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