Advanced GIS Practice Exam

To effectively visualize a drastic population change by overlaying historic aerial photos with current orthophotos, the key steps involve ensuring that the historic aerial photos are accurately aligned to their geographical positions. This is where the selected option comes into play.

Opening the non-georeferenced raster in an Image Viewer is crucial because it allows for visual assessment and manipulation of the image as needed before georeferencing. By adding links manually, you can create control points that establish correspondences between known geographic coordinates and specific points in the historic aerial photos. This manual link creation is particularly important when dealing with older images that might not have been captured consistently or have undergone changes, as it allows for greater precision in alignment compared to automated methods that may not account for significant distortions or shifts over time.

Setting a data frame projection before this process is also an important step, ensuring that any manipulations or overlays are performed within a defined spatial reference framework. This helps maintain consistency in how both layers will be viewed together.

Overall, this approach provides the greatest reliability when overlaying historical and modern imagery, presenting a clear visual representation of changes in population over time, which is the goal for this analysis.