GIS I Lab 4 - Vector Analysis with ArcGis

Goal:

The goal of this lab was to use different geoprocessing tools within ArcGIS to find the best bear habitat for a particular study area in Marquette County, Michigan.

Background:

The Michigan DNR wanted to know what lands they own that are the best suitable habitat for black bears. There were certain criteria that had to be met to find the most ideal habitat locations.

Methods:

There was data provided that showed where the study area was located and the different features within it. A certain number of bears were being mapped and their locations were given in an excel file. In order to map this data, it needed to be imported into ArcGis as an event theme. Once the data were imported, it could then be exported as a feature class and added to the geodatabase. Once the bear locations were on the map, it was then necessary to put all the other necessary on the map for easier viewing and analysis.

 The assignment called for the top three habitats, based on bear locations, to be separated from the other land types. For this data to be obtained, the locations had to be spatially joined with the land cover types. Once the three habitats were found, a new feature class was made in order for the data to be analyzed with other data.

Biologists believed that bears may spend a fair amount of their time near streams. In order to find out if this was a true hypothesis, a 500 meter buffer was made around all the streams in the study area.  Once this buffer was made, it needed to be dissolved to make it easier to understand. This dissolved result needed to be clipped with the bear locations to find the number of bears near streams. The hypothesis turned out to be correct; 72% of the black bears that were being tracked were recorded within 500 meters of a stream. 

The next step was to find suitable bear habitat based on the stream buffer and bear locations. In order to do this, a feature class had to be created for the top three habitat types for the tracked bears. Once this was made, it was then necessary to intersect that feature class with the stream buffer. This result would give us the best habitat within 500 meters of a stream. Once these feature classes were intersected a dissolve was needed to make for continuous polygons rather than small individual polygons making up one larger feature.

The Michigan DNR then wanted to know what land that they owned that would fall into these areas of desired bear habitat. The DNR management feature class needed to be clipped with the study area in order to eliminate unnecessary data from the map. Once that data was clipped, it then needed to be dissolved to eliminate internal boundaries within the data. This dissolved result then needed to be intersected with the best bear habitat. The result from the intersect was the best bear habitat on DNR managed land.

Results:

The results of this map show the best black bear habitat for the Michigan DNR to improve. This assignment allowed for ArcGIS to be used in a real life situation to solve a real world problem.

This is a map of the results that were found while researching ideal black bear habitat. The map on the left shows the ideal habitat locations. The map on the right shows the study area and the different land cover types associated with the area.

This is a data flow model that was used to find the ideal bear habitat for the Michigan DNR.

 Source: Michigan Geographic Data Library