it relatively quickly here just to give you a idea of how we do it and give an approximation of the area of Nigeria.

And I'm going to double click there.

Now you can see that that's in miles.

If I change it from Imperial to Metric, I get a figure in kilometres, and you can see there that's just over 898,000 kilometres squared.

So that that gives you an approximate area.

I appreciate I haven't done a perfect line around the border, but it gives you an idea.

Now what we could do then is we could maybe compare that with another country.

So as you can see, France looks quite a bit bigger than Nigeria here, but let's check to see if that's actually the case.

So if I go on to France, and again, I'm gonna give an approximation the area of France, I'm not going to do it exactly.

Zoom into that a little bit more to make it a little bit easier for myself And just go down this border and we go around France.

There we go.

And what you'll see there, you can see on the screen, this figure is 536, just over 536,000 kilometres.

Now that is significantly smaller than Nigeria.

Now the area will have gone off Nigeria now and if I take this off, you can see the issue with these maps.

Nigeria looks smaller on the map, but it's actually significantly bigger.

And this is an issue around countries close to the equator if we use the Mercator projection.

They are actually a lot bigger than they look on this projection.

So time now for a learning check, and it says the magnifying glass symbol allows you to (pauses).

Now you can see you've got three different options on the screen in front of you.

What you need to do is pause the video whilst you consider and then select your answer.

And the correct answer was C, it allows you to search for places.

So really well done if you're able to select C is the correct answer.

Our next one check says that each circle on the map has a diameter of 800 kilometres.

This shows that (pauses).

Now once again you've got three different options on the screen.

And once again, what you need to do is pause the video here whilst you read through those options and select what you think is the correct answer.

And the correct answer was C, saying that Nigeria is almost half the size of Greenland.

Really, really well done if you're able to select C as the correct answer.

Going on to our practise tasks for our first learning cycle, there are two different questions.

So first of all, what you need to do is open the link that you can see at the top of the screen.

1A says then to complete the following tasks, click on Basemaps in the bottom toolbar and select chartered territory map from the options in the pop-up.

Zoom in on Nigeria and look carefully at the countries and bodies of water it borders and its position with reference to the equator.

1B then says to describe the location of Nigeria with reference to the equator, other countries and bodies of water.

Used directional terms such as north, east, south and west.

The second question then says to, A, complete the following task, and the first one says to click on the Measure tool from the bottom toolbar and then to measure the area of Nigeria.

2B says to then describe how the area of Nigeria compares with that of the UK at 243,000 kilometres squared.

As Jacob says, "You won't be able to measure the area of Nigeria 100% accurately using this tool, but it will give you a useful estimate." So please then pause the video here whilst you attempt these two learning tasks.

Best of luck.

Let's now get some feedback for 1A.

Now the chartered territory map that should be used to visualise Nigeria's location looks like this.

1B then says that Nigeria is located in the Northern Hemisphere, slightly north of the Equator.

It is situated in the continent of Africa and shares its borders with four countries.

To the north there is Chad and Niger, to the east, there's Cameroon, to the west, there's Benin, and Nigeria has a coastline in the south where it meets the Gulf of Guinea in the southern Atlanta Ocean.

What about 2A? Well, your screen should look like this, as we can see on the right side of the screen, measuring the area of Nigeria.

And finally 2B says that my measurement of the area of Nigeria was around 913,000 kilometres squared, which is nearly four times the area of the UK.

So really well done if you're able to include anything like that in your own answers.

Going on now to our second learning cycle, and this is all about visualising the human geography of Nigeria.

A variety of different layers can actually help us to visualise the population of Nigeria.

Now, once again, there is a video here for you to watch.

So take the next couple of moments to watch the instructional video, and I will see you in a few moments.

In this video, we're going to use the Geography Visualizer to investigate the population of Nigeria.

Now there's a range of different layers, data layers that we can add to this map which is going to tell us something about the population.

So I'm gonna put on three layers.

I'm gonna keep the base map as it is on this imagery hybrid map, which gives us the satellite imagery, but also gives us the borders between countries on it.

I'll keep that as it is, but I'm going to go in the toolbar to where it says Open map.

And I'm going to click on this and you'll see lots of different layers of data here.

And I'm going to click on this one where it says Human Footprint.

And you can see on the map now where it says Map layers, there's a little 1 has come up next to it, which shows there's a layer of data on there and you can see that the map has changed colour.

I'm going to add some other layers on here.

And rather than gonna Open map this time, I'm going to click on where it says Add layer, and this is another place that we can find some layers of data.

I'm going to click Cities of the World.

And I think that will be a useful thing to investigate if we're looking at population.

And I'm also going to look at Population by Country.

And once I've clicked on all of those, I'm going to come off this and you can see it says 3 at the bottom.

It shows I've got three map layers, which have now been added to this map.

Now what's happening at the moment is it's adding these layers on all at the same time.

So you can see there's big circles on the map and also there's a range of different colours.

If I click on Map layers in the toolbar, you'll see that we've got these little boxes where it says Toggle visibility, and that allows me to take a layer off and just not visualise it while I want to look at some of the others.

So I'm going to just start by looking at Population By Country.

If I go to the bottom and click Legend, it tells me essentially a key which tells me how many people are in this country.

And we can see straight away that Nigeria, if I zoom out a little bit, you can see there's an awful lot of people here.

There's over 200 million people, that's why it's in this dark colour.

It's the most populous country in Africa.

If I zoom into that, I could just click on it and a little pop-up will come up.

It'll tell me the capital, but it'll also give me information about this population, not just the current population, but also the forecasted population for the future.

And we can see that population has risen really rapidly over time.

So that's a really good layer we can use.

There is a problem with that though, and that gives us a total population for Nigeria, but it doesn't give us an idea about where people are living, how they are distributed.

So I'm going to click back on Map layers and I'm going to come, I'm going to unclick the Population By Country and I'm going to click on Human Footprint.

And if you want to find out more about what this means, you can click on this Information button and it will tell you a bit about the description.

But fundamentally, the reds and the oranges are where there is a high human footprint and blues are where it's a low human footprint.

And what we mean by human footprint is its areas that have been built on or heavily affected by humans.

So that could be intensive farming, but also infrastructure like roads and railways and things.

And you can see where there is a high human footprint within Nigeria, and it's actually a lot of the country.

We've got a patch to the west and patch in the northeast and the southeast which is maybe less impacted by humans.

But the rest of it, really the majority of it has got a very high human footprint.

And if you compare that with some of the countries further north, it's really quite different.

Okay, so we can see, again, it gives us information about the population.

The final layer we can look at is Cities.

So I'm going to unclick Human Footprint and I'm going to click on the Cities, and we can see straight away that there are a lot of cities, big cities in Nigeria.

And the bigger the circle, the bigger the city.

So we can see here that the size of the different cities there.

Now if I click on the city, so Abuja, the capital there, if I click on it, it gives me information.

And you can see through this pop-up so it's more specific information, in particular how much has grown over time.

And what you'll see in these cities is they've really rapidly grown as people have moved into urban areas and people continue to be born in these urban areas.

So GIS can be used to visualise the human geography of Nigeria.

One aspect of Nigeria's human geography is the population size and distribution.

And as Lucas says, "Around 228 million people live in Nigeria!" Nigeria is actually one of the most populous or populated countries anywhere in the continent of Africa.

As Alex says, "Nigeria is also one of the most populous countries anywhere in the world." Time there for a learning check.

It says what is the population of Nigeria? Now, once again, I've got three different options on the screen.

And once again, what you need to do is pause the video here whilst you read through those options and then consider and select your answer.

And the correct answer was B, around 228 million people.

As Aisha says, "Nigeria's population is more than three times the population of the UK!" So really well done if you're able to get B as the correct answer.

Thinking on the individual circles in the cities of the world layer actually shows us how much a city's population has grown over time.

This pop-up box shows a population growth graph for Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, and so we can begin to track just how much Lagos' population in this example has grown over time.

So it's a really useful tool to see the growing urbanisation within a city.

It's run now to our practise tasks for our second learning cycle.

And again, it says for you to open the link that you can see in front of you.

1A then says to complete the following tasks, and the first task is to click on Basemaps in the bottom toolbar and select charted territory map from the options in the pop-up box.

Then you need to click on the Add layer function in the bottom toolbar and select Cities of the world in the pop-up box.

Then you need to locate the cities of Lagos and Kano.

Click on their proportional circles and compare their growth rate.

Then 1B asks you to describe how much Lagos has grown in population since 1950.

And I would like you to try to use numbers in your answer.

So there you are, there are your two practise tasks.

What you need to do right now then is pause the video whilst you attempt them.

Best of luck.

And now some feedback.

So for 1A, your screen will look like this when you compare the population growth of Lagos versus Kano.

And for 1B then, the population of Lagos has grown rapidly from around 325,000 in 1950 to more than 17 million in 2025.

So really, really well done if you are able to get those two answers or perform those tasks in that way.

Really, really well done.

The third and final learning cycle now is all about visualising the physical geography of Nigeria.

Now due to Nigeria's extensive size, it also has a diverse range of landscapes, as you can see via the two photographs on the screen in front of you.

The ArcGIS visualizer has a range of different layers that allow us to visualise Nigeria's physical geography.

And we can see four different examples in front of you.

So first of all, we can look at the soil, we can look at the precipitation to understand which areas of Nigeria are wetter or drier than others, we can look at the temperature once again to look at which areas are perhaps warmer or cooler than others, and finally we can look at land colour as well perhaps to try to understand which areas of Nigeria are more forested than others.

So time now for learning check, and it says what different layers can help visualise the physical geography of Nigeria on the ArcGIS visualizer? So you can see you've got the same four different images that we saw on the previous slide.

What you need to do whilst you pause the video is try to recall the information that I showed you on the previous slide.

Best of luck.

So we can look at the soil, we can look at the precipitation, we can look at the temperature, and we can also look at the land cover as well.

Really, really well done if you're able to recall those four different answers.

The ArcGIS visualizer has a range of different tools that allows us to visualise Nigeria's physical geography, such as in 3D view.

Now once again, you've got a instructional video to watch, so please then watch the instructional video and I will see you in a few moments.

In this video, we're going to use the Geography Visualizer to investigate some things about the physical geography of Nigeria.

Now to do this, I'm going to add two layers of data to this map.

And I'm going to do this by coming down to the Add layer button in the toolbar.

And once that's up, I'm going to scroll down.

I'm using the scroll wheel of the mouse there, and then I'm going to click on where it says Global Temperature.

I don't want the maximum or minimum temperature, I'm going to take the average temperature.

I click on the plus there and I'm going to click on the Global Rainfall because that gives me the average rainfall as well.

And you'll see on the screen you'll see a little 2 there, so that on the toolbar where it says Map layers and that shows me that I've added these layers to the map.

So I can close this now and you can see that the map has changed colour.

Now, now those layers are in the background, what I can do is I'm actually going to unclick the visibility there, so they're ready for me to visualise as soon as I want to by click in these buttons.

But for now I'm going to leave the layers off and I'm going to zoom into Nigeria.

I'm just using the scroll wheel of the mouse there.

I could use the zoom button at the left-hand side, but I can use a scroll wheel of the mouse.

And what I want to do is I want to look at different parts of Nigeria to see if the temperature and the rainfall is the same in these different places.

So one way of doing this is by looking at what we call a transect, which is a line of study.

So rather than just looking anywhere, we can take a line from one part of Nigeria sort of in the south central, I'm just gonna go up to the northeast a little bit, I'm going to double click and it gives me a line that I can study.

And then I'm going to add four points.

And I don't need to be really accurate here, but all it does is it gives me four places and I can take them roughly an equal distance apart and call that a systematic sample, a systematic study where I've taken four places that I can now look at to see how Nigeria changes over space.

If I wanted to be really accurate, I could measure that distance between them.

But for our purposes here, I'm just going to look at these four places.

So I'm going to start at this one in the southeast along my transect line, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit.

The first thing I might want to do before I start looking at the layers is this has got satellite imagery on it, so I can just zoom into this area and see what I find.

So it looks to me like there's quite a lot of sort of trees here, this green area and we've obviously got this coastline with this huge delta system here.

It looks lovely, doesn't it? If I want to, I can really zoom in and come to the bottom toolbar and change that to 3D, and that just allows me to get a really good idea of what this landscape looks like.

If I click on this toggle button at the side, I can turn it round and it gives you an idea.

I can look at the coastline here, I can zoom in, I can see that this is flat area.

I can sort of see the trees around.

It gives me an idea about what it looks like.

And you can, yeah, you can really see those trees now and you can see the coastline.

Okay, so there's vegetated area, flat area, nice coastline there.

So it's really good to have that ability to do a visual reference there, so that's the first thing I'm going to do.

Now I've zoomed back out, I can see my sketch again, my transect line with these different points.

I've actually put my point a little bit up here.

It doesn't really matter exactly where you put it, but I can now add the layers.

So first of all, I might want to look at the rainfall.

And if I click on the Legend, it's telling me that this area has a high precipitation because you can see it's in blue.

If I click on it, it actually gives me information.

2,297 millimetres, that's an incredibly high rainfall total.

The average in the UK is around 8, 900 millimetres.

So it gives you an idea that this part of Nigeria has got very high average rainfall totals.

But it's also worth noting that it's significantly more in between maybe May and October than it is between November and February.

So, okay, so I can say that about the precipitation.

I also want to unclick this and just look at the temperature.

And again, I'm going to look at the Legend.

This looks pretty hot, but I would recommend you click again on here and it gives you a really good idea of the temperature, it gives you exactly the average temperature is 26.

8 degrees C.

And importantly you can see that it's hot all year round.

That temperature doesn't really change very much.

So, it's good, gives you a good indication of what this place is like.

Lots of vegetation, lots of trees, very high rainfall totals, very hot within this area.

So we're looking at really an equatorial climate and an ecosystem as well.

I can then go up to these different areas.

If I just take this off for now and I can look at the different areas along this transect line.

Now I could go to all of them in turn.

I'm not going to do that here because I'm just showing you how to do this.

But I will go into the final one to have a look, so we can look at this final point along this transect in northern Nigeria.

And if I zoom in, you can see straight away that this is a very different landscape.

It certainly doesn't look like trees as much, it looks like much less vegetation, more dry, arid, landscaped and landscape with very small patches of vegetation in there.

Again, if I want to, I can click on the 3D.

I can rotate around, I can have a good look at this landscape, I can zoom in.

If I want to click this again, I can pan to move across the landscape.

And again, it's pretty flat, but certainly it looks like an arid landscape, doesn't it there? So let's come out of that now we've had that visual reference.

And again, what we can do is we can have a look at the different layers.

So if I click on rainfall and I click on this area here, we can see the precipitation is very, very different.

494 millimetres, right by the dot it's 526, both pretty low totals.

If I went a bit further north, you can see it's even lower.

So this is less than half the precipitation I'd expect in a lot of the UK.

But importantly, you can see that it does get rainfall, it does get precipitation, but it's all in sort of a four-month period of the year and the rest of the year is really, really dry.

We call this a semi-arid climate.

So we get rainfall for three, four months of the year and then it's really, really very dry.

If I take this off and I go onto the temperature and I click on the temperature, we can see that again it's really very high, but it's slightly different now.

It's actually cooler in January and it's much warmer in June, still hot in January, but warmer in those periods of May and June.

And if you zoom out, you might be able to think about why.

If I change the Basemap here to the Chartered Territory Map, you'll see that the equator appears on the map, and you can think that the southern part of Nigeria is much closer to that equator, so it's unsurprising that temperature remains fairly constant throughout the year.

Whereas in the north of Nigeria, we are moving away from the equator so it starts to become slightly seasonal there.

Okay, but it also shows between these points just how much that ecosystem changes along with the climate.

So time now for a learning check, and it says true or false, to find out information about physical geography on the ArcGIS visualizer, you have to add layers? So please then pause the video here whilst you consider and then select your answer.

And the correct answer was false.

And once again, I'd like you to pause the video whilst you consider as to why or how the statement is false.

And the reason it's false is that you can investigate the physical geography by changing the basemap to satellite imagery, zooming in and inspecting the biodiversity and relief.

Really, really well done if you're able to get those two answers correct.

So on now to our final practise task for our final learning cycle.

And once again, it says for you to start by opening the link that you can see in the top of the screen.

Then 1A says to complete the following tasks, start by clicking on Basemaps in the bottom toolbar and select Imagery Hybrid map from the options in the pop-up box.

Click on Add layer in the bottom toolbar and select Global Temperature 1981-2010 and Global Rainfall 1981-2010.

Click on Maplayers in the bottom toolbar and make sure both of the layers are selected.

Click on different locations to show corresponding climate data.

Record the annual rainfall and average temperature for each location in the table.

And the table that you see in front of you on the screen is the same table that you need to complete in task 1A.

For 1B then, you need to describe any patterns in rainfall and temperature across the country.

So please then pause the video here whilst you attempt this practise task.

Best of luck.

And now for some feedback.

So for 1A, your screen will look similar to this when you are investigating the climate data of different locations.

And then with regards to the table, here is a completed table.

So with regards to Abuja, the annual rainfall is 1,211 millimetres, the average temperature's 27 degrees Celsius.

For Port Harcourt, it's 2,297 millimetres per year, and the average temperature is 26.

8 degrees Celsius.

For Sokoto, it is 603 millimetres per year and 28.

6 degrees Celsius.

For 1B, your answer may be similar to the following, "Nigeria has a warm climate with high temperatures across the country.

Rainfall is highest in the south and lowest in the north." So really, really well done if you're able to include anything like that in your own answers.

Well, on now to our learning summary and what you need to know from today's lesson.

Well, you need to know that GIS can be used to visualise both the human and the physical geography of Nigeria.

Nigeria is located slightly north of the equator in the continent of Africa.

Nigeria is also nearly four times the size of the UK, although it does look smaller on some map projections on the world map.

Different layers of data on a GIS show that the population of Nigeria is growing rapidly.

And finally, visualising Nigeria's physical geography using GIS shows the climate varies across the country.

So really, really well done during today's lesson.

It was a pleasure teaching you, and I will see you again on the next lesson.

Goodbye.