Lab 5: Final Mini Project

Introduction:

For this project, I choose my research question to be “where is a suitable camping area in Ashland County Wisconsin”? I chose this question because last year I got a tent for my birthday and haven't really been able to use it as often as I would like. My sister, who has frequently offered to take me camping, lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. My sister is an experienced camper/backpacker but I have a few concerns. For starters, my sister is allergic to bees and it seems some other bugs as well. I’m sure she is responsible enough to bring her EPI pen along but just to be safe I set up some criteria for possible camping areas. This criteria includes being within county or national parks, at least 2 miles from a highway, a mile from any fire occurrences within the last 10 years, and at least 64 km from a hospital. These criteria are to help me find optimal camping areas but also easy access to roads incase my sister has to use her EPI Pen I want to make sure a hospital is at least 45 minutes away. 

Data Source:

I got my data from ESRI and the Wisconsin DNR. I used ESRI’s Highways and Hospitals and the WI DNR’s County, national, fire occurrences, and Wisconsin’s State and County boundaries. My concerns with some of this data is the temporal accuracy. When was the data taken and is it still useful to me?  The fire occurrence data’s most recent record was from 2009. It would be nice to have more up to date data but for a project for an introductory course for ArcGIS I’m okay with this data. Here is a link to the Wisconsin DNR metadata: http://dnr.wi.gov/maps/gis/metadata.html. I was also concerned for the completeness of some of the data, for instance for the fire occurrences, where all fire instances recorded or was certain criteria made to have to be recorded in this data set? Overall I am pretty happy with my data sources and the metadata.

Methods:

For this assignment I used the clip tool to limit the necessary data to inside Ashland County. I used buffer tools with clips for the hospital and highway features to “build” my area of interest and I used a buffer with the erase tool to take away unwanted areas. I also used the Union tool to combine the county and national forests in the county. Here is my data flow model:

Results and Evaluation:

Here is a map of my final product run from the data flow model. As you can see I am not limited for choices in the Ashland County area. I feel like there are some things i could fix or change for next time. For instance there is a hospital in the next county that you cannot see that would be closer than the other hospital. I could have forgone the hospital clip to ashland county and then more area would be available for camping but I was limited to one county. I am pretty satisfied with the outcome. If I had to do this project again I would ask a different question that would require me to go out of my comfort zone and look for data online. I had thought of doing a question for the placement of a wind farm in Eau Claire County but decided to go with a simpler project for the sake of time. I really enjoyed this project and I feel more confident to answer more spatial related questions.

Lab 4: Suitable Bear Habitat

The goal of this lab was to demonstrate and further explore our knowledge of geoprocessing and data management and use them to adhere to specific criteria, also to make a data flow map of the process.  

Background: map suitable bear habitat areas and compare it to DNR management areas in Marquette County, Michigan.

Methods:

Objective One: Map a GPS MS Excel file of black bear locations in Michigan. First, I explored the properties of bear_locations_geog$ and then previewed the file noting file type and coordinate system. This file had X and Y coordinates and in order to map them I needed to add them as an event theme. So I set the X and Y fields with the corresponding Point_X and Point_Y and set the coordinate system to NAD 1983 HARN Michigan GeoRef (meters). I then exported them to my geodatabase.

Objective Two: Determine forest types where black bears are found in central Marquette County, based on GPS locations. For this objective I made a join with Land Cover and bear_location to get bear_cover, after that I summarized MINOR_TYPE and found that the top three habitat types are mixed forest lands, forested wetlands, and evergreen forest lands.

Objective Three: Determine if bears are found near streams. First I buffered the streams and then preformed a spatial query with bear_location and found that about 72% of the bear population at that point in time was near a stream (according to biologist it has to be above 30% to be consider an important habitat characteristic.

Objective Four: Find suitable bear habitat based on two criteria. Now using the bear_cover I preform a query to limit it to the top three habitats and intersect that with the stream_buffer. These show up as overlapping polygons of the same feature so I use the dissolve tool to make them all continuous.

Objective Five: Find all areas of suitable bear habitat within areas manages by Michigan DNR. For this one I used clip to limit the available features to inside the study area and used clip again to see which DNR management areas were within our recently determined suitable bear habitats. Because the DNR’s management areas are split into small units I used dissolve to get rid of the inner borders.

Objective Six: Eliminate areas near urban or built up lands. For this last objective I used Select by Attribute on land cover to isolate urban and built up areas within the county and followed that up with a buffer. From here I used erase to eliminate any bear habitat and DNR management area within 5k of the area.

Results:

As seen on the Map I include land cover type in the bear habitat areas and DNR management areas in those habitats. It appears that there is a good cluster of bears in the North West but there are no DNR management areas around that area. If you look just south of that you see there is a good proportion of DNR Land management and bear locations. Something that needs to be recognized is that these bear locations are frozen in time, these bears aren’t glued in place and are probably mobile. I feel like this area would be the best place the Michigan DNR could utilize their resources with their given management areas at this point in time unless they are interest in obtaining more management areas to the north.

 And here is my Data Flow Map!

 

Sources: All of the data were downloaded from the Michigan Center for Geographic Information.
   Landcover is from USGS NLCD
 http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/nlcd/metadata/nlcdshp.html
   DNR management units
http://www.dnr.state.mi.us/spatialdatalibrary/metadata/wildlife_mgmt_units.htm
Streams from
http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/framework/metadata/Marquette.html