GIS 1 Final Term Project

Hard to believe it's already the end of the semester, but it's time to start working on my final project.  The project is pretty simple by definition, think of a spatial question or problem we would like to answer, and then gather and manipulate data to answer that question.  Where things get complex is that the question we ask needs to be relevant, and we need to use four tools to answer our question.  Additionally, we need to use at least three different spatial layers, but I don't think that will be an issue. 

For my project, I chose to answer a pretty popular spatial question:  where should I buy a cabin?  In the Midwest, going up to the cabin for the weekend is your pretty standard vacation.  Everyone knows someone who has a cabin, or has one themselves. The data I will be using for this project comes from the "price data" that was included with the ESRI Arc software.  The price data includes major roads, state outlines, and cities.  This is a good place to start and establish boundaries for my project. I am also using data from the Wisconsin DNR.  This data is very detailed and contains useful info such as where the highest quality bodies or water are as well as where "sewage disposal ponds."  I wouldn't want to build a cabin anywhere near that. 

By taking a glance at the data available to me I have come up with a few criteria for where I want my cabin.  I would like it to be on a lake or a river, within a county forest, and not near any sewage or industrial waste ponds.  For this project, we are going to assume I'm filthy rich and I don't need roads to get to a cabin, as I have a private helicopter that can land me anywhere. 

The first step is organizing my data.  After adding the Wisconsin state boundary as well as major roads and cities, I needed to sort through all the DNR data to find layers that were pertinent to my project.  In the end I kept layers showing the high quality lakes and rivers, county forests, and other open water features, such as sewage ponds.  I should be able to find a suitable cabin location from this data. I also left on cities and interstates to give the map perspective.  After turning on these layers, I can begin to visualize what needs to be done to narrow down my search. 

The map with all layers I intend to use turned on. 

Right now the map contains a lot of erroneous data.  First of all, I need to eliminate interstates and cities outside of Wisconsin.  For cities, all I needed to do was a selection of cities within Wisconsin, and create a new layer from that selection.  For roads, I had to first select roads that went through Wisconsin, and then clip them on the Wisconsin outline so that the map kept the pars of the roads that were relevant. Additionally, I selected all of the "sewage disposal ponds" and "industrial waste ponds" from the DNR water body data and set them as individual layers. I gave them a bright "bio hazard" coloration, but they aren't big enough to show up. Now the map looks like this:

At this point I can begin to narrow down areas that fit my criteria.  To begin, I'll start with where I don't want my cabin, anywhere near a sewage or industrial pond.  I'll set a buffer around every industrial or sewage pond of 10 miles to make sure I'm not anywhere near them . By creating a union between these two buffered layers, I get a single layer that I can simply label "hazards" and create an orange label for so I know where to steer clear. 

It's clear that there are many hazardous areas, but it looks as if there is still plenty of room for me to find a good spot for my cabin.  I'll turn these layers off for now and return to them later.  

By looking at my map, I can see that there are not only plenty of streams and lakes to choose from, but plenty of spots where the two connect.  So instead of putting my cabin on a lake or river, I'm going to go for the best of both worlds and try to find a spot right where a river runs into a lake. But how do I find these spots in particular?

To begin I ran a 100 meter buffer on the water bodies layer, essentially giving me the shorelines of each lake.  I then ran the geoprocess erase, and eliminated the original lake area, leaving only the 100 meter outline of each lake. 

The 100 m shore is in purple, with the lake in blue.

Now that I have my shores, I need to figure out where the rivers cross them. I know that where these rivers cross the 100 meter shorelines I will find a suitable cabin location. By running the geoprocess intersect, and intersecting the rivers and shorelines I get a beautiful 100m segment at the end of each river as it runs into or out of the lakes. 

The 100 m segments at the end of rivers shown.  It is along one of these that my cabin will be built.

Now that I've established the exact shores where I would like to build, it's time to look at other parameters.  The DNR data has a shapefile showing all the county forests, which are lands dedicated to optimum forest protection as well as recreational activities.  What better place to build a cabin than in a government protected woods?  By running another intersect of my potential shores with county forests, I get another layer showing all the places where a shore is inside a forest, perfect!

An example of a river running into a lake, inside a county forest. 

By looking at the attribute table for my potential sores inside county forests, I can see that there are 9 potential locations.  However, I have one last step left.  As I said earlier, I do not want my cabin within 10 miles of any sewage or industrial ponds.  By running an intersect of my final shores and my hazards layer, I found that there was one shoreline within my hazardous zone. By running erase and erasing the bad shore from the rest, I am left with my final 8 shores to choose from. 

The rogue shore in its hazard zone.

Now that I have my final 8 shores it's time to start making an attractive map.  At this point, I have tons of erroneous layers from all the various geoprocessing tools I ran along the way.  By turning off the layers I don't need, and adjusting the displays of the ones I do, I get a pretty good start to my final map. 

So far a pretty good start to my final map, except for one thing: It doesn't show where my potential cabin locations are.  They're turned on, but the symbology isn't distinct enough for them to appear on the map at this scale.  To make them more distinct, I'm going to go into editing mode and create a new feature class that is solely the 8 point representing the 8 potential cabin locations. 

During this process, I found one of my locations to be nowhere near a lake, and three of them extremely close together, so close that they appear as one when not zoomed in on the map. I also gave the cities their names for reference, gave the cabin points a nice cabin symbol, added a legend, scale bar, arrow, and title and voila, we have a finished map. 

Overall, this project enhanced my GIS skills more so than any other assignment we had all semester.  It is one thing to solve a problem in a workbook or follow a tutorial, but to create your own original problem and solve it requires a new level of intelligence.  It has been a successful semester of geospatial work;  I'm excited for what the next one will bring.