Lab 4: Final Project

Introduction:

For this lab, you have to create and answer a spatial question by using the skills you've learned throughout the semester. The spatial question in this blog asks where is the best potential place to put a campground in Eau Claire county. You need to use at least three spatial layers feature classes and four tools. You can also pick one tool to perform a second time for it to count as the fourth.

Sources:



Data was found from the ESRI2013.DBO.USADATA database, and the Wisconsin DNR database.

Methods:

To obtain the best area for a campground in Eau Claire county you should find an area inside of a national park and a county forest as well as within 1 kilometer of a lake and 3 kilometers near a major road. The tools utilized to obtain those specific parameters are the buffer, dissolve, and intersect tools in order to find the most suitable area for a campground. 

Begin by clipping the Parks, Forests, Water Features, and Major Roads in Eau Claire. Next create a 1 km buffer for all the lakes, and dissolved them to get one polygon. After that make a 3 km buffer for all major roads, and dissolved that to get one polygon as well. Then I intersected the Lake buffer, the major roads buffer, the parks feature class, and the forests feature class which gives the areas you could put camp grounds.

Results:

Figure 1 below shows my flow chart of the tools and functions performed to get my potential campgrounds.

Figure 1 shows the Flow Chart for the Project.

Figure 2 below shows that map that I created showing where the best locations are for potential campgrounds. Those areas are represented in yellow.

Figure 2 shows the map in which I will propose to the audience

Evaluation:

My overall impression for this project was that it is a great way to show the Professor what we have learned. I liked that it allowed us to choose our own spatial question in which all steps were done on our own. I really wouldn’t change the project because I think it has a great layout. The challenges I faced were trying to find all the data I need from ArcGIS, after that the rest of the project flew by.