Ethan Nauman

Lab 4 Mini Project

 

Lab 4 Mini Project

 

    For our end of the year mini project we were assigned the task of creating our own question that pertained to a real life scenario. Since my cabin is located in the National Forest in Taylor County, WI, I wanted my question to be centered around that. Taylor County is pretty isolated with a few small towns scattered throughout. With these small towns being located all over, I wanted to know how they would respond to forest fires in the area and in the National Forest. My question was, "I want to create a map to see all the forest fires in Taylor County since the year 2000. These fires had to take place within the national forest, and within 250 meters of a road. I also wanted to see the fires located within a 1 mile radius of the towns in Taylor County". My intended audience at first was just for me. I was curious to see if any fires had occurred recently that were close to my cabin. There wasn't any. Then I thought more, since I was also showing a 1 mile radius of fires by towns, I figured that these fires would be the easiest for these towns and firefighters to respond to. Also, since I was showing the fires in the National Forest that were only 250 meters off of a road, these two would also be easy to put out and not cause a major hazard.

    To answer this question, I had to use two different data sources. The first source I used was ESRI. I was able to use the state outline of Wisconsin and also the county outlines. This allowed me to bring my area of interest down to just Taylor County. The next data source I used was from the Wisconsin DNR geodatabase. I was able to upload the forest fires, cities, roads, and national forest. Without having access to these feature classes from the DNR, this project wouldn't have been able to happen. After completing my map and analyzing it, I have some concerns about the data. One of my major concerns is about the roads feature class from the DNR. What I mean by this is, some of the roads could be logging roads or have very hard access to in the National Forrest. This could mean that although they say there is a road there, is it washed out, does the road not have access to in the winter time, or is this road over grown by forest now. Another data concern that I have is about the cities. I did a 1 mile buffer around the city to show fires inside that 1 mile. Now where is the center of that buffer located, is it at city hall, or what would make more sense in this case would to have the center be located at the fire station.

    I now want to talk about the methods and tools I used to complete this project. Upon getting my area of interest, Taylor County, I next had to bring in all the feature classes that would allow me to show the fires of interest. The first too I used was a buffer. I buffered the roads throughout Taylor county to 250 meters and I also buffered the city to a one mile radius. This would allow me to show fires inside these. The next tool I used was the intersect tool. I intersected the roads buffer and the national forest. This tool combines the two feature classes, while showing the roads and the buffer throughout the national forest. After using the select by attributes tool which I could then show the fires from 2000 to 2009, I used the select by location tool. For the select by location my two inputs were the fires from 2000 and on, and the National forest. This would show the fires in my National Forest roads buffer, and within the 1 mile radius of my towns. The last tool I used was the merge tool. Since I got two different feature classes, one for the fires in the National Forest and one for the fires within the 1 mile radius of the towns, I wanted to combine them and create a single feature class. The merge tool allowed me to do this, and I renamed these fires of interest. Below you can see my data flow model showing all the tools I used throughout the completion of this project. The data flow model will read from right to left. It will read buffer, buffer, intersect, select by location, and merge.

 

    The results of my project show the fires of interest. These fires are located within 250 meters of a road in the National forest, and within a 1 mile radius of the towns in Taylor County. The fires of interest are located by a red dot, cities a bright green dot, and the roads are black. The National Forest is a dark green color, the cities 1 mile radius is in light blue, the national forest roads buffer is in a light green, and the Taylor County roads buffer is in a rose color. I named my project "Fires of Interest in Taylor County, WI" because that was exactly what I was trying to show. I feel that my map makes sense and is easy to read after a quick glance at the legend. I also added a picture of a forest fire just to show the destruction that these can have on a forest if they are not contained and put out. We always here about the gigantic forest fires out on the west coast, I am just glad that we have enough fire departments to be willing to not let these cause major destruction in Taylor County, better yet not to have my cabin catch fire!!

 

    If asked to repeat the project one thing I would change is the cities buffer. A one mile radius isn't very far, I probably would change the radius to at least 5 or 10 miles. This would show more fires of interest on my map. I also would like to find data on how long it would take for the fire departments to arrive on the scene of the fires and how long it would take to put them out. I understand that it would be hard to find this data because I highly doubt that someone has a stopwatch going to time exactly how long these things would take.

 

Lab 3    

    Goal: The goal for lab three was to introduce us to geoprocessing tools for vector analysis. The tools that we would use would help us to determine suitable habitat for bears in the study area of Marquette County, Michigan. We used a variety of spatial analysis tools along with a few non-spatial tools. The tools used in this lab will lay the ground work for the final two upcoming labs as we will continue to use these tools throughout the remainder of this course.
    Background: The objective of this lab was to workout a scenario for the Michigan DNR. They asked us to find and determine the forest types where black bears are found in central Marquette County based off of the GPS locations from the bears. They want us to determine if they bears are mostly found near the streams, to find bear habitat based on land cover and distance from streams, to find the areas that are managed by the DNR in these bear habitats, while eliminating areas near urban or built up lands, and to be able to generate a data flow model showcasing our workflow and cartographic output.
    Methods: The first tool I used was in objective two. I completed a simple inside spatial join between the bear locations and land cover to give me a table. Upon opening the output attribute table I summarized the minor type field which in turn gave me how many bears live in each land cover. The top three land covers were: mixed forest land with 31, forest wetlands with 17, and evergreen forests with 14 bears respectively.
    The next two tools I used came in objective three, which asked me to find the number of bears that were located within 500 meters of a stream. The first tool I used was a buffer. I buffered the streams to 500 meters and did a dissolve all option which gave me all the streams buffered rather then each individual stream. The next tool I used was the clip tool. I clipped the bear locations and the streams buffer, this gave me the number of bears inside the 500 meter buffer. There were 49 bears inside the buffer out of 68. This equaled 72%, anything over 30% is considered an important characteristic. So, the distance for a stream is relative to bear habitat and is an important characteristic.
    The next two tools again came in objective four. This task asked me to find suitable bear habitat based on two criteria: suitable land cover types, and within 500 meters of a stream. The first tool I used in this task was the intersect tool. I intersected land cover and the streams buffer, this gave me an out of land_streams_intersect. It shows suitable landcover types within 500 meters from a stream. The next tool I used was the dissolve tool. Since polygons from the land cover and streams buffer overlapped, I wanted to get rid of all internal boundaries. I dissolved land_streans_intersect, which gave me landstreams_intersect_dissolve. This rid the internal boundaries in the buffer zone.
    Objective five asked for recommendations to the DNR for a bear management plan. The DNR were looking for suitable bear habitat that were located on their management lands. I had to perform overlay analysis from the political boundaries to find all areas in the suitable habitat that were within the DNR management lands. I clipped DNR_mgmt and the study area. This gave me all the DNR management lands inside the study area of Marquette County. Next I just wanted to find the DNR management lands that were inside my 500 meter buffer. I again clipped the previous clip of DNR_mgmt_clip and the landstreams_intersect_disolve, this gave me the DNR management lands just inside the 500 meter buffer.
    Objective six ask for me to make another map. The DNR liked the work done on objective four that they decided they wanted to change the bear management areas to outside 5 kilometers of urban or built up lands. I began with selecting the urban lands by the select by attributes. I created a feature class out of this selection. The next tool I used was the buffer tool. I buffered 5 kilometers around the urban lands. I then had to clip the buffer to the study area which gave me the area that isn't suitable and the area that is. A majority of the suitable area lies in the northern half of the county while the urban non suitable lands fell in the southern half.
 Results:

 Pictured above is the final maps that I created for this lab. The top right map is a small locator map of Marquette County. The bottom left map if from objective four of the lab asking to show suitable bear habitat based off of two criteria, 500 meters from a stream and land cover. The top left map is from objective six asking to show habitat that is outside of the 5 kilometers from urban lands. The stripped area is not suitable for bears.
Pictured above is my data flow model throughout the lab. It reads from right to left then down. So, it goes streams buffer, then clip, and then down to intersect.

    Python: Above is a small introduction to python script from this lab. The lab wanted to teach us just a few things of how python works and how to understand the script that we were writing. To me, after using python, I think that it is much easier to use then using the tools in Arcmap. It is easier to understand, and easier to come to the conclusion you are looking for. I am excited to use more of python in future labs.
    Sources: There were four different sources that we used to create this map of bear habitat in Marquette County, Michigan. The first source is : Michigan Geographic Data Library.
Source two, land cover is from the USGS NLCD,
http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/nlcd/metadata/nlcdshp.html

Source three, DNR management units,

http://www.dnr.state.mi.us/spatialdatalibrary/metadata/wildlife_mgmt_units.htm

Source four, Streams,

http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/framework/metadata/Marquette.html