Lab 3

Goal

The goal of lab 3 was to use various geoprocessing tools for vector analysis in ArcGIS to determine suitable habitat for bears in the study area of Marquette County, Michigan. 

Background

For our third lab, we are to learn and become more familiar with tools that are used in ArcGIS. We have been given all of the data about Marquette County, and all of the data for bear locations. This lab gives us general rules to follow but does not tell us exactly what to do. In the methods section, I will describe how I went about problem solving and using the tools available to me to analyze the given data and produce a final solution to the overall goal. 

Methods

Lab 3 was divided into eight different sections in order to work towards our goal step by step. For the first section, we started off with the obvious steps of organizing all of the data that we needed for our lab in our personal class folder. We were given an excel table with data on the locations of bears in the study area. We brought the table data into ArcMap and plotted the X,Y points on the map with a specific coordinate system. We then exported the points as a feature class that we could work with in ArcMap. 

In the second section of the lab, we brought all of the data in the bear_management_area feature class. We made sure that it was all in order and then proceeded to preform a spatial join of the new bear_locations feature class and the land cover feature class. This gave some extra data to describe the places where the bears were. We then preformed a summarize operation on the new table to see which land cover areas contained the most bears. Areas 380, 387, and 237 contained the most bears. 

For task three, we needed to use the buffer tool on the streams. This would gives a visual aid of the areas that were within 500 meters of all of the streams. Our goal was to find out if streams were an important part of a bears habitat. I found that 49 out of 68 bear locations were located within the 500 meter buffer. This means that about 72% of the bears were located close to streams, proving that streams were an important characteristic to a bears habitat. 

For the fourth task, we needed to find suitable areas of bear habitat for the study area. So what I did was combine areas 380, 387, 237 and the buffer area created earlier. I used the union tool to combine both of these areas. I then used the dissolve tool to eliminate the overlapping of lines to make the area look nicer and less confusing. 

Task 5 has us make recommendations to the Michigan DNR for a bear management plan. For this section, we add the DNR management data for Michigan. Because we are looking at a specific area in Michigan, we need to select by location the DNR management zones withing the study area. Then we use the intersect tool to combine the suitable habitat that we came up with in section four, with the DNR management zones. At the end, I used the dissolve tool to get rid of the small zone boundaries in the intersected area.

Task 6 has us go one further step. We presented our data to the DNR and the liked it but decided that these suitable habitats can not be located close to urban areas. I created a five kilometer buffer around all of the urban or built up areas of the study area. I then used the erase tool to remove any data from the suitable habitats in the DNR zones that fell within five kilometers of an urban or built up area. This provided our final suitable habitat for bears in our study area. This all includes areas that are close to streams, in a suitible land cover type, in a DNR management zone, and away from any urban areas. 

In our last section, we worked with python. We wrote code to execute different tools in ArcMap. The following screen shot shows the code that we executed in the last section.

 

Results

After going through all of the sections of this lab, I feel like I have become much more comfortable with some of the different tools we have learned about. I also feel like building data flow models has become easier and more helpful for me. The final map that we created had some very interesting results. As shown above, we went through many different steps to come up with a specific area that would be ideal for bear habitats. The interesting thing that I found was that none of the bear locations that we worked with in the very beginning, were located within the final ideal locations that we came up with. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that things were  not executed correctly, it just means that things don't necessarily come down to the data that we use. 

Figures

Data Flow Model

Final Map

Sources

All of the data were downloaded from the State of Michigan Open GIS Data http://gis.michigan.opendata.arcgis.com/

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