Tell Us About Yourself
Hello! My name is Antonio Antoine Smith, and I am a Freelance Cartographer based in Knoxville, TN. I started as a GIS Technician 25 years ago, digitizing features from aerial imagery for a DoD subcontractor. After a few years, I made the very painful transition to CAD, creating as-built drawings of utility facilities. I briefly returned to school to become a mechanic before I got the hang of it. After that, I worked for an environmental consulting firm for almost 10 years, using both CAD and GIS to create a variety of deliverables. I returned to school in 2017 and worked in higher education until recently.
I earned my Associate’s in GIS from Roane State Community College (unfortunately, the GIS program no longer exists) in 2019; my Bachelor’s in Geography from Marshall in 2021, and my Master’s in GIS from Johns Hopkins in 2025. I became a freelancer shortly after I finished teaching GIS at RSCC in 2025. For most of my career, I made technical maps and drawings for engineers and scientists. After taking Dr. Cassandra Hasen’s cartography course at Hopkins, I started shifting my attention toward the art side of map making. I am currently working on a mappy book about Knoxville.
Tell us the story behind your map
Most maps start with an area of interest; this one started with a dataset. I found the USDA TreeMap data a year or so earlier. I thought it was an interesting dataset and tried and failed to integrate it into multiple maps. The 30-meter resolution was too low for my large scale maps. So the layer went back on the shelf.
The 2025 TNGIC Fall Forums were approaching, and I don’t like to attend GIS conferences empty handed. I try to tailor my maps to a target audience, and the East Tennessee forum seemed like a perfect opportunity to use the Tree Cover data. The region is home to part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Cherokee National Forest, so coverage shouldn’t be an issue. The scale and format finally worked. The original map was 24×36 inches. I rescaled it down to 8×11.5 inches and refined it some more for the calendar.
Tell us about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map
Most of the maps in this map were created in QGIS.
As mentioned earlier, the forest type data is from the USDA TreeMap dataset. I used DEMs from the USGS LidarExplorer; city, county, and state data from the Census Bureau; hydro data from the USGS National Map, and park data from the State of TN GIS portal.
I condensed forest types to major forest types (i.e., all variations of pine became pine) to simplify the map. I remapped the TreeMap raster colormap in QGIS by sampling the autumn leaf colors of most of the tree types with Coolors.co. This gave me the hex codes for the leaves of the forest types, giving the layer a more organic aesthetic. I created a subtle hillshade underneath the forest type layer in QGIS. I generated the chart of the ten most common forest types in RStudio after exporting the raster attribute table in ArcGIS Pro. I reclassed each of the top ten forest types in isolation to create the small multiples map. I compiled everything in Affinity Designer (now Affinity Studio).