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.
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